 So welcome, I'm Nate Angel from hypothesis as I'm sure you know by now because you've listened to me too many times in too many different sessions and I'm super honored today to have with us here some fellow Coloradans. I was actually born, bred in Colorado and it's a state near and dear to my heart and our special speakers today are also Coloradans and so I welcome that. And just by way of an introduction, I want to mention that I first met Professor Manuel Luis Espinosa in Denver when he came to give a very short talk at another event. And it was it was an amazing experience for me because later when I edited that video of his talk and uploaded it to YouTube. I actually was brought to tears by the video what he said. So no pressure. No pressure today, Professor Espinosa, but I could get kind of emotional and so I'm hoping that happens here today. So with that personal note, I just wanted to introduce our guests more formally. So Professor Manuel Luis Espinosa is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Denver, and is part of a collaborative effort called the right to learn dignity lab there. And he and his co speaker will be telling us a lot more about that as we move on. I'm joined today by Frida Silva, who is graduate actually of the same institution University Colorado Denver, and has also worked extensively with the right to learn dignity lab. And there's a senior research associate there. And so they're going to talk a little bit about the ways that they have used social annotation in order to do their very important work at the right to learn dignity lab. And I don't want to give away the give away the whole story, so I'm going to let them do that. And to get us started, I'm going to pass the ton over to Professor Espinosa. Thank you, Nate. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. I wish I could be there in the same place with you, but we're here in the same virtual place. I am the current director of the right to learn dignity lab. And I just feel my heart tells me to always name everybody who's in the right to learn dignity lab so you'll have to bear with me here and we just go by the dignity lab for short. So we have Tanya Soto Valenzuela, who is the incoming director come November of the of the dignity lab, which will make me the intergalactic ambassador for life. And I'll be living aboard the mothership from Parliament. We have Mandy Wong, Tamara Lungai, Maria Karina Sanchez Velasco, Valencia Syrell, Arles Howard, Diego Ulivari, Raquel Stacy Isaac, Adria Padilla Chavez, Lima Alali, Soraya Latif, Taylor Smith, Veronique Mua, Katie Riz Gonzalez and Spencer Childress. And together we'll be paid in full, everyone. So I'm going to share my screen here for a second because I in order to tell the story that we want to tell today. I have to take you back in time just a bit to 1953. So this is a document that I've procured from the Library of Congress. And I was at the Library of Congress searching for primary documents related to the Brown v Board of Education case right Brown v Board of Education one. Now, this particular document is from 1953 the summer of 1953 approximately 7868 years ago. And so there was something curious that happened in 1953 Brown v Board of Education number one, as you know, it's a landmark case here in the United States in American jurisprudence. And what's happening there is what's odd that's happening there is that it's not adjudicated in the first term that it gets presented to the Supreme Court. They have a period of re argument, right, which is something like, again, this is a break really from the typical. So there's a re argument phase in June of 1953. The case is adjudicated in 1954. Now what's happening in June 1953 is that the Supreme Court of the United States has given homework to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the anti segregation folks, right. And the and the pro segregation states, and their homework has to do with the history, intent and meaning of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, right. This is big. So both sides get their scholarly team together. And the NAACP Legal Defense Fund gets Howard J Graham, one of the preeminent scholars of the 14th Amendment in the United States. And he is in charge of marshaling all these forces, almost 200 scholars in trying to understand what the 14th Amendment is about. Right. What its intent was and whether it's whether it's broad reach extends and touches what happens in public schools at the time. So now if you see here, right, that there's, there's up here up at top, right. Howard J Graham puts together a three page document on work to do. And here you see, just in four quick sentences, what it is that he wants people to do he wants them to check newspapers, biographies to survey historical material and so on. And then he gets to more specific instructions, he says, take down verbatim, any statement concerning interpretation of law. Right. Now that's where it begins, right. There's something beautiful here at work about intellectual craft, right, which is where we're going to begin the today's talk. Let me take you to the next page. Further instructions more detailed. Search congressional debates for the 39th Congress, and he wants people to look for these terms, civil rights, civil equality, social equality. Then he says quote exactly. Again, and then there's more material here related to, again, this thing that he calls related terms. And he's telling everyone be sure in all your notes to indicate clearly right here. The full reference what was said, the person who said it, where they said it, what was said, right. This, I think folks like it has to be to my mind at least, you know, it should be growing, you know, a clearly an apparent that this is like what hypothesis look like before hypothesis, right. But let me give you the more stark picture of what it really really what really would look like within the NAACP working group. That's where all that information was supposed to go on on five by seven note cards. Right. That's what it was supposed to do. So here at the very top. That's the subject school segregation here to the left. The page 708 709 where the source the congressional globe, which is the transcripts of the 89th Congress right. And here in brackets and the brackets like this is how far this is how advanced idiots right. It's not even typed in it's penciled in the brackets right and the brackets are to indicate who the author was and what and what and who what when they were speaking and on what page you could find that particular reference. The four dots. That is paraphrasing anything below these three stars. That's what's that is what's supposed to be verbatim right. So that's what an annotation looks like in 1953 on five by seven cards. Right. Now there's another reason that I am bringing attention to this right. Here's the final two sentences in that three page document by Howard J Graham, who has this incredible task again of marshaling all the intellectual force of the NAACP legal defense fund in order to aid in the re argument. He says, these instructions must be detailed so that there will be no likelihood of misunderstanding of notes taken. The brief must be accurate for obvious reasons, right. It's the obvious reasons part that I want to focus on here, because what it's obvious to them with is not going to be obvious to future generations. Remember, I found this document in in the NAACP archives within the Library of Congress in the Madison Library. And as you're going through them, right, it's the smell that hits you the smell of the documents themselves. And then at some point you look up and I looked at my finger, my finger, my fingertips, and it was the yellow dust, the yellow dust of these documents and it as it is slowly disintegrating. Right. But here we have something here preserved for us for the future. And that was going to aid us the right to learn dignity lab in doing and creating our own dignity handbook, which I'll talk about here shortly. But it's these obvious reasons that really, really has me intrigued. What's obvious to them is not obvious to us, but there's a connection between this way that they were annotating this intellectual craft. And these obvious reasons, which included, of course, social advocacy, right, because what was at stake? Well, what was at stake for the NAACP and for the entire country is that if they lose this case, Jim Crow continued, right. Racial segregation in the United States continues to be a legal constitutional way to pursue the ideal of equality. Right. So that's what was at stake here for the NAACP. Now I'm going to stop sharing my screen and say a little bit more about the our handbook. Now, again, so we copied for a few weeks this methodology. We knew it was going to be a long road, but it was thorough. Right. It was thorough. So we started it and how did it work? It worked spectacularly well and it was so slow. It was incredibly slow. We used to spend probably the first half hour of our dignity lab meetings just getting people caught up on who had which note card and who had the note and what people put down on it and trying to refresh their memories from the meeting before. And then I get an email from a very, very, very good colleague, my dear brother, Professor Remy Khalir, who says, Manuela, I got something for you. And whenever he's told me in the past years that he has something for me, I know it's going to be good. And what did he have for us in 2017 and early 2017? Hypothesis. Hypothesis, which becomes for us this wonderful medial tool, which allows us to do everything that the note card did, but much quicker. Without losing any of the thoroughness, without losing any of our process, which is a process that really values consensus and the values listening and the values taking our time because we needed to get it right for what we had in mind. We needed to get it right. Let me talk to you about what we had in mind. So this dignity handbook, right? Why? Why create one? What was the need? So in 2017, so this clarity of purpose that we carry around so confidently today was really fuzzy for us. And I've likened it, you know, that early sense of clarity and purpose that we had. I've likened it to those first images that came back from the Hubble telescope, right? That they were fascinating, but they were fuzzy. And the Hubble itself was in need of corrective vision, right? Was in need of glasses. So what we thought in 2017 was what we were growing to understand in no small portion to every member, of course, of the right to learn dignity lab makes their valuable contribution. Sometimes I can point out the specific contributions that people make. So my research associate, my senior research associate, Frida Silva is one of the people. She's the one who asked, where's all this going? Right? What's the purpose of doing all this work? So for us, we knew in 2017 that the education clause of the Colorado Constitution was in need of amendment, right? So that's something that many people have known. What was different in that room at that time is that we thought the ones to do it were going to be us. It needed to be us, right? But before doing that, we had to engage in a really concentrated and a really extensive period of study regarding dignity in American jurisprudence. The word, the concept, the ideal, the practice of dignity in American jurisprudence and just and thus American public life, right? So now let me talk about the handbook figuratively and then tangibly, right? So either way, the handbook was born out of frustration with the way that dignity was talked about in American jurisprudence. So what we were noticing is that when it was talked about, it was left undefined or under explained, right? Here you have this graphic representation, this powerful word. What are the more powerful words in the human language and in the language of law? And it was being used more as a finishing chess move, a rhetorical chess move in order to win an argument. But not much was said in terms of its understanding, right? So this thing called dignity, which indexes the inherent quality of every human being, right? I can't tell you exactly where it's at in the body. But I can tell you though, right? I can tell you that it's in every human being that we carried around and that it's inalienable, right? That it's inherent in us. Dignity, the inherent quality and then this contingent experience and sense. The experience and sense do not have to happen in public life, in social life at all. So we had this powerful word that was going under explained and under defined, right? So for us, what we needed to do was engage in this long period of study in order to further our own understanding. This is about intellectual craft in order and then so that we could also anticipate the kinds of ways that we