Bryan Dewsbury: 00:13

Welcome back my friends. Welcome to knowledge unbound. We are at episode nine. Can you believe we have been on this journey for quite some time and I really enjoy every minute I've got to spend with you. Knowledge unbound is brought to you by the RIOS Institute for Racially Just Inclusive Open STEM education.

Bryan Dewsbury: 00:31

We are generously funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Thanks as always to my longtime producer, Mrs. Segev Amesai, computer engineering major class of 2025. Got that right this time. So this week we have a really interesting conversation.

Bryan Dewsbury: 00:49

We'll be talking to Maisha Moses, the executive director of the Young People's Project. And I'm not going to spoil the conversation by telling you what it is. We have a lot to talk about. You know, there are ways in which this project connects the civil rights and what we know about justice and what the kind of education people deserve. And I'll just let our guests, Maisha Moses, just share that story with you.

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:15

Thanks for joining us and I hope you enjoyed the conversation. So what I do is, you know, I don't read people's CVs. I don't, you know, say all the things that you've done, right? I told the audience that you are the Executive Director of the Young People's Project. So let's start with that.

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:37

Tell us what the Young People's Project is, how long it's been in existence, what you all have accomplished and what would you like people to know about it?

Maisha Moses: 01:46

Okay. So the Young People's Project is a youth math literacy organization. And, in a very broad sense, we structure opportunities for young people, generally speaking, who are struggling with math to help each other. And we work primarily, with students who are in communities who for the purposes of their educational opportunity are being sorted to the bottom. And so typically that's black students, Latino students, in lower income urban communities, also, white students in lower income rural communities.

Maisha Moses: 02:46

So that tends to be our target population. We grew out of the algebra project.

Bryan Dewsbury: 02:53

Tell us about that.

Maisha Moses: 02:54

Yeah. So, my dad started the algebra project, Bob Moses, and he has a civil rights, legacy and history. And So the algebra project was an extension of his civil rights work in the 1960s, organizing for the right to vote in Mississippi with black sharecroppers. And so what they found, what they learned in Mississippi was that, you had to get, you know, you had people all across the country at all levels of society working on the right to vote, but that when the sharecroppers actually got organized and organized themselves to start to demand their right to vote, then the country shifted.

Bryan Dewsbury: 03:47

Why was that a pivotal point? Why was the sharecroppers organizing a thing that created

Maisha Moses: 03:55

momentum? Well, the narrative in the face of an oppressive system was that, well, the people themselves were apathetic. Not that there's something wrong with the system that is preventing them from being able to exercise their natural desire and natural right to vote, but that the reason they're not voting is because they're apathetic, they're the problem. And it's sort of the same narrative. They don't

Bryan Dewsbury: 04:21

care or something.

Maisha Moses: 04:22

They don't care. And it's sort of the same narrative in education and in schools that the children don't really care about their education. That they don't want to work hard And that their families and their communities are too dysfunctional for the schools to really make a difference. So going back to the

Bryan Dewsbury: 04:49

sharecroppers, and just for listeners' benefit, Bob Moses, Robert Moses was a member of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that operated mostly in the 60s. People know Ella Baker and Stokely Carmichael. I believe he was in SNCC as well. Yeah? Yeah.

Bryan Dewsbury: 05:11

He's from Trinidad, by the way. Yeah. And all the work they did about getting people out to vote. Were they the ones who organized the sharecroppers that then created the momentum?

Maisha Moses: 05:24

Yes, was the young college students. So it was the SNCC workers. Many of them were college age, college students. They left college, dropped out to do this work. And it was really the sit in movement that sparked the energy or unleashed the youth energy in Greensboro.

Maisha Moses: 05:44

Yes, in North Carolina. And then, but that energy in Mississippi was channeled around the right to vote. And it was Ella Baker who, sent my dad sort of into Mississippi to connect with some of the longtime NAACP leaders who had been in the trenches for decades. And one of them, Amzie Moore, said that, well, if the young people are going to organize in Mississippi, we need them to work on voter registration. So

Bryan Dewsbury: 06:22

we're going to get back to YPP in a second but I think this foundation is important. When SNC went into Mississippi, my understanding, and I'm drawing this from Bob Moses' book Radical Equations, that there was a little bit of tension between how the young people sort of approached civil rights and getting out to vote to the ways in which some of the more established workers were. Around notions of leadership. And I think the phrase I remember being used was grassroots leadership and investing in people who kind of do little things but little things are different ways of showing leadership. To what extent they had to navigate that and how was that handled?

Maisha Moses: 07:13

So in Mississippi, so they were really influenced by Ella Baker who helped to found SNCC.

Bryan Dewsbury: 07:21

She helped And she led the Freedom Party, right?

