Emergent Strategies in Education: Toward Humanizing School Ecosystems

• In Event: Fostering Teacher Voice and Education in the Pursuit of Democratic Justice

Abstract

During the 2020-2021 school year, we engaged in a project focused on supporting teachers as they learned about and enacted humanizing pedagogies during distance learning. We found that it requires an intentional and concerted effort to humanize students a) within dehumanizing systems and b) while also being dehumanized. Humanization calls us to consider the interrelatedness of the well-being (or lack thereof) of all educational stakeholders because ultimately all systems, contexts, and environments are essentially a reflection and construction of the humans within it. We draw upon learnings from our humanizing professional learning project, nuanced through Indigenous and Black feminist perspectives of ecosystems to move beyond the ways that traditional ecological systems theory masks cycles of dehumanization perpetuated by educational policies.

Authors

• Keisha McIntosh Allen, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Kyla B. Thomas, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Sakeena Everett, University of Connecticut
  Presenting Author

• Kindel Turner Nash, Appalachian State University
  Presenting Author