This year in the PSU Art and Social Practice MFA program, I'm helping to organize and produce a weekly radio show. The show evolved out of the weekly conversation series. Everyweek on the show students in the program interview people who's work, usually connected in some way to PSU, relates to Social Practice in some way. For the very first episode I had the privilege to interview radical pedagog Rozzell Medina. 

Rozzell Medina dropped out of high school at 17 because he was tired of being told what to learn about and how. He earned a liberal arts degree from Portland State University almost 14 years later. In 2009, he became interested in how people can come together to form independent, self-organizing learning communities that improve the quality of participants' lives and their abilities to co-create equitable and liberated societies. Since 2009, he has been working, creatively and collaboratively, to nurture these kinds of learning communities. 

In 2009, he became co-director of Public Social University with Judy Fleming, creating over a dozen free, all-ages learning events in art galleries, museums, and public parks. In 2010, he became the coordinator and committee chair of Chiron Studies at Portland State University, a unique program that makes it possible for  graduate students and upper-division undergraduates to design and instruct official 4-credit classes that the university does not already offer. 

He is currently collaborating with others to establish People's Social Learning Collaborative, a nonprofit organization that will nurture diverse face-to-face learning opportunities that are not dependent on institutions and which do not create burdens of debt. He is also completing his master's degree in Educational Leadership and Policy with an emphasis on Leadership for Sustainability Education. 

Interested folks can listen to the show almost every week at 12noon PST on kpsu.org.