Maisha Moses: 07:25

The MFDP? No. Well, the MFDP was led by it was local Mississippi folks Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That led MFDP and that was a couple of years later, that was sort of the culmination of their work in Mississippi.

Maisha Moses: 07:41

Ella Baker helped to get SNCC off the ground. And she, sort of went up against, the SCLC leadership around, know, do the young people, the young people need their own space that they own and that they control and that they lead, they make their own decisions. And so I think that was the tension. And her idea about grassroots leadership is sort of encapsulated in her quote, strong people don't need strong leaders. And that there's leadership everywhere, right?

Maisha Moses: 08:25

There's leadership in the community, in every community. And it's the job of organizers to bring folks together and to create conditions and to organize processes that enable that leadership to emerge.

Bryan Dewsbury: 08:45

So was that then the philosophy that that kind of belief in everybody's ability to lead but also be agentic, right? Have their own kind of control over their futures. Is that the philosophy that allowed the galvanization of the black sharecroppers? Right? That then led to kind of a more national Yes,

Maisha Moses: 09:08

absolutely.

Bryan Dewsbury: 09:13

Maybe sticking with Bob Moses for a second. I know he, you know, at some point he left SNCC, went on and did a PhD in Math eventually and taught Math in Tanzania and Cambridge. Can you tell us a little bit about that journey?

Maisha Moses: 09:28

Yeah. So he had actually, he had started his PhD in math, actually in philosophy. And he was studying the philosophy of math. And, then his mom passed and, the family situation was such that he had to leave school and he got a job teaching math in New York and he was helping to take care of his dad. And it was during that time of his life that the sit ins happened.

Maisha Moses: 10:14

And he was so moved by the sit ins that, he went down to, experience them, take a closer look at them. And then that's what you know, led him to Mississippi. And then, when that phase of the movement work, Nick's work in Mississippi, was changing and sort of coming to an end, He left the country, and he ended up for a little while in Canada and then, found his way over to Tanzania. And he had been, not so much a I can't remember if he was he had filed official conscientious objector status to the Vietnam War, but he had been able to defer his draft, because he was a teacher and because he was teaching mathematics, or because he was a student. And so he had, you know, every time he had been called up, he had had these legitimate deferments.

Maisha Moses: 11:35

And I think at one point, he did say that he had written a paper about being a conscientious objector. But at that time this was, I don't know, mid-60s And he had no more deferments. And so, yeah, so that's why he left the country. And, at that time, Tanzania, I think there were, I guess a handful of black expatriates, like movement folk who were going to Tanzania, living, working, trying to think about organizing over there.

Bryan Dewsbury: 12:20

Because even Stokely went to Africa eventually. Yeah.

Maisha Moses: 12:25

And I think SNCC had organized I mean, they had done stuff in Ghana, but I think they had also organized something in Tanzania, like a couple years prior, a group of SNCC folks had gone over to Tanzania. Tanzania was one of the few countries that was, I think offering a level of citizenship to American expatriates. So anyway, he ended up in Tanzania and I was born there and my two brothers and my sister.

Bryan Dewsbury: 13:00

Where were you in the

Maisha Moses: 13:03

I'm the oldest. So there's four of us, all about two years apart. So me, my brothers, Omo, Taba, and Malaika, who likes to say she was conceived in Tanzania but born over here.

Bryan Dewsbury: 13:24

The idea came in Tanzania. So when he left New York to join the movement, was his dad still alive?

Maisha Moses: 13:31

Yes. Okay.

Bryan Dewsbury: 13:32

How was how was that handled? Because he was taking care of him, right?

Maisha Moses: 13:36

Yeah. I think he got him settled to a point. It took a couple of, you know, I sort of glossed over a couple of years.

Bryan Dewsbury: 13:43

Got it. Yeah.

Maisha Moses: 13:44

But he got him settled and, his dad passed away while we were still in Tanzania. And I think it was the, Carter administration because of the organizing around the Vietnam War, the Carter administration pardoned all citizens, American citizens who had either left the country or dodged the draft. And so that's why we were able to come back.

Bryan Dewsbury: 14:17

Interesting. Did he ever tell you why he chose philosophy of math?

Maisha Moses: 14:28

So he had a really strong spiritual bent. And I think when he was an undergrad, he thought he might go into religion.

Bryan Dewsbury: 14:39

Where was undergrad?

Maisha Moses: 14:40

In Hamilton College. Upstate New York. And then when he went to he got his master's, he went to Harvard and he was doing philosophy. And the the premier or the lead philosopher philosopher in the philosophy department was a logician.

Bryan Dewsbury: 15:04

I

Maisha Moses: 15:06

guess a mathematical logician. And so he was sort of going with what was popular or what was the focus of the philosophy department at Harvard at that time. But I think he always liked math. You know, he went to Stuyvesant High School in New York. And so, you know, my sense was that he just really excelled academically.

