- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by Kean University.

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- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it’s just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It’s not all about memorizing and getting information, it’s what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

Recently, my colleague Jacqui Tricarico down at the Atlantic City, NJEA, New Jersey Education Association Convention in Atlantic City, sat down with John Hunter, who's founder of a terrific organization called World Peace Game Foundation.

They talked about conflict resolution.

They talk about problem solving and promoting world peace.

Imagine that.

Jacqui and John Hunter, let's check it out.

- Hi, I'm Jacqui Tricarico, Senior Correspondent for "One-on-One," here at the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City.

And so honored to be joined by Mr. John Hunter, the Founder of The World Peace Foundation, and an NJEA keynote speaker here at the convention this year.

Great to have you with us.

- Hey, Jacqui.

I'm happy to be with you.

- So nice to be able to speak with you.

So, first and foremost, you are an educator.

You, more recently retired.

I don't know if we can totally call it retiring, but almost 50 years teaching in our public schools.

Talk about how you knew teaching was your calling and what kept you passionate for all those years.

- You know, Jacqui, I really did not know that teaching was my calling.

I accidentally became a teacher.

I kept dropping in and out of college, couldn't find the right way for myself.

And then I, finally, with the pleading of my parents, "Please get a degree in something," I went back.

And there was an experimental program in something, but the back of the sign, what the program was, was torn off.

I didn't know what it was in, but I knew I was an experimental kind of person.

So, I said, I'll do that.

Could have been dentistry, forestry, could have been anything, but it happened to be education.

And it was an experimental program, which suited my nature.

And I happily dove into it and found out that was what I should be doing.

- Talk about, I know you've talked about this in a TED Talk that you gave about that first job that you got, and how it opened up so much for you, personally and as an educator.

- Yeah, the very first teaching interview I got for a job, I had a three-piece suit.

I had a- - Sharp, like you are today.

(Jacqui laughs) - I had a film projector, slides and screens, all the things I had done as a pre-service teacher.

And I put them aside, never even got to use them.

The supervisor, we had the interview, Anna Lou Aaroe was her name, in Richmond Public Schools in Virginia in 1977.

And she said, "What do you want to do?"

And I said, "Well, I want to be a great teacher.

I want to teach these gifted inner-city children in this new experimental high school.

How do I do that?"

And she refused to tell me how to teach.

It upset me greatly, because I really just wanted guidance.

I wanted to be shown how to do a good job.

But she said instead, "What do you want to do?"

And that opened up everything.

Instead of being a detriment, it turned out to be the cornerstone of everything I would do for the next 45 years.

- So, that opened up for you too in 1978, creating The World Peace Game.

So, this is something that you taught for many, many years.

I want to understand it and listen to your breakdown of it, because I've been trying to understand the game myself, reading your book, and watching videos, and it seems like such complex issues.

But, your fourth graders over all those years really understood it, and we're able to do so many amazing things with the game.

So tell us, what is The World Peace game?

- It's a geopolitical simulation.

It started out as a four-by-five piece of plywood on the floor for those high school kids I talked about, with tiny little game pieces from junk shops and toy stores.

And I just wanted to put them into a problem solving mode.

Problem solving was in vogue in 1970s.

And so I wanted them to solve problems.

I had to teach social studies, but I knew from my undergraduate mentors, Ms. Ethel J.

Banks, particularly, in Richmond Public Schools, that I needed to marry their passions with the curriculum.

"Find out what they love," she said.

"And once you marry or pair that love with the curriculum, their love will drive the learning."

So social studies, board games.

1978, that's all we had.

No social media at all.

So, we paired board games with social studies.

And it just kept going and the students kept innovating with it.

And so now it's a four-by-four-by-four Plexiglas tower, a structure with four horizontal layers of plexiglass, four-by-four, about and a half an inch thick.

Undersea layer, down to the shoes, the kids' shoe tops.

Ground and sea level at their knees.

Aircraft a level at their shoulders.

And outer space level just above their heads.

They got to stand on chairs sometimes to move things.

Thousands of game pieces.

I give them 50 interlocking real world global problems to solve that adults have not solved.

And I let them know that.

I also apologized to them at the beginning that we're even doing this game, because we adults have failed so badly.

So, we read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War," basically how to stay out of it, or how to avoid it if you can, to get a little primer into thinking about it.

And they're tossed into this matrix of problems, simultaneous problems headfirst, with new problems arising every few minutes from random cards.

There's United Nations, arms dealers, World Court, and also World Bank at the corners of the board.

And the fictional teams sit on the sides of the board.

There's even a random entity.

We used to call it the "Weather Goddess," now it's genderless.

Random entity who controls the stock market, the weather, and random things that occur to everyone at all times.

So, you're constantly in a matrix of chaos, volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity.

And the children love it.

They take to it like ducks to water.

It's amazing.

And they've done so well.

Of course, we've gotten invited to the Pentagon.

The documentary film, "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements," was screened at the United Nations, Google, and so forth.

So, it's been amazing that this structure, something I did not know would work at all, turned out to work so well.

- 45-plus years of teaching The World Peace Games, have the students always found a way to find peace amongst everyone?

- You know, Jacqui, it's strange.

It's almost shocking.

They always, always, always, in games I've played, do.

They find out that compassion is the way to make everything work.

And in our world today, you know, we may have a dearth of that sometimes, but they come through with that equation every single time.

They've almost lost many times.

We have a set amount of time the problems have to be solved satisfactorily.

- There's a timer, right?

Timer's going down.

- Problems have to be solved satisfactorily.

And all countries have to raise their asset value beyond the starting point.

Two things have to happen.

- That's an important part of it, yeah.

- And so if they don't do that, we're not winning.

And so they play until they do.

And somehow they've managed to do it, yeah.

- What has surprised you the most about teaching the games all those years?

What has stood out in your mind, maybe as one of the times that really surprised you about how the students interacted with each other, with you around these games?

- Well, you know, as a facilitator of the game, you put yourself in a position of not knowing what's going to happen.

That's built into the rules that I wrote, so, I'm always in an uncertain area.

And learning to live with that uncertainty has become a normal thing.

And, of course, life is uncertain moment to moment, but it's in relation of life.

So, when the students come together and they face that uncertainty and they don't mind, they become happy to have things not clear, so they can bring clarity.

And I think them winning the game in the last few moments, the ecstasy, the incredible overwhelming joy they feel when they physically feel viscerally they have saved the planet.

And some of them from 40 years ago have gone into public service, governmental service, and are actually trying to do that now.

So, that just gives me such a warm feeling that something you do as a teacher might not only affect them, but help others too.

- You mentioned knowing what some of your students are doing now, do they come, how often are your students coming back to you years down the road, and letting you know what those games meant to them, and how it shaped the future of their education, and their careers, and their lives?

- It's a gratifying thing, because as a teacher, when you put your heart and soul into them for a year, or two years, however long, and they leave, you may never see them again.

You don't know.

You lay awake at night wondering, "What happened to this one."

"What happened to that one?"

You do.

And so when they come back through social media, or however now, and they say, "Mr. Hunter, I want to tell you what I'm doing."

I just had an interview with NPR, with Irene Newman, who's doing PhD work in conflict resolution.

And she said, "I played the game.

I did everything.

I broke all the rules, Mr. Hunter.

You let me do it, because that's the way the game works.

And it led me to this And I'm so glad you let me have that chance, especially as a girl."

It's a great thing.

- That's wonderful.

So, the games themselves, I know you've traveled the world teaching them, how often are now educators bringing them into their classrooms, and how passionate are you about making sure that other educators learn what this is and can implement it in their own schools?

- Jacqui, you know, I never had an idea of taking the game anywhere beyond my classroom.

I just do what teachers do, which is you make curriculum as best you can for your students and you hope it works.

And because of Chris Farina, a beautiful independent filmmaker who was introduced to me, this documentary, "World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements" was made and that opened the door for everything.

And so now the game is, we've taught teachers in 42 or 3 countries.

And so the game is played all over the world.

And it's amazing to me to go to Tokyo, and have them be aware of the game, and ready to have me do a game, and to watch them do their games.

Or, to go to Croatia and see it happen.

Or, Austria.

It's an astounding feeling for a teacher.

And you just realize there are teachers far better than you, and they're asking you, can I use your work?

It's a beautiful thing.

- The documentary is being shown here at the NJEA, as well.

Your students have learned so much from you over all those years of teaching, all the time that you have dedicated to bettering young people, what is the most important thing you've learned from your students?

- I'm glad you mentioned that, because they may have learned something from me, but I was really the beneficiary, because I had 30 teachers, and they had one, technically.

And, you know, when you learn as an adult to have them become your peers, your co-creators, your co-teachers, because they've got individual and unique wisdom you don't have, you respect that, you respect them as individuals, then suddenly you've got a learning environment.

Everybody's teaching something all the time.

And once they realize they're empowered by you that way to be themselves, the learning just takes off like a rocket.

You don't have to do anything really as a teacher, because they're in charge.

And they want to be in charge of their academic destiny, which they rarely ever get to do.

So when you let them know that, especially at nine years of age, they're fourth graders, and now we're in middle school, high school, and even college students.

Ethiopian college students just played the game a few months ago.

Ukraine, the teachers are playing the game now, just.

So, the things I've learned is just, you never can think that something is so small that's not very powerful.

It can be a seed, but a tiny apple seed, you can have in a hundred years an orchard of thousands and thousands of trees.

So, even a small seed is important and worthwhile, I think.

- You planted a lot of seeds that I think have grown really in such a beautiful way from all those students that you've taught through all those years.

Thank you for the time you put into education and in our country.

Really appreciate that.

And thank you for taking the time today, so we could learn more about the work you've done, about The World Peace Games.

A really beautiful, interesting, complex concept that I loved learning about.

So, thank you so much, Mr. Hunter.

- Thank you so much.

- [Narrator] To watch more One on One with Steve Adubato find us online and follow us on Social media.

All right, folks, my colleague, Jacqui Tricarico, the senior correspondent here at One-on-One, sat down with Stella Lopresti-Busick, talked about a whole range of important issues that often get talked about in sound bites, but are more complex, more important than people realize.

Here's Jacqui.

- Hi, I am Jacqui Tricarico, Senior Correspondent for "One-on-One."

I am on location here at the NJEA Convention in Atlantic City, and so pleased to be joined now by Stella Lopresti-Busick, who is the subject of a film, a documentary that we're seeing here called, "Ben In Bloom."

It's so great to have you with us, Stella.

- Hi, it's nice to be here.

Thank you for having me.

- Thank you for taking the time.

So, tell us about this documentary, "Ben In Bloom."

It's being shown here to educators.

Describe for us what the film is.

- Absolutely.

So, this film is, at its core, a story about my life as a activist in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, so a very contentious place that is home of a lot of political warfare, I'd say, because it's a microcosm of sort of the country as a whole, as it's the swing county of Pennsylvania, often decides the election, as we just saw.

- Yes, we were just coming out of this just a few days after the presidential election, and we saw a lot of people are saying, yeah, that Pennsylvania was the state that made sure that Trump was elected president again.

- Yes, yes, and so growing up in that environment, in that landscape, it was really important for me to make change and be the voice of change and the voice of reason even as young as 13-years-old.

So, I got into activism when I was 13, and I was working with great groups as I went through high school, like The Rainbow Room in Doylestown, Youth for Unity, all of these fantastic groups.

And the film just follows my story there about growing up in Bucks County, some of the more specific events and work that I did and looking forward into the future, towards what I am hoping the landscape of this country and the world can look like.

- [Jacqui] And a lot of the film focuses on LGBTQIA+ rights.

- [Stella] Yeah, for sure.

- Talk about that, and you're talking about your activism.

Give us some more examples of some of the things you're even doing today, but some of the things that you're hoping people take away from the film in that regard.

- Yeah, absolutely.

I think what I really want people to take away from this film, and I was actually just talking about it when we did our talk back, is that the power that we have, we, as humans, as people, especially in this political landscape, the power that we have lies in our voices and our actions, and the voice that we have can't be taken away by anybody.

And so being able to use that voice for good and being able to disrupt the status quo that's comfortable for a small group of people but ostracizes a large group of alienated, marginalized, and minority communities, it is really important that people take away the power of their voice, 'cause so often I see, even with this election most recently, I had friends that are under 18 that were like, "My voice doesn't matter," and I'm like, "Yes it does.

"It is the most important thing someone can use."

And it's really important to me that people are taking that away.

And the film follows me doing activism in Bucks County.

And one of the events that it closes in on is an open mic night event that I did, where- - [Jacqui] Oh, was that through The Rainbow Room?

- Yes, that was through The Rainbow Room.

I partnered with The Rainbow Room, 'cause I had been going to The Rainbow Room.

The director of The Rainbow Room is someone I love very dearly, Marlene Pray, and we were talking about the state of affairs in Bucks County and Pennsylvania and the US.

And when I was a, gosh, a sophomore in high school, I told Marlene that I wanted to platform young, queer people.

And the way that I wanted to do it was through art and music, because I grew up on music.

I'm a singer.

I'm in an acapella group at UC San Diego, where I go to school, and I compose music also.

So I wanted to get an avenue for queer youth to exude their joy via their art.

And so that was an event that we started.

It started as an a small open mic night through The Rainbow Room and then evolved to a much bigger event that we did that really got all of the community involved, and so that's something that the film really closes in on.

And it's something that we started when I was, it would would've been the summer after my sophomore year of high school.

And then it happened when I was a junior and when I was a senior, and it continues to happen now even with me in San Diego.

- So talk about The Rainbow Room.

And you say early on in high school, what was going on in your life at that time and how was this organization, this place that you could go to, how did that really help you throughout that time in your life?

- It was really important for myself and the people around me to have a space that was validating and safe, because Bucks County was super unsafe for queer and trans teens, of which I'm both, and it was very important for there to be a space where not only people were physically safe, but also emotionally safe and their identity was safe, and could be around people that not only validated them and talked with them and spoke with them and were there for them, but understood them.

And that was something that was really important to me when I started attending The Rainbow Room.

And I found this community of people that really resonated with me, that I really resonated with, and it was really, really important for that community to exist.

And The Rainbow Room started with Marlene Pray back in the very early 2000s in Doylestown when there were almost no gender and sexuality alliances in Bucks County, in Pennsylvania, really anywhere.

And Marlene sort of created that space that still lives on and is a very important resource to young, queer, trans people in Bucks County, but all over Pennsylvania, even into the New Jersey area.

- I wanna ask you, as a trans person, a lot of the times, we're here at the NJEA convention, so a lot of focus is on young people and people in high school, middle school, and there is a lot of controversy, or a lot of issues around parents, teachers, others, caregivers, saying that young people are given too much information, too much exposure to think that maybe they wanna be one thing when there's something else, and we shouldn't really be playing into that at such a young age.

What do you say to those people who think that way or feel that way?

- Yeah, so I think a person's individual experience is their business and their business alone, right?

When we're talking about queer and trans identities, the idea that students or young people are given too much information about gender identity, sexuality, exploration is preposterous in my opinion.

And I will invoke the idea that trans and queer people have existed for thousands of years.

Since humanity began, trans and queer people were there right alongside the dawn of humanity.

And when people invoke the idea that students are getting too much information via social media, news, whatever, they are often saying that trans people just sort of cropped up in the past couple decades.

And while there is a very...

The reality of the situation is trans people have existed since the dawn of time, like I mentioned, but what I urge people to think about when they're engaging in this school of thought that the transgender people are erupting from the age of social media is thinking about another historical example.

And what I'm thinking about specifically is left-handedness versus right handedness.

For a very long time, people that were left-handed, their dominant hand was their left hand when they were writing, were considered to be like spawn of Satan, especially when there was a lot of Christian iconography starting to be really, really prevalent in the world, especially in the United States.

That was something that was widely believed.

So, people would have iron gloves to try to force themselves to make their right hand dominant.

Well, when society started to accept that handedness has no hand in any sort of spawn of Satan, the rates of people that reported being left-handed went all the way up, not because people that were left-handed just started emerging, it's because society stopped ostracizing them, and the same thing is happening here.

Trans people have existed forever, but in the past few decades, it has become a safer place for trans people to exist openly, and that is why we see higher reporting of trans and non-binary people existing.

And so that's why the idea that students are getting too much information is preposterous, and that identity exploration comes from within.

As someone who experienced all of it, it comes from right here.

When I started experiencing it, I didn't even have the language to explain what was going on within me, I just knew there was something.

And so, I encouraged people to think about that, but also, stepping away from the idea of having to have empirical evidence surrounding everything.

Being compassionate and empathetic costs literally nothing, and what other people are doing with their own bodies, their own minds, their own selves, is frankly nobody's business but their own.

- So my last question for you, so I recently watched, I have a feeling you probably saw it too, "Will and Harper," a documentary that came out on Netflix.

And it's Will Ferrell and his friend Harper and their journey together, because Harper transitioned in her seventies, kind of playing on that wasn't comfortable early on in her life.

And something that she said that stuck with me, she said who she was before and the male name that she had before was actually not really her, and Harper is really who she is.

Do you feel the same way about being Stella?

- This is a great question, and it's something that I've given a lot of thought to.

And I think that I'm the same person in the way that everybody is the same person that they were when they were 13.

Everybody evolves, right?

So the version of someone now, I'm 19 now, so the version of me now and the version of me at 13 are the same person, but a lot of evolution has happened.

So I'm not gonna say we're different people with different identities and different experiences, because that experience underscores my entire existence.

What I will say is adopting my identity and my name, specifically, helped me be a more authentic version of myself.

It's not like anything changed within me, but rather allowing myself to project more authentically to other people and being perceived more authentically to who I am.

That person, when I was 13, that scared but hopeful person is exactly who I am in here.

Just like people who are 70-years-old are still the same person that they were when they were 13, but have gone through, oh, I've never been very good at math, you know, 50, 57 years of transformation, and I feel the same way.

So in the sense that, am I the same person?

No, 'cause I've evolved.

Is the person within me the same?

Yes.

If that makes sense.

- It does, it does.

Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for sharing your story with us and with so many other people through this documentary, really important.

People can check it out, "Ben In Bloom."

Check it out online.

You can find it there.

Thank you so much, Stella, for joining us and for taking the time to speak with us.

- Thank you for having me.

- So for Jacqui Tricarico, myself, and our entire team down in Atlantic City at the 2024 New Jersey Education Association Convention, we thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Kean University.

The New Jersey Education Association.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Wells Fargo.

RWJBarnabas Health.

Let’s be healthy together.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

And by Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by BestofNJ.com.

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