HigherEd Series: Can Apprenticeships Transform Higher Education? with Mallory Dwinal-Palisch of Craft Education

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Mallory Dwinal-Palisch (0:24)

We had those adults working in our building every day, and we could not turn them into teachers because all of the alternative certification programs that popped up in the education reform era still require that you have a bachelor's degree before you enter. We kept sending them off to the local community college system, and they kept dropping out for reasons that had nothing to do with ability. To be clear, we weren't sending everyone. We were sending, I know this individual. I've watched her work with students all year. She would be so good. I will pay as her employer to turn her into my teacher. I would send her off to a community college or a four-year institution, and they'd be gone by the semester for reasons that had nothing to do with ability.

Yeah, that frustration that started for me as a college student and undergrad, but then that I followed academically during my PhD program and then experienced again on the employer side of things as a school principal, has really become the foundation for our work of how do you put your money where your mouth is and really give talented people who have been locked out of opportunity a chance to prove themselves and make a better life.

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SPEAKER_1 (2:17)

Welcome to the Edtech Insiders, HireEducation series, hosted by Matthew Rascoff. Matthew is an education innovation leader, a Stanford lecturer, and a regular guest on our podcast, whose work focuses on expanding access to knowledge and opportunity through digital learning. In this series, he speaks with leaders shaping the future of higher education. We hope you enjoy the conversations.

Matthew Rascoff (2:42)

Welcome everybody to a new episode of Edtech Insiders and our special mini-series focused on higher education innovation. We have a wonderful guest today, Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, and I'm so glad to be engaging with her, to have the chance to ask her some questions about her own origins and the incredible work that she has done for the past couple of decades in education innovation.

Mallory, welcome to the podcast.

Mallory Dwinal-Palisch (3:10)

Thanks so much for having me.

Matthew Rascoff (3:12)

I understand you are a professional extemporaneous speaker and have like a long record in this. I confess, a little bit intimidated to be asking you questions, you know, with a professional rhetorician here, but also quite excited to hear what you can cook up on the fly. So I'm going to ask you maybe some questions that you haven't been asked before. I will see if I can rise to that challenge.

Mallory Dwinal-Palisch (3:34)

All right. Well, I'm out of practice, so it'll be brushing off of the old gear.

Matthew Rascoff (3:40)

Maybe you can take us back to your undergraduate years at Northwestern University, when as a sophomore, as I understand it, you developed a nonprofit called Self, and one version of the story that I read was that you got this idea from the dining hall workers there when you noticed that the people serving you had kids who could not read English. And I wonder if you could just say a little bit about what that experience was like and how it might have informed your subsequent career in this space.

Mallory Dwinal-Palisch (4:11)

Absolutely. So I grew up in the whitest part of America, right? The big diversity in the small rural town that I was from was Protestant versus Catholic. And so language has always fascinated me. I went off to college to be a Spanish major. I was super excited about that. And I was really excited to have a chance to learn a language and then practice it. And the uncomfortable dynamic that was popping up at my institution, and that is uncomfortable and real across much of America is the overwhelming privilege of being an English speaker versus not in this country. And there were so many people working in the dining hall who I was initially just grateful that they were willing to practice Spanish with me and help teach me. But as we got deeper and deeper into that work, what we would talk about would be our lives. And they would tell me about their kids' experience in Chicago Public Schools and how they were really worried that their kids weren't learning English. And they knew that English was going to be the vehicle to upward mobility.