Maisha Moses: 15:45

But that's a really good question.

Bryan Dewsbury: 15:49

Well, I'm thinking about, you know, I guess some of this stuff is like what you do in undergrad could kind of inform what you end up getting interested it appeared to me, especially given the genesis of the algebra project and the NYPP, that it wasn't just math for math. It became something else. And I just wondered if that thinking began all

Maisha Moses: 16:17

the

Bryan Dewsbury: 16:17

way through the journey, right? Is something almost bigger you're trying to understand through these degrees.

Maisha Moses: 16:25

I think so. I think he was always a deep thinker. I mean, my sense was that he was, he was searching. When he was, I learned, it's so funny how you learn things about your parents, like near the end that you never knew. But he used to come home when he was in college and do sidewalk preaching in New York.

Maisha Moses: 16:53

I was like, what? So I think he definitely was searching for something. I mean, the choice to study philosophy, because you're really thinking about deep ideas about existence and meaning. Like I said, he always had a very deep spiritual bent and that found expression. Later in life when we were in Tanzania, somebody gave him the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.

Maisha Moses: 17:34

And he got really deep into that sort of philosophy of yoga in life and practiced it a lot, especially, well, really, you know, all through our childhood and early adulthood. And so he brought that tendency to He was always just really good at seeming to penetrate to a really deep understanding of the core of things.

Bryan Dewsbury: 18:15

Not just math, right?

Maisha Moses: 18:17

Not just math. Yeah, not just math.

Bryan Dewsbury: 18:20

So let me make sure I have my timelines right. He left the PhD program to join SNC. Right? Did he finish the PG program before Tanzania or No. Okay.

Bryan Dewsbury: 18:34

So that was finished after when you came back.

Maisha Moses: 18:36

When we came back.

Bryan Dewsbury: 18:37

And so Harvard just like, Oh yeah, we haven't seen you in a while. Do these three classes and wait.

Maisha Moses: 18:44

Once you go, you can always come back, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I think so.

Maisha Moses: 18:53

I I I do believe. Yeah. Okay. That's very

Bryan Dewsbury: 18:56

nice. So what was the time period then between leaving?

Maisha Moses: 19:00

So it was like 1958, I think he left. And then he came back in 'seventy six.

Bryan Dewsbury: 19:06

Oh wow. Okay. So he gets a PhD in Math and I know him and the family are in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What led to Algebra Project? Yeah.

Bryan Dewsbury: 19:24

Not just, you know, he had a thing, right? But what made him sit and say, hey, this is the next mission that I need to sign up for? So

Maisha Moses: 19:35

he didn't finish his PhD. He taught us math all through our childhood. So I think I remember like starting to work with him from the age of three. And then when I was in the eighth grade, he thought I was ready to take algebra and the school wasn't offering it. And I was really tired of working with him.

Maisha Moses: 20:07

So I would stonewall him a lot. So he just went around me and he made a deal with my teacher to come into my class and teach me algebra during math class, along with a few other students that she asked him to teach. And around the same time, it was roughly around the same time, he got the MacArthur award. And so what he ran into in my algebra class or in my math class was that, the students were sorted, into ability groups and those ability groups more or less fell along race and class lines. And so his freedom struggle, you know, button got pushed.

Maisha Moses: 21:05

And, and also as a parent, you know, cause I was the oldest and you know, I had three siblings coming up behind me and so he wanted to make sure they also got to take algebra and you know, were having a good math education in school. So I think that first year when I was in eighth grade, he was probably still doing his studies and then, you know, like coming in once a day. But after a while, he just started focusing on working with the students in the school and raising the question of, well, who gets to take algebra? And he started working with parents and talking to parents about what was going on, the other black parents in the school. And one of the parents, her name was Shirley Kimbrough.

Maisha Moses: 22:02

She wrote a letter to the other parents and the letter basically asked two questions. Do you want your child to take algebra? I think it was seventh and eighth grade. And do you want all the children to take algebra? And so all the parents said, yes, I want my child to do it.

Maisha Moses: 22:25

But not all the parents said that they wanted all the children to do it. And this was at the open school, the King Open School in Cambridge.

Bryan Dewsbury: 22:36

Okay, I'm not sure if I'm familiar with it.

Maisha Moses: 22:38

Yeah, parents had a lot of influence and so they made a policy decision based on what every parent wanted for their own child. And they decided that they would, teach algebra to all children in this program within the King Open program, starting in the seventh grade. And so, then the sixth grade teachers asked, well, how do we prepare our students to take algebra? Because they had been preparing them for more arithmetic, basically. So, he started working with the teachers and held some workshops, classes for teachers and parents.

