A conversation with Rhonda Broussard that challenged me – and will challenge you too.
I’ve had the privilege of hearing Rhonda Broussard speak several times in the States, and each time I walk away with my thinking gently but firmly rearranged. So when she joined me recently for a podcast conversation about the future of education, I knew it wasn’t going to be a comfortable chat. It wasn’t. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Rhonda is the founder and CEO of Beloved Community, a US-based not-for-profit doing remarkable work at the intersection of youth agency, equity, and civic engagement. She’s also the author of a book titled One Good Question, that has the tantalising by-line “How Countries Prepare Youth to Lead”. That tension between preparation and possibility sits right at the heart of everything Rhonda does.
Who gets to wonder?
One of the things Rhonda said early in our conversation has stayed with me. She described growing up in Louisiana, where she and her uncle – just three months apart in age – were educated in the same school building. She had access to self-directed learning, inquiry, chess, tinkering. He didn’t. Same building. Different world.
She put it plainly: both modes of education exist concurrently. The real interrogation is who gets access to them. Who do we think is worthy of that much agency in their own learning? And who are we – let’s be honest – simply preparing for compliance and production?
That hit hard. Especially as someone watching education policy in Aotearoa move in a direction that seems to prioritise the basics above all else. I raised this with Rhonda. Her response was measured but clear: the debate about “basics vs inquiry” is largely a debate about class and race, whether we name it that way or not.
Second graders, a locker key, and a bill of rights
I asked Rhonda to tell me what Beloved Community actually does – because she’s one of those rare people who doesn’t just theorise about education, she builds things. What followed was one of the best stories I’ve heard in a long time.
In a school network Rhonda was leading, grade two students learned about social justice movements – the usual content, leaders and change-makers and living museums. But then the teachers asked one more question: What is something in your own life you actually want to change?
She described how a group of eight-year-olds noticed their school building had lockers – left over from its days as a high school – that no one used. They decided this was unjust. They researched who had the power to change it, booked a meeting with the head of school, found out a locksmith’s quote was needed, spent the spring term selling lemonade at lunch, raised the money, walked back in with a bowl of coins, and then – because they weren’t in it for themselves – wrote a locker bill of rights for the whole school.
I’ve been in education long enough to know that this kind of story can sound nice but inconsequential. It wasn’t. Rhonda’s point was this: you don’t have to keep teaching children how to do this. Once they know they can, they just keep doing it. The seed, once planted, grows on its own.
Civic education isn’t just about knowing how government works
We also got into something I’ve thought about for years: the problem with civics education. Rhonda described how in the US, civics is often a half-year course that amounts to memorising how government is supposed to work – and implicitly, why that model is the best model. There’s little room to ask why things are organised this way, what other models exist, or what it would look like to design your own.
This resonated deeply. We had a similar debate here in Aotearoa about whether civics should be compulsory – and as Rhonda and I have discussed before, civics presented through a single cultural worldview isn’t civic education at all. It’s a different kind of compliance.
What Rhonda is pointing toward is education that prepares people not just to participate in democracy, but to interrogate it, improve it, and build it. That requires the kind of intellectual humility and curiosity that doesn’t come from memorisation.
Agency isn’t just for the young
One of the things I find most powerful about Beloved Community’s work is that it doesn’t stop with students. Rhonda described training early childhood educators in the same participatory research methodologies they use with teenagers. The results were striking: educators came back and said it hadn’t just changed how they led – their whole families had been transformed alongside them.
This is something I write about in my own work on agency: it isn’t ultimately about me. It’s about us. The ripple effect Rhonda describes – from student to family to community to policy – is what genuine collective efficacy looks like in practice.
“What I want for the future of education is this sense of agency, voice, and power to be extended, expected, afforded for every human everywhere on the planet.”
— Rhonda Broussard
Listen to the podcast episode
I encourage you to take the time to listen to the full podcast episode (see below). There’s a lot more in there – including Rhonda’s YPAR academies where teenagers conduct real research and push for real policy change, and a fascinating thread about whether education and the economy can (or should) be separated.
Her final words to me were simple: every human, everywhere. That’s the aspiration. The podcast is a good place to start thinking about how we get there.
Your chance to meet and hear from Rhonda in New Zealand
I’m excited to share that Rhonda will be visiting Aotearoa New Zealand next month, and will be hosting a ‘book talk’ where she’ll read excerpts from the book and discuss the implications of our questions on our professional growth and the young people we serve.
Date: Tuesday 7 April
Time: 2pm (cup of tea first with Rhonda speaking from 2.30-3.30)
Venue: Level 1 Raphoe House, 8 Gloucester Park Road, Onehunga, Auckland
Register to attend by clicking the button below:
