Reforming Our School Systems Around a Humanizing Curriculum: Schooling During and After COVID-19

• In Event: Conceptualizing Efforts to Bring About More Humanizing Educational Institutions: Perspectives From Research + Practice

Abstract

Objective
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how we can reform our school systems around a humanizing curriculum - a curriculum that values not just academic knowledge but also self, social, and cultural knowledge. Additionally, we argue that this curriculum ought to be co-created and co-implemented with learners and their families.
Framework
We draw on multiple bodies of literature to create this approach. We build on humanizing pedagogy, critical studies, and learning sciences to define a humanizing curriculum as one that seeks out and celebrates students’ experiences as whole human beings who are learning about and creating their place in their society (Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1995). The literature on system reforms, critical studies, organizational studies, and implementation science help us conceptualize how to shift existing school systems to support a humanizing curriculum.
Methods and Data Sources
In this conceptual paper, we address two questions: (a) What do we want our students to learn? and (b) How do we create systems that provide them with the opportunities to learn? We leverage lessons learned from the multiple bodies of literature mentioned above to answer these questions.
Results
A humanizing curriculum sees and supports the humanity and dignity of each student and encourages students and teachers to leverage students’ self and community knowledge to transform their world (Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Salazar, 2013). Clearly, such a curriculum has to be co-created by students, teachers, and other adults working together within caring relationships (Love, 2019; Taylor, 2019; Veloria & Boyes-Watson, 2014).
Families can partner with educators to support children with thoughtfully designing projects that build on and amplify the rich knowledge and interests children bring to class (Moll et al., 1992; Paris & Alim, 2017; Yosso, 2005). Co-creating a curriculum with families recognizes that families are more than capable of helping educators create more equitable school systems (Ishimaru, 2020; Sampson et al., 2020) and have vast amounts of knowledge and areas of expertise (Moll et al., 1992; Yosso, 2005).
Co-creating a curriculum with students and families also addresses a major challenge with system reforms: shifting people’s understandings and expectations about what schooling should look like (Cuban, 1993; Scott, 2014; Wong, under review). We can address this challenge by co-creating with families new expectations for what schooling looks like, and the roles everyone plays in shifting school systems.
Significance
We call for a humanizing curriculum as an evolution from a standards-based curriculum. We see its power during the current pandemic and beyond. When we think about the wellbeing of children and their families, we can only imagine a curriculum that nurtures children as whole beings and leverages their interests to make sense of this new world unfolding in front of them. We can only imagine school systems set up to help children find their place in this world in order to improve it. We have been handed an opportunity as educators, families, and citizens to change how we think about schooling and learning, and it behooves us to take advantage of this opportunity.

Authors

• Lok-Sze Wong, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author

• Punya Mishra, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author