Maisha Moses: 23:29

And then he organized some college students at Harvard, actually. I think they were within I might get this wrong, but I think they were within an organization called the Seymour Society. And, they, came with him before school. He got some students and the college students to agree to come before school and the college students were the attraction, you know, because there was that, you know, close in age or closer in age relationship near peer. Yeah.

Maisha Moses: 24:05

To try out some materials to think about, you know, to prepare students differently. And so what he was working on was as he started teaching the students in seventh and eighth grade algebra, what he noticed was that are metaphors about number that are so powerful for arithmetic and you know, they're so obvious we don't pay attention to them that numbers carry information about how much or how many, and that's our main metaphor that we have in our mind for what a number is, what a number represents, that that metaphor breaks down when you get to algebra because in algebra you encounter new numbers, different kinds of numbers, signed numbers, and that you need a metaphor which says, well, are also telling you something about which way, right? They're capturing information about direction. And so this is where his work at Harvard around the philosophy of mathematics, really started to flower, I would say. Because he was looking at the work of a philosopher named Quine, Willard Van Orman Quine, who had a philosophy of elementary mathematics anyway, which said roughly, I'm not going to say this technically.

Maisha Moses: 25:51

This is not a dissertation. That mathematics is a structured regimented language and that these languages are sort of ubiquitous in the scientific disciplines. And that they arise from the language that people use to talk about their experiences. But they structure and regiment the way you can talk about them. So we're about the same height, right?

Maisha Moses: 26:33

Think. Oh no, so you're taller. So right, in our everyday language, you'd say Brian is taller than Maisha. But math forces you to encode Brian's height is greater than Maisha's height. And so, he, and that was actually an activity that he developed and put into the curriculum, materials that he developed over a number of years to help students make that transition and have one to understand that math emerges from everyday experiences.

Maisha Moses: 27:19

It's just a matter of paying attention to certain features of those experiences and then naming them and then structuring the language that you use, right? It forces you to use a certain language, certain syntax to talk about those experiences. And so that was the work that he was doing with students before school. And then after about a year, he felt like he had a set of materials that, he could actually take into the classroom. And it was Lynn Godfrey who, was a fifth and sixth grade teacher.

Maisha Moses: 27:56

I think she agreed to test the materials in her classroom. And so again, over a number of years, like he worked very closely with her to, you know, develop and iterate and modify. And then, I don't know, that was about a five year period and it took, I guess that amount of time to sort of solidify the process and that turned into what the algebra project called the transition curriculum based on the five step process, which is start with some sort of physical event, like comparing heights is a very simple physical event. Another, sort of the culminating physical, no, actually the beginning physical event was taking a trip on the red line. And then in Boston.

Maisha Moses: 28:54

In Boston. Yes. But you can take a trip. You may

Bryan Dewsbury: 28:59

have your own local red

Maisha Moses: 29:00

line. Exactly. You can take a trip in a car. But a trip gives rise to, certain mathematical features and the students would go through a process of like drawing pictures about their trip, making a mural, writing stories about the trip. And in that part of the process, everybody has a voice because everybody has something to say about their experience.

Maisha Moses: 29:33

Everybody owns their experience. And so it's a way for people to feel like, they have a say in the mathematics, right? They're contributing, to the, actually the creation of a little bit of mathematical knowledge. And so then, once you have that process, And the other thing about that process of giving students a voice, one of the things that, and this is sort of jumping back to the 60s and what it took, one of the tools that the young SNCC workers used to organize the sharecroppers was a meeting and figuring out how to structure meetings so that the people who come actually talk and don't just sit and listen to a person Come and tell them how to do it. Right.

Maisha Moses: 30:39

And who are willing to bring their ideas to the table. And so his metaphor for classrooms was that they're a kind of a meeting space. But typically the teacher is the one who's talking and telling students, you know, what to think about and how to think about it. And so he was really searching for a process in the mathematical space, in the mathematical education space that enabled people to really have a voice in the classroom and students. And so then you sort of students talk about a whole lot of things.

Maisha Moses: 31:21

Many of them not necessarily related to, you know, quote unquote the math or people might think is the math. But then out of all of that conversation, like it turns out that there's a few sort of often like really obvious features that you could focus on. And then once you focus on them, you can talk, you can mathematize them. And so that was the five step process. So having the event, drawing a picture, talking about the event and people talk, identifying the mathematical features and creating the feature talk to relate those features and then representing the features symbolically.

