Students and teachers are human beings. Schools must bring this to light.
The HUMAN RESTORATION PROJECT supports progressive educators in building systematic change within schools. By providing free resources, professional development, and materials, we can form a coalition of like-minded educators who can revolutionize the education system from the ground up.
This work doesn’t provide firm answers or simple solutions. These do not exist in solving the complex, nuanced issues of the education system which is rooted in inequity, lack of proper funding, and systemic racism, sexism, and greed. This primer outlines the philosophy of progressive education, which is the antithesis of the growing movement to test, retest, and dehumanize the education process.
It may challenge or conflict with one’s ideas – which is why this style of education is needed. Unless educators seek to deconstruct and rebuild the underlying systems of the system, little to no change will occur. Instead, we’ll see more and more educators become burnt out and demoralized as they continually try to make the broken systems work as promised.
A human-centered classroom is needed now more than ever. In a time of growing uncertainty, global challenges, and increased threats to democracy, children need space to question, reflect, and actualize a meaning to their lives. These young people, along with their educators, will build a new future of love, care, and respect for all.
Source: Primer: A Guide to Human Centric Education
The Human Restoration Project’s primer on human centric education outlines equity literate contemporary progressive education compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disability.
A fantasy of ours at Stimpunks is to start a school for local neurodivergent and disabled people who are not served by public or private schools. “A human-centered classroom is needed now more than ever,” especially for those left out of “all means all”.
If there is ever a Stimpunks school, HRP’s Primer and Handbooks and the book “Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools” would be foundational. They recognize that “creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education…”
Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America.
Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children’s strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community.
Human centric education is inclusive instead of eugenic.
Sadly though, the social, political, and economic narrative of schooling in the past has been grounded in a “soft eugenics” belief that while some children have the capacity to become whatever they choose to be in life, others do not. This plays out in the decisions that educators make, often based on decontextualized data and confirmation biases that stem from immersion in traditions of education that did the same to us. Even if lip service is given to words such as equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships, schooling today is still far more likely to support practices from the past that have created school cultures in which none of those words define who educators really are, no matter what they aspire to be.
Consider how the “habitable world” concept developed by Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, Emory University researcher and professor, sits at the core of the philosophy of educators who developed and now sustain the structures and processes of schooling that impact young people such as Kolion (Garland‐Thomson 2017b). Garland‐Thomson views public, political, and organizational philosophy as representative of one of “two forms of world‐building, inclusive and eugenic” (Garland‐Thomson 2017a). Unfortunately, often it’s the soft educational eugenics philosophy that is most often expressed in practice, if not in words, across the nation’s schools rather than the creation of habitable worlds that are inclusive of all learners.
If we want our schools to be learning spaces that reveal the strengths of children to us, we have to create a bandwidth of opportunities that do so. That means making decisions differently, decisions driven from values that support equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships inside the ecosystem. Those are the words representative of habitable worlds, not words such as sort, select, remediate, suspend, or fail.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
How do we get from eugenic to inclusive world building in our schools? HRP has a recipe that very much aligns with Stimpunks philosophy and experience.
HRP has identified twenty systems, summarized within 4 values statements, that must be changed for a human-centric, equitable system that creates a better future for all.
Learning is rooted in purpose finding and community relevance.
Social justice is the cornerstone to educational success.
Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
Learners are respectful toward each other’s innate human worth.
Source: The Need
A school run on such a philosophy would include us Stimpunks like no school has yet.
Stimpunks shouldn’t have to start our own school to access the inclusive world building of human centric, contemporary, progressive education. For the “all means all” promise of public education to include us, we need allies working “against rules and excuses – to convert an institution to a progressive model of education”.
We’re working – against rules and excuses – to convert an institution to a progressive model of education grounded in an “all means all” philosophy when it comes to every child participating in rich, experiential learning.
Stimpunks is happy to support the Human Restoration Project and its vision of contemporary progressive education.
Support us in our September funding drive to create a better future for classrooms through human-centered learning through entirely free resources. Thank you @pammoran for your kind words! #restorehumanity 🚀
— Human Restoration Project (@HumResPro) September 10, 2021
Learn more about donating/gifts at https://t.co/GixKV90q62 pic.twitter.com/tdD2yu0Pg6
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