Where Are You?
Speaking to You from Where You Are
If you are here, then you are at least curious about what Humanizing Education could mean. Maybe that curiosity stems from skepticism, perhaps well-meaning curiosity, or maybe you are fully invested in the concept already. Regardless, we welcome you and ask you to take this journey with us to learn more about what Education can be and what role you have in making it more. In all your activities within the University or College, you are making decisions that have cascading impacts on others — and that is true for all of us: administrators, instructors, students, staff, etc. Would you like to know how you can help “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all?” Let’s begin.
We, and many others, believe that access to education (materials, experiences, and interactions) is fundamental to achieving inclusive and equitable quality education for all. We are involved in efforts to improve all three, but for the purposes of the work we have undertaken here, we want to focus on the interactional: on humanizing the endeavor altogether. At its least, “humanizing education” means recognizing that we are all human. So, we start with an awareness of what it means to be human together, namely: where there are people there are also power dynamics, systemic and historical cycles of exclusion, privilege, and inequitable access.
Education (both teaching and learning) must be understood as relational, situated, and embedded in socio-economic cultural phenomena. And this is not just a situatedness that represents where the instructors and students are — administrators and decision-makers within the University or College should also explore their own situatedness. It is in the relational moments that education transcends mere content, rote memorization, and standardized assessments and moves to the realm of sustainable learning outcomes, application of concepts, great personal growth, and yes, equitable access.
In some cases, technologists have tried to solve this by building in surveillance mechanisms to flag students falling behind. They have built in ways for instructors to connect with students other than just in classes or during office hours. Each of those attempts creates the context where the relational can happen, but they do not in and of themselves create relational connections. Those connections happen in the details of how we treat each other.
We need to do the following, and not as a task or a checklist, but as a foundational value:
- Ask “Education for whom?” in every decision we make and every plan we scale
- Establish meaningful ways to talk with and listen to each other
- Build in mechanisms for change and flexibility
- Build in opportunities for reflection
- Build in Codes of Conduct and ask what else needs to be done to make a space inclusive and challenging
- Explore how pedagogies of care, trauma, and kindness impact outcomes like innovation,