would have to help the public to understand what it is that we were doing. One hope was that this handbook would be of use, right? To parents, to teachers, to students, to practitioners of the law, most specifically though to us, right? Because in order to make an argument that you are going to amend a constitution, there's something implicit there for us that we had to make really, really explicit. You need to know way more than the opposition. You need to know way more about the opposition in regards to the history, in regards to the shape of the concept itself, in regards to its meanings and its functions, right? Now, more tangibly, the handbook, the analytic goals of the handbook were to identify and understand the content criteria of dignity and its equivalent expressions. Now, when I say content, I'm talking about the practical guidance it provides, right? And when I'm talking about criteria, I'm talking about the reasons that an author gives within a legal text, within a legal document as to why they summoned this word for it, right? So we needed to understand that. Here was our hunch that even if you didn't, even if you didn't see the word, that there was something so pervasive and so powerful about dignity that you'd still be able to detect the dignity impulse in people's words, right? Maybe not in the words of the justices, maybe not in the words of judges, but certainly in the words of the lead plaintiffs in any Supreme Court case that has something to do with dignity. You'd be able to understand what it is that provoked this dignity argument and gave rise to it, right? So where did we search? We searched in two landmark cases, Tennessee versus Lane, a 2004 Supreme Court case dealing with disabled rights, the rights of the disabled. This is the terms of the time, right? The rights of the disabled and the obligations of the government in making sure that those folks had access to everything that it meant to be a citizen, right? And we also had another case, Lobato versus Colorado, a case that had everything to do with the constitutionality of the public school financing system in our state. Now, in that case, you didn't find the word dignity at all, not in the amicus briefs, not in the initial complaint, not in the various opinions by the judges, but you did find it, right? It's equivalent expression in the way that the lead plaintiffs, the students themselves and their parents and teachers talked about what it meant, what the value of education means to the human being, what education means to the human person. That's where you could find it. So how did we create this, this, this dignity handbook, which is still in formation? It's one of those things that like it seems to not end. You can, you can think that you're done being thorough and then you look around another month later and you've learned a lot more. Well, we did it slowly. We did it carefully. We did it ploddingly and we did it together in these things that, you know, that I've come to call annotation ensembles, right? So we had two kinds of together, face to face and online. And so when you're talking about the digital versions of these cases, we're talking about more than 2000 pages, 2000 pages that we had to upload to the cloud and pair with hypothesis so that we can read and annotate the various complaints amicus briefs, arguments, everything, right? Hypothesis, as you know, allowed us to read together without being in the same place together. And even when we were together, hypothesis served as the historian of our thinking, the archival sort of, you know, the archival custodian of what it is that we were thinking. So let me share my screen again and give you a quick bird's eye view of all the annotation that we did. Okay. Now, here's a snapshot from a analytic learning software, a learning analytics software that was created by Francisco Perez called crowd layers. And it gives us a sense, right? It gives us a kind of a history of what it is our annotation activity was with respect to these cases. And so you'll see here in this snapshot, right, that we had 1231 annotations across probably at the time, which was across the time we were a 12 to 13 member group, nine participants in the actual activity of annotating 52 documents, 204 threads, 113 days, excruciating, long days, right? And 118 tags. And then here, of course, you have this beautiful stuff that you could also look up the various threads of the of the consolidations themselves. Now we had a couple phases and three that we'll talk way more about what it is that was happening in the consolidation and the consolidation phases and also the initial phase of annotation. So now these ensembles. You know, if you wanted to understand what it is that was happening in the dignity lab, you do very well, you go very far in studying how these ensembles work. What did they do? Well, they read together, they wrote together, they talked together, they listened, right, they collaborated. We were what we were trying to do was become of one mind, but a special kind of mind, right, a mind that was constituted dialogically, a mind that was not necessary, that it was not necessary to be in total agreement. What was necessary, though, was to work through and identify the points of disagreement to see if there was some way we could come out with a working consensus, right? That process I think was really, really important for us. So as I handed to Frida Silva here in a second, I want to prepare you and I want to tell you that feel free, first of all, to take down notes and ask questions about the following terms, not limiting you to only these terms, but these are specialized terms that I think you'd be well served in asking more about. Consolidation, of course. Extract, which is a kind of shorthand for an analytic and perceptive action. Magnify and stencil. So make sure you feel free to ask Frida or I about any of those terms. But before I hand it to her, I just want to, I have to make a note that it seems like to me Frida has something on her mind, right? And I want to know what it is that she's thinking of. What are you thinking of Frida? Y'all, I'm thinking of a master plan. Hello, everyone. It's so nice to be here with you all today to talk about the work that we do. My name is Frida. I'm one of our two senior research associates. And before I dive in and show you what our annotation process looks like, the methods that we used, I want you