Maisha Moses: 32:09

And this is where it really becomes clear that math is a language because the symbolic representation is just a translation of the feature talk into symbols. The meaning is really encoded in the feature talk. One of the things

Bryan Dewsbury: 32:23

that I like about the way that method is set up is sometimes even when you're learning a new language, but I would say particularly in college, math classrooms, science classrooms, is there is almost an understanding or belief that you have to sort of check whoever you are at door before you enter into this new universe, this new culture. Right? Because now you're doing science, Now you're doing math and you have to think like a mathematician and you have to. You know, there's a lot of work on identity, sense of belonging and identity in these subjects. And I'm not here against that research but one of the struggles I have with it is sometimes to me it presumes that the thing that you're trying to identify with itself does need interrogation.

Bryan Dewsbury: 33:04

Right? Yes. And that you need to sort of shape shift whatever you brought to the table in order to accede, right, to this thing. Yeah. But here this method is saying, you know, your daily experience matters as you, you know, acclimatize, as you decide kind of how you want to exist in this new mathematical world because your world is part of that world too.

Maisha Moses: 33:27

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in that sense, it opens the world up to you because then you learn how to you you can learn how to relate your experience to anything.

Bryan Dewsbury: 33:39

Right. And then, I mean, the other thing too, not to bash academia too hard here, but sometimes a lot of the we have terms for these things now, right? Community Cultural Wealth, Wealth, Active Learning and I think it's good, you know, terms kind of codify an understanding of something but sometimes the naive among us don't realize that a lot of these things were existing. And they may not have been called that but the mentality of where people come from matter, people having agency matter. These things existed long before we applied academic terms to it.

Bryan Dewsbury: 34:12

Yes. Algebra Project was in existence. When was the year it was founded?

Maisha Moses: 34:25

'eighty three.

Bryan Dewsbury: 34:25

'eighty three.

Maisha Moses: 34:26

Okay. 'eighty three. And then it sort of formalized as an organization in the early 90s, like 1991. Okay.

Bryan Dewsbury: 34:34

But then Young People's Project, the organization which you were an executive director of, formed in 1996.

Maisha Moses: 34:42

Yes.

Bryan Dewsbury: 34:43

What were the conditions that led to that founding? So

Maisha Moses: 34:49

my dad invited my brothers and some of his Better don't say no. Yeah, my brothers and, know, like we had this sort of extended family, all of the black children who went to the open school, right, who were part of the algebra project, we sort of formed an extended family network. And so those, we were all in our 20s then. And my brothers were in their early 20s and some of my cousins, extended family cousins and former algebra project students were in their early twenties. And so, and they were all boys.

Maisha Moses: 35:37

My sister and I were the only girls. That's interesting. Yeah. How did that happen? I have no idea.

Maisha Moses: 35:43

Yeah. I have no idea. Yeah. All these, civil rights mothers who wanted to have boys to be the next generation. Interesting.

Maisha Moses: 35:55

Yeah. My mother was one of those mothers. But I always tell her she's really lucky she didn't have all boys.

Bryan Dewsbury: 36:07

I have all boys. I'll see what happens in my situation. So you all were in your twenties.

Maisha Moses: 36:14

We were in our twenties. And so my dad was inviting my brothers and cousins down to Mississippi to check out the work that he was doing with the algebra project. So he had gone back to Mississippi. He and Dave Dennis, who had co direct, he and Dave co directed Freedom Summer together in 1964. And they would meet up, you know, at various SNCC reunions, and, he would talk about the algebra project, and he convinced Dave, that this issue, the issue of, really underlying it is quality education for all children, but organizing around access to math as a way to get at that issue, was sort of the civil rights struggle of this time.

Maisha Moses: 37:10

And so, Dave moved his family. He had been in Louisiana and he moved his family to Mississippi to help get the algebra project off the ground in Mississippi. And they felt like they had work undone there. They had left work unfinished. And so he had sort of put his bucket down at Brinkley Middle School in Jackson.

Maisha Moses: 37:39

And he was working with, some seventh graders and then he followed them to eighth grade.

Bryan Dewsbury: 37:46

And just real quick, I note your use of the word bucket. I don't think that was an accident.

Maisha Moses: 37:52

Oh yeah, there's a I just got this from growing up here in

Bryan Dewsbury: 37:57

Catch your bucket where

Maisha Moses: 37:58

you Catch your bucket where you are.

Bryan Dewsbury: 38:01

I wanted the audience to know that. So we'll explain afterwards. We can continue. I like what it means. So

Maisha Moses: 38:14

then my brothers went down and they were helping out in the classroom and they just made these incredible relationships with the students. And you know, again, it's that near peer connection. I mean, they're in their early twenties. These students are in middle school. You know, they automatically think they're cool.

Maisha Moses: 38:36

And they were, like, they were pretty cool. And And my dad was really pushing them, because he would keep telling them, my brother Omo likes to, say that my dad kept telling them that the young people have to get their act together. And part of what he was saying was that, at least how I interpret it, was that the problem requires youth agency in order to shift. That the idea that the country as a whole has, which is that education sort of, my dad used to call it, well, yeah, he called it sharecropper education. The idea that you're pre assigned work and then you get the education to prepare you for that work to which you've been pre assigned.

