The Whole Child (Revisiting the Foundation)
The Whole Child
Traversing is coming up on its one year anniversary and in honor of that event, I am going to be reposting some of the first issues, as we have a lot of new readers who were not with us in the beginning. These first posts outline the foundation of the blog and