guys to imagine real quick. So I want you to all imagine a group of researchers. You can imagine us. Say we are paleontologists out somewhere desolate, excavating for fossils. But the tools we have inherited aren't really serving us anymore. So what do we do? We create our own tools, our own processes, our own methods collectively to excavate for our fossils. In other words, many times how research is conducted, especially in the social sciences or in the humanities, is often confined to certain methods and processes that aren't, isn't really getting us to where we want to be and where we want to explore. So what do we do in that case? We create our own methods and our own processes that will assist us in better uncovering the work we wish to do. And that is what I will be talking to you in this portion of the lecture. I will discuss how we constructed and used our own methods and symbolic and digital tools and how we used that method and those tools in our annotation process on hypothesis that helped us bridge the intersection of our intellectual craft with social advocacy to create our dignity handbook. And as Prof. I mentioned earlier, we began our research for the word dignity. It's content, criteria, equivalent expression in the U.S. Supreme Court case, slain versus Tennessee. And I will be guiding you through our annotation process in that court case document on hypothesis. So now I will begin by sharing my screen. So there are two phases in our annotation process that we now name consensus and consolidation, both of which had their own symbolic tools for pinpointing the term dignity, what it is and what it means in the slain versus Tennessee case. In the first phase, we use the extract and magnify tool. This means we extracted the term dignity into three parts. It's content, it's criteria, and it's possible equivalent expressions. So once we extracted and identified dignity in the document, we then magnified the excerpt, so to speak. Like kind of when you were a kid using a magnifying glass, going through like fine print or through something like small, right? So we read closely and would make an annotation as to what category of dignity in the document it fell into. So once someone identified in the documents what might stand as content versus criteria, they would make their annotation and an R2L member would jump in and would either critique the initial annotation or what supported and thus gathering consensus. So now these parts of dignity were not rigid as we ourselves in this first annotation phase, we're really trying to understand what constitutive content versus criteria and thus parts did overlap. And because of this, in order to help us focus on the excerpts we were annotating, we needed at least four of our members to weigh in on the initial annotation. And if all members were in support, were in consensus, we had agreement over what category of dignity the excerpt fell into. But let me show you kind of what this looks like. So I know you are all very familiar with hypothesis. This is just a screenshot right now that you're seeing Lane versus Tennessee document. It's a writ of certiorari, I don't know how to pronounce that word for a while. But basically it means it seeks judicial review of a decision of a lower court. In this case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. So through these documents we highlighted the excerpts that communicated dignity to us and then we annotated them. And one of the annotations that I will show you is called Annotation 8.1. And it lies in this document. It lies under a section called Title II of the ADA. The ADA is beginning to allow persons with disabilities to participate in public life. And it lives in a subsection D called Public Transportation. So right here, here is an initial annotation my colleague Mandy Wong makes. But first, like I just want to show you all this note card, right Prof? It looks like, let me go back, it looks like this note card. And I thought that was really cool, the hypothesis before hypothesis note card. But going back, what here my colleague has highlighted is an excerpt that reads, Living independently and with dignity means opportunity to participate fully in every activity of daily life. In this annotation, she states bingo. She has identified an excerpt that might be dignity's criteria and content. Now what you are seeing here is actually an organized chart of our annotations. In that specific thread that Dr. Ramey Collier actually created and organized for us. So here is this view so you could better follow this rich discussion. My colleague and funding partner, Tanya Valenzuela, is actually the first person to respond to Mandy and support the annotation. And because she is the first person, she labels her annotation with the following hashtag, tag consensus one. Signifying her support and that she is the first person to weigh in on this annotation. Profit adds his two cents, he supports the annotation and labels his comment under tag consensus two and so forth. That's how it kind of goes. And now I will walk you through this rich discussion. I won't read the full text that we are full comments, but just certain sections that are worth mentioning. So we start this annotation with Mandy. She has highlighted the excerpt that she believes falls under content and criteria. Tanya supports her annotation, puts her argument forth and states here in the yellow section. She says, the sentence literally says, Dignity means opportunity to participate fully in every activity of daily life, which I believe adds to a definition of dignity. Forth advocates of rights and dignity to the court. Now, Profit responds to Tanya and Mandy and says, I add my vote of yes. In the near future, we will have to work out the question of whether full participation and meaningful participation are synonymous or interchangeable with dignity itself. So Profit agrees, but with a twist or a new angle to consider with these two notions of full participation and meaningful participation. Yeah, meaningful participation. So now my colleague, Arlis Howard, she's a third person to respond and she states, I do feel there is a difference between being able to meaningfully participate and having full participation. I feel the latter means that one is able to participate in those things that are small or looked at as unimportant like the passage list further down going to movies, dinner, baseball game, etc. Whereas meaningful participation to me means the ability to participate in voting, core access, etc. Here Arlis elaborates on Profit's point and she extends the text to make the distinction between meaningful participation and participate fully. Our colleague Raquel Isaac is the last person to annotate and she concludes with this. I don't think that full participation and meaningful participation are the same. Meaningful participation means going to school and getting a dignified education, not just getting to go to school. Raquel clarifies on Arlis's distinction and beautifully concludes and ties this annotation together to be an example of dignity content, not criteria. So this right here, this thread that I just like paraphrase is the anatomy of an annotation in phase one. And here you see us utilize the digital hypothesis tool as like a home base for us and for our deep thinking, our investigating and leveraging the tags as tools to magnify dignity. In this court case into either criteria content equal expression. And again, to reiterate Profit's point earlier, the thought process behind these annotations for many of us was very excruciating. And at times a little bit painful and pinpointing if the excerpt fell into content or criteria and even replying to one another wasn't a process that we took lightly. This rich discussion was a product of us reading what our colleagues had typed up, pondering, reading in between the lines, building on top of each other as demonstrated by this rich thread. So that is what phase one annotation process looks like. Now I will show you what annotation phase two looks like. So here in this second phase, we really focus on refining our own understanding of dignity. It's content criteria and equivalent expression by consolidating the annotations in the first phase with a more elaborate symbolic tool. One that we place on top of our annotation discussions to help us craft more precise understanding of dignity. And you might ask, why is it a stencil? And the way I like to think of it, it's kind of like those stencils that you buy at Walmart or Target and you layer it on top of another sheet of paper and you use your utensil, your pencil to trace and actually make drawings precisely rather than just a free dry. You're having more precision and something more exact, something more refined. So that's why we call it a stencil. And the stencil helps us be precise in constructing our definition of dignity. So moving forward here again, this is another screenshot of what the second phase looks like. But we will highlight each section again in an organized chart just for presenting purposes. So here this is what the stencil looks like. I will now be walking you through each of these sections highlighted in light blue still using annotation 8.1 as an example of an annotation from the first phase that we saw a potential to be refined through consolidation efforts. This second round review was actually led by my colleague Maria Santos Velasco. And I will begin with a section called changes at the top. So here with changes, we looked at the highlighted portion from the consensus phase and identified if that highlighted portion needed to be extended or shortened to fully embody what was being proposed, whether the content criteria or equivalent expression. And this instance compared to what we had in the first phase. So if we kind of look back over here right here, the phase out the highlighted portion was this part or that second highlighted yellow portion. It was just that. But now in the in our second phase, we have the whole section that was highlighted. So we wanted to extend basically to that section and that was a change that was made. Now we have now we go into primary category that second section. And here we label the excerpt by the part of dignity falls into. So in this case is dignity content. Now with the third section bit summary, the text that follows is actually an abstract of all the discussion that led up into that point. So here I'm going to kind of read a little bit about the excerpt and that excerpt. Just trying to explain this, but yeah, it's basically all the thread discussion in annotation 8.1. We are just summarizing what that discussion really was and how it led us to identifying how it led to dignity content. So this is what it reads. One of the few places where the word dignity is brought into play in this case, more importantly, our group finds meaningful participation interlaced into the passage as well. Though it's not explicitly mentioned, while we are all in agreement that fully participating and meaningful participation are not synonymous, it can be inferred that one imply the other. Moving on to the next section definition. In this section Maria here defines what dignity category means given what was discussed and changed and it reads. This is an example of dignity content, not only for its deliberate use of the word dignity, but also for the examples that it gives as to how people can have their dignity affirmed. These experiences are just some of the few ways in which it is possible to feel a sense of dignity. Maria now shows us how the new extended excerpt has now provided us with greater context that represents dignity content through the examples of dignity being affirmed. In the next section, rational tags. The rationale for tags, the consolidator adds the tags that are most suited for this consolidation and provides a rationale for using them. In this consolidation, Maria chose dignity content and meaningful participation and provides a rationale for using them. Moving on to the next section, dignity content. Sorry, I kind of skipped a portion, but I'm going to talk a little bit now about those tags that she used. So she used dignity content and meaningful participation and this is a rationale for using them that she states. This annotation merits dignity content tag because it is an instance in which an explicit definition or distinguishing characteristic of dignity is communicated. The sentence that begins, living independently and with dignity points to the importance of every day activities and the dignity of the human person. Additionally, this annotation can be interpreted as an affirmation of the right of every person to have their humanity recognized. With meaningful participation, Maria says, We think meaningful participation is implied with dole when dole says participate fully. We take meaningful participation to mean unambiguously effective involvement in socially vital activities structured by social relations that are reciprocal and dialogical. So, with all that rich context, this process, as we reflect back, helped us develop our dignity lens as young dignity scholars. Whereas one might read the term dignity in a court case document and consider it simply like a piece of rhetoric. We are thinking about the power of identifying dignity affirmed or indignity in these social settings and acting upon that. And as a research collective, we have bigger plans to go beyond discussing dignity in a publication, but seeing where the rubber meets the road and where our intellectual craft meets social advocacy. And these symbolic and digital tools and this annotation process that we have created are catalysts to carry out what lies ahead and seeing educational dignity manifest in our classrooms. And with that, Prof, what are you thinking of? I'm thinking of a master plan too, Frida, right, because I want to walk out with a victory in my hand. So if I take you back to the Brown case, right, and for the obvious reasons, all of that stuff about the obvious reasons that Howard J. Graham writes at the very bottom of the work to do document. Well, again, their obvious reasons were that they could not allow the pro segregation states to prevail with the argument that the 14th Amendment was absolutely powerless in desegregating public schools, right? What they had to achieve was to was to summon forth the knowledge and the history and the intent of the 14th Amendment to make an argument that the egalitarian imperatives of that grand amendment came into contact with public schools in the 1950s. That's what was at stake, because if they could not achieve that, if they could not successfully answer the questions that the Supreme Court put forth, then the rationale is there to continue what? To continue Jim Crow, to continue racial segregation. And again, you have who knows how many more years we would have had of legalized of deury segregation and not just de facto like we have now in many places, right? But what are the obvious reasons for us? The obvious reasons for the dignity lab are that we're making an argument for a different world. One in which educational dignity, the inherent quality, its experience and its sense is that educational dignity can come to be seen as something paramount to public education, right? Something central, something as part of the language of public education. Education for us to call it that has to help the person discover and nurture and cultivate their song in life. If it doesn't do that, we'll have to call it something else, but we won't call it public education. Now, our work as intellectual craftspeople, it started to blossom in the annotation ensembles through hypothesis, right? But the place where craft and social advocacy meet for us are in our weekly meetings. We call them amendment Fridays and now we've moved to Tuesdays for the summer. That's where all of this gets focused on in those hour long weekly meetings in which we are rewriting the education clause of the state of Colorado, right? Now, the most potent tool that we have is the vision that we've been able to create in and through this amendment. So, again, now, education folks, as you all know, at the federal level, at the national level, it is not a fundamental right. That is a matter that's left to the states. So every state has something that they call an education clause that governs the way that the state that government provides public education. It is the mandate, right? Now, in Colorado, we have a rather weak one, a rather anemic one and ineffectual that we've had since 1876. And the prevailing language there is thorough and uniform. Now, that's what the government of the state of Colorado has to provide its residents, a public school system that is thorough and uniform, right? Now, historically, what that has meant in terms of its provision, and especially in the courts, the way that they've interpreted when we've had challenges to the constitutionality of the public education system in Colorado, is that thorough and uniform exacts the legal minimum, right? Legal minimum. There's physical plans, there are books, there are operating funds, but there is nothing to be said about the learning that happens in schools or the not or the not yet learning that happens in schools. And it has nothing to do with the actual outcome of schools. Now, that to us seems like something like an egregious mistake, right? The way that education is thought of in the current Colorado Constitution, it's thought of more as a governmental service, not as a fundamental right of personhood, something that's necessary for the continuation of peace, justice, and equality in our world. Now, let me give you a sense of what it is that we've been able to accomplish. Now, if I look ahead to November, October, November, we'll be going before the legislative committee of the state of Colorado in order to get the language for this new amendment certified. After a 10 day wait period begins an intense six month period of collecting signatures so that we can amend our state's charter. What is it going to be replaced by? We're trying to supplant the language of thorough and uniform, which is so so susceptible to narrow readings, and it doesn't really hold up whenever someone wants to put forth a robust reading, right? It's too vague. It's too ambiguous. Let me read you three sentences out of our current amendment to give you a sense of what it is that we're doing. So thorough and uniform will be supplanted in part by the following. Public schools are sanctuaries, spaces where the inherent and inalienable dignity of the human person is inviolate, spaces where compassionate guidance abounds. Guided by the principles of integrity and equity, the state shall ensure that all public school students have ongoing and diverse opportunities to meaningfully participate in their education. As a paramount requisite of education, meaningful participation fulfills the promise of public schools as havens for learning and growth, crucibles for inquiry and experimentation, forums for dialogue and dissent. That is what we're doing. We're making an argument for a world that is possible, a different kind of world. And it's hard for me to think, looking back on it, that we would have been able to do this without hypothesis. Hypothesis allowed us to translate intellectual craft into social advocacy. Why did we have to do that? We're on the weak side. We're the small ones in the equation of David and Goliath. We're David, but we're Bernini's David. If you look up Bernini's David, it's different than Michelangelo's David. Michelangelo's David is making the decision whether he should throw the rock. Bernini's David has made the decision and is in the process of throwing the rock. That is what is made possible for us. That's what the Dignity Lab is about. That's what hypothesis makes possible. And we are happy to share it with you and if we can to clear up or clarify anything that we have talked about, but that's the sort of world that we're endeavoring to make. Right? And it's me as part of this group of young people who are all my undergraduates mostly, right? And a few doc students now thrown in. These people who have given their lives, a portion of their lives for this struggle for educational dignity, that I get to be a part of, that I'm lucky enough, that I'm fortunate enough to be part of. So thank you very much. Thank you all. That was so great. Manuel and Frida, thank you. And just because we had those technical difficulties at the beginning, I want to keep this going on a little bit longer if you guys have the time. I also know that you may have something else you need to get to. But if you could stay for an extra 15 minutes, that would be great. I did see that somebody had kind of asked about R2L and what that means. And sure, it means, it means right to learn. But maybe you could speak a little bit more about what's behind that. Sure. Right to learn. Right to learn. And really, we took that name from, there was a quotation from an essay written by W.E.B. Dubois in the late 1940s. And Dubois was writing against the House on Un-American Activities. It was a critique really of what it is that was happening in the country at the time. And then he has this paragraph that's almost, you know, it's prophetic, right? It's mystical and prophetic as Dubois, as only Dubois can be. And he says something like, for 5,000 years, for 5,000 years, we have endeavored to protect this right. That you could lose every other right in the world. But if a country, if a people doesn't lose this one, they can find their way again. What's that right? The right to learn. The right to learn, which in essence is a right to correct our mistakes, a right to become, a right to transform ourselves. That really gives a deeper meaning in resonance. And so, you mentioned also that so many students had participated in this. And I think that's the part that really catches me with this project is that it's not only, you know, such a valuable and necessary public works project. A kind of infrastructural public works project that needs to be done. It's also, you know, a learning, a learning exercise, or it's not even really exercises in the right word because it's not just exercise, right? It's actually, it's activity, it's real doing. And I'm curious how many students have, you mentioned a lot of names. How many students have participated in this? And is it offered to them as a sort of formal class within the University of Colorado at Denver? Or is it like a, almost like a whole other thing outside the classroom? Well, I'll get, I'll get part of that answer. And then I'd like Frida to, to chime in as to what it's like because she was, you know, I was the professor and, you know, and she's one of the students that, that I, that I asked to be part of the group. So, so everything that comes out of right to learn really, really flows out of a core course that I created for the University of Colorado Denver called Equality, Rights and Education. So what that class is about is it's a history of American public education through the reading of landmark cases. So imagine students three months out of high school reading Dred Scott right alongside one another, right? That's what that class is about. And that's where I, that's where I kind of, you know, that sort of handpicked, you know, the students that I thought like, you know, that might be interested in something like R2L, like the Dignity Lab. And a member of the Dignity Lab, Diego Ulibarri, he told me that, Prof. I see what you were doing. You were looking for students with that fire that had that spark for this kind of work. And I suppose that's what I was doing. Yes. So maybe Frida can illuminate as well as to her experience as a student. Yeah. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of funny because with R2L, right? You talked a little bit about how students, you know, is this just like, was it just a research thing? And then it became something else, right? Like, I don't even know being first gen and going through my first year classes for office class. The title just sounded interesting. And I didn't even know if it was part of my major like route. I being first year, first gen, I was like, yeah, I'm just going to choose everything that sounds interesting to me. And I just stumbled on to what office class. And I think we have some of those folks too, where a lot of us aren't even in the education path. Like I study political science and communications. I'm doing branding work now. We have people who are doctors now like like health doctors, people who are Lima, who is she's setting architect, right? So people who are not in the lane of like education, but somehow found ourselves in poor office classroom. And right, me being a freshman, I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I was asked to participate in a research group. My first year, you know, I'm going to learn how to write. It's going to get on my resume. It's going to look fantastic. You know, just thinking about, oh, this is just what we do in college, right? But then I never thought that, right? I've already graduated like a year ago, but a lot of us are graduated. We have left the university and are still part of this research group that extends beyond the university. And that is because we just, we've just been so drawn to studying dignity and actually creating something apart from just writing academic papers. And it's going to take a team effort to really bring this to the legislation. But yeah, like we have folks who are doctoral students, who are parents, who take care of family, who have full-time jobs, like a big portion of our research group already graduated a long time ago. But we're still here. Why? I don't know. What did you do? It wasn't for the money. It wasn't for the wages. No, definitely. It's just envisioning what is possible when you infuse dignity into education. Well, Frida, it seems like it's maybe kind of radically transformed your path, right? A first-generation college student sounds like you took a class because the title was interesting. And the next thing you know, here you are, you know, giving a keynote at some weird conference that you never heard of before. How has this kind of affected your life plans? Has it changed your destiny? Not necessarily here. What I will say is, our tool is kind of like my second job. I have a full-time job and it's like my other full-time job, which I love and what I need in my life. Because sometimes your full-time job can be all what you want it to be as far as your values and what you want to work on. Our tool fills that and more. And I think the way it has changed me and my life and my trajectory is that once you hear about educational dignity, you can't unsee it. Once you hear it, once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? Now you start thinking about, am I demonstrating this in my classroom? Am I demonstrating this with others who I'm educating? How are we cultivating a dignified space for student learners? You start having those questions and once you see it, you can't unsee it. You start creating these questions and that's what we hope people will get out of us presenting at these conferences. So it's that spark and it's just something that we've never really considered in educational spaces. That's so great, so powerful. I certainly have been unable to unsee it, as you say. I'm wondering, and maybe you might want to take this one on, but I'm wondering over the past year during the pandemic, we've seen such kind of radical transformations of educational spaces. And Frida, if you wanted to take it first, I would be fine too. But I'm wondering in what ways the pandemic has affected your work or this project. I mean, I'm sure that it's, you know, you've maybe haven't been able to come together face to face, maybe as much as before, but has it changed perspective on dignity and education in the project itself? Or have certain things come to the surface more than maybe they had earlier because of the pandemic? Sure. I think it would be difficult for anyone to say that it didn't pass through, right? That it didn't pass through the filters of their mind. And it certainly gave us greater reason. It stoked our fires, you know, which were already running strong. And it helped cement where it is that we were going. But again, you know, like, you know, with the students that we have and myself as well, you know, I think we lived those kinds of lives, right? You know, so many of us are first generations and a number of us are also children of immigrants, right? So these these struggles and these sorrows have been part of our lives since we were children for many of us. And certainly, I think what has happened in the last year, year and a half, I think as Vera says, nurtured us, you know, we have the thing is we had an outlet for that outrage, you know, and the outlet was to write and to read because we know we were doing something with this long term, that the victory in terms of, you know, providing an education for people that is in harmony with their with their inherent dignity. That is what keeps us going. That's the horizon point. So that's my perspective on it. Yeah, I mean, this is part of the question to me that I actually never asked because I'm not in school after like May 2020. But I'm curious for a fair rate. It's cemented after this past year, it definitely cemented that we're in the right direction. This is what we have to do with many students across the country calling for their, you know, curriculum to, you know, represent what has traditionally been underrepresented. And I'm curious, for a long time, our institution has been like, oh, yeah, you're a researcher. No, that's, that's cool. What you guys are doing, not too much money put towards it. You know, a good pat on the back. But now I'm curious after, you know, the year that we've been through, have like your own colleagues or other educators been like, tell me about this educational dignity, you know, with a more with a stronger call to action to create dignified spaces to show the underrepresented underserved. I believe so. I believe that it's happened. There's been an uptick in that. And certainly our new chancellor has made promises in terms of helping to support the group and we'll see if both promises are a follow through on. That's always the, that's always the, that's the detail that we're always waiting for. We think we're at the right time. We're at the right time. But if you look back in history, I can't remember. I can't remember a scholarly book that talked about efforts to desegregate or efforts to promote, you know, a broad form of justice in society in which anybody said that this was the best time to do so. There was always people that always said that, no, this is the inconvenient time. Economics, economics are bad. Right. Or the economic times are good. Why would anybody care about this? So you're left to think like, when is it, when is it ever a good time? Was it a good time when we're ready? And we're ready now. Oh, I love that. And maybe that's a great, a great way to stop. I, we've taken up a whole bunch of your time. And I really appreciate that you are David with the rock. I took a look at that picture when you brought it up and I put a link into that chat to it. So, and it is a really very different statue, isn't it? It's a David, a David of action and sort of a David of sort of thinking or something, whatever he's doing there, standing there with his rock. I really appreciate both of you coming here. And I'll just give you the opportunity to wish us a fond farewell and anything that you want to leave us with as we go. Frida, how about we start with you? Thank you all for coming. I really appreciate it. I think that's it. I think Prophet has more. The right to learn Dignity Lab. Thanks you for even thinking about us and considering us to come talk with you all. We got all kinds of love in the world for hypothesis and hypothesis folks. So anytime that you all, we can be of use to you, please feel free to call on us and thank you so much.