Bryan Dewsbury: 39:49

And by work you mean there's an assumption of this is the limits of your capability and so the work that you're assigned is congruent with what people assume your capability is. And so therefore the preparation is in preparation for that low limit.

Maisha Moses: 40:04

Exactly. That's the expression today. He ran into it in Mississippi with sharecroppers, right? And when you have, you know, a caste system essentially, and it's not the expectation of what you're capable of, it's the expectation of what you're

Bryan Dewsbury: 40:24

allowed. What they need from you.

Maisha Moses: 40:26

And what they need from you. Right. But even today, so you had in the early 1990s a case in New York and, the campaign for fiscal equity and they sued New York state and they said students in New York City on average have an eighth grade, they graduate with eighth grade skills and we're at the dawn of the twenty first century. And so what can you do with eighth grade skills? And one of the justices really just like sort of put into his law, but into his opinion exactly what you just said, right?

Maisha Moses: 41:06

That well, we need children, to fill low wage jobs and you can do that with education. And we need a lot of people actually, right, to fill these low wage jobs. And I think this is really, a conundrum for the country. And given the country's history, it doesn't give all children an equal opportunity to fill low wage jobs. It sorts that opportunity again along race and class lines.

Maisha Moses: 41:40

And so in the face of that, what do young people do, right, in the face of this system, which in the words of Ella Baker, does not lend itself to their needs, to their hopes, their desires for fulfilling whatever dreams they have, for their lives, you know, what do they do? And so that's what he was saying when he said the young people have to have to get their act together. Because the story is of course all the way down the line, from everybody in the school system when the students are not performing, well it's because they're not behaving, they're not showing up, right? They really don't care about their education. And so they started the young people's project.

Maisha Moses: 42:35

And the students I think were willing to do that because in the algebra project, they experienced the way of learning in which they found themselves. So the whole part of the five step process, enables you to bring yourself and your voice to the classroom, your experiences have meaning, they count. It just really opened themselves up primarily to themselves and then also to each other. And so they had those, they just had such a different kind of learning experience. And then my dad was also helping them have experiences outside of the classroom.

Maisha Moses: 43:23

And so he enabled them to go to a graphing calculator workshop and they learned the graphing calculator and they picked it up much more quickly than the teachers picked it up. And so then they had a little bit of like intellectual capacity that had value because this was the very early days of school starting to use the graphing calculators. And so because they had gotten that training then when, in the summer, I think this was the '95 maybe, when they came back to school that next school year, then they started helping the teacher teach the other students calculator and that sense of power, you know, that like we can really learn something and make a difference. I think also gave rise to the idea that they could form something that was their own and that it was a real thing.

Bryan Dewsbury: 44:25

Yeah. I mean, it's like my son now teaching me things on my own iPhone, right? You're 10. It's not okay. So right now the model is students who were algebra project participants, who were in classrooms that were taught algebra, they now go into middle schools and teach middle school age children algebra.

Bryan Dewsbury: 44:50

Yes. Do I have that right?

Maisha Moses: 44:52

Yeah. So the way it works now is that we have high school, sometimes college students who also support the high school students. They go either to the school during the school day or after school. And they teach algebra concepts. So one of the things that YPP did early on was that they focused on games and some of the games that they had learned in the algebra project and expanding those games.

Maisha Moses: 45:24

And then also there was a really powerful game that my dad developed called the flag way game, which he sort of handed over to YPP to fully develop. Because games are things that students, children just naturally do with each other. It's, I mean, it's just part of youth culture. And so they organize that, and for the purpose of doing math together.

Bryan Dewsbury: 45:54

Right. Yeah. Right. Okay. I did note at the beginning of this conversation how you described what YPP does and why, right, in a very non deficit way in the sense that I can't remember your exact words but you talked about there are students who are in conditions that don't allow them to thrive, right?

Bryan Dewsbury: 46:16

And that's in keeping with, you know, what we've come to understand about sharecropper education and things like that. And so I appreciate that because I think even people who are, you know, relatively progressive in their values and how they think about education still don't quite, get that systems and environments is what we need to focus on. However, YPP is set up to go in and create community and foster intellectual and social growth. Is any component of YPP set up to address the environment that is causing the problem in the first place?

Maisha Moses: 46:57

That's a good question. So YPP is a little bit over 25 years young. You know, I can't believe it. And the first part of it is, are the young people willing to put a demand on themselves like to do the work? And so we've shown that that's true.

Maisha Moses: 47:17

And as we've built a track record, more and more we've been invited to partner with systems. And that's a really interesting development. One, like it's amazing, because YPP is not a kind of strategy which is focused on protest.

Bryan Dewsbury: 47:40

Right.

Maisha Moses: 47:41

Right? It's a strategy that says, well, you have to go after your education, you have to go after that which, you might want to, not engage in because of the dysfunctional ways in which it's being presented to you. And you have to figure out how to get your friends and your peers to also go after it. And so it's taken a really long time for just a handful of schools and school systems to see that as valuable.

Bryan Dewsbury: 48:29

They're going after things.

Maisha Moses: 48:30

They're going after and to invest in the young people themselves as the agents of change to get other young people to go after it, right? Schools are designed, the model really for all schools is that, it's the adults who are the agents to get the students and to get the children to move and to do something and to do whatever it is that they're doing in school. But for the students at the bottom, right, the system isn't designed for them to move up. So really they just have each other, I think. But then is the system, are schools willing to organize themselves so that the students can actually have each other, right?

Maisha Moses: 49:22

Schools as

Bryan Dewsbury: 49:23

And by organize, you mean like restructure the system that allows that. Exactly. That requires a whole change in mentality.

Maisha Moses: 49:30

It's not even change.

Bryan Dewsbury: 49:31

It's not even just about doing three or four things. It's like you have to actually rethink what does it mean to educate and

Maisha Moses: 49:36

establish that. Exactly. Exactly. And you have to emphasize more collaborative achievement. Education is so focused, so competitive, focused on individual achievement.

Maisha Moses: 49:50

So schools aren't really places that are designed for children to help And each that's the core of our strategy that the children have to help each other.

Bryan Dewsbury: 50:01

Right. And I just think about what that means for not just their math skills, but just the values that they will hold going forward as citizens, as voters, as parents, as community members, as church members, right? And that I guess maybe selfishly for me, that's the kind of long view piece that I just feel education is missing so much. How you kind of formatively expose people to environment and values now. And when they get to be 25, thirty, thirty five, whatever, take that with them.

Bryan Dewsbury: 50:35

And in math skills too, right? But that bigger piece, that civic piece.

Maisha Moses: 50:39

Yes. Yes. They have to practice all of those citizenship skills as children and it's beyond behaving.

Bryan Dewsbury: 50:50

Right. Well, well, yeah. I mean, actually, you say it, you laugh but and I agree with you because behaving, not just behaving in the sense that, you know, you want, I don't know, an orderly classroom or whatever but behaving sometimes behaving can be a synonym for acquiescence maybe? Yes. Right?

Bryan Dewsbury: 51:10

Yes. They don't question? Yes. Right? You're just in a space and this is what it is and your job is to acquiesce and agree?

Bryan Dewsbury: 51:16

Yes. Yes. And so this is me extrapolating from your usage with behaving. Yes. It's powerful once you start thinking beyond that.

Maisha Moses: 51:25

Yes. Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely.

Bryan Dewsbury: 51:28

So let me circle back, speaking of philosophy, to the phrase I called you out on. And I learned it myself from radical equations. Cash your bucket where you are. It's a phrase I've used now a lot when I give talks, I do professional development. Partly because in education research, I would say maybe in research in general, sometimes there's an obsession with looking for patterns and what trends occur across the nation in certain things, which I think there's a place for that.

Bryan Dewsbury: 52:01

But sometimes it prevents people from taking time to understand the uniqueness of the situation they're in, right? So to be specific to education, yes, there are certain teaching strategies that I think I feel very confident that can work in most classrooms. All the classrooms But I've taught are different, semester to semester. Like every time I teach a class, I approach it like a whole new class because I'm taking time to figure out who's in front of me, histories, even if it's similar ish to the last one. And then as we kind of build that relationship, I'm making decisions based on the evolution and the emergence of that relationship.

Bryan Dewsbury: 52:41

Talk to us a little bit about that phrase, cast your bucket where you are, how it played out in the civil rights movement and then how it played out in AP and YPP. So

Maisha Moses: 52:53

I think it goes back to the idea from Ella Baker that leaders are everywhere. And so wherever you are, if you just sort of, I mean it's such a, it's a perfect metaphor. It's not about stopping. It's about choosing to go deep in a place with the people who are there in that place. And facing the problems that arise that you choose to work on together and then figuring out together how to get those problems.

Bryan Dewsbury: 53:42

I want to take that quote you just said, the one interrupted. That and just apply that to every classroom. Like just exactly the way you just said that. Right? Imagine if you thought of no matter what class it is, imagine if you thought of it that way.

Bryan Dewsbury: 53:55

Being willing to face a problem with the people who are there and going deeply into that. Yes.

Maisha Moses: 54:00

No, that's it. And similar to what you were just talking about, you experienced at the university level. I mean, I've heard it a lot recently that one of the big problems that teachers are facing is that in from class, from period to period, even if it's the same class, it's not the same. Right. It's different.

Maisha Moses: 54:24

And within one class you have students, especially in middle school, who are at very different levels, you know, maybe like three to four to five years of, you know, so called performance levels in terms of grade and their skills. But that's actually a wonderful problem to have if you approach it from this perspective.

Bryan Dewsbury: 54:49

Right. So, I guess 25 years young, and even if you were to add on the APS to that, both organizations have lived in America during very, very different political times. So without going into too much detail about, you know, where we are right now, but I just want to know kind of in general how you've cast your bucket where you were in different states, in different situations, in different environments. And maybe even as you look to the future, where do you see the next directions for YPP going?

Maisha Moses: 55:34

Yeah. So YPP got off the ground because Omo really cast his bucket in Mississippi. And I mean, it was my brothers and like eight eighth graders. And they started YPP. And for the first five years of the organization's life, it was just, exactly that, like figuring out what that group of young people and the other young people they attracted could do together.

Maisha Moses: 56:12

And that expression of cast your bucket where you are gave birth to YPP, which has now had, you know, a national footprint. We've been able to sustain projects for bursts of time in different places all over the country. And so that's why I know that there are young people pretty much in every community, in the communities that we want to focus in, who find just really deep meaning in doing this work. I think the other place that, we've been able to, sustain a footprint around this idea of cast your bucket where you are is here in Boston. Boston and Cambridge.

Maisha Moses: 57:13

And so now this is our longest running site. And I think it's required keeping the local presence, but then having, building national influence, to get to the point over the years, where now we're able to sit down, like say with Cambridge Public School Districts and talk about how we might, build out YPP, in the schools, in more schools. And as we just talked about, you know, it's not schools have to shift, you know, and it's a big shift. But that they're willing to have that conversation, is just really, really big. But it's taken all these years to get there.

Bryan Dewsbury: 58:10

Yeah, mean, yeah, it takes a while. You know, I think a lot of times people ask me about, and this is in the college transformation of teaching kind of context about, you know, how do you go about getting people to think about their teaching differently and transforming institution? And my first word is always patience, man. Yeah. This stuff mightn't happen the way we want it.

Bryan Dewsbury: 58:34

You know, I hate to say it in our lifetimes or in our careers, but you kind of have to work towards that more perfect union type of mentality and also be willing to look back and say, you know, we are in a better place now than we were twenty years ago. Hopefully.

Maisha Moses: 58:53

No, it definitely takes patience.

Bryan Dewsbury: 58:56

Are your brother still

Maisha Moses: 58:57

involved in YPP? No. My brother Omo, has started, a different organization. It's called Math Talk. And he's looking at augmented reality as a tool to help make visible the math and the environment that's around us.

Maisha Moses: 59:24

And then also thinking about like installations in public places to help adults and children just engage in math playfully, right, as they're going around Yeah, their it's cool. And then, my other brother Taba ended up getting into construction. And my sister, she had done some work with the algebra project in YPP also when she was in high school and a little bit in college. She ended up going to business school.

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:00:00

She went to Babson and has worked in various nonprofits. It's interesting because we're recording this episode at Bentley, which is I think like direct competitor.

Maisha Moses: 01:00:14

I know how

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:00:16

to apologize. It's just kind of funny. Anyway, we could talk for hours but that is so much unpacked with this work but it's been great. I really think the audience learned a lot, and we continue to learn. Thanks for being here.

Maisha Moses: 01:00:29

Absolutely. Thank you.

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:00:40

Knowledge Unbound is brought to you by the RIOS Institute for Racially Just Inclusive Open STEM Education. We are generously funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation who has supported all of our episodes. Our producer once again Mr Segev Amasai, Computer Engineering Major Class of 2025, our Content Manager, I should have said this in previous episodes, Mr Adrian Lozano, Biology Major Class of 2026. You can find this on every episode on Spotify, iHeartRadio or you can go straight to our website at knowledgeunbound.transistor.fm. Don't forget to subscribe.

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:01:23

Thanks to our guest Maisha Moses, Director of the Young People's Project. Thanks for everything that she has shared with us and I hope that one of the lessons that you take from this and I guess maybe for me is figure out how to catch your bucket. This is this is something you may have to reflect on. What does it mean to go deeply into a problem with your students? What does it mean to get to know them and be in community with them in service of that problem?

Bryan Dewsbury: 01:01:53

It's a completely different way of teaching but it comes from a movement that asks us to just be better humans to each other. So with that, I'll see you next week and don't forget, be excellent to each other. It's not about stopping.

Maisha Moses: 01:02:17

It's about choosing to go deep in a place with the people who are there in that place and facing the problems that arise that you choose to work on together and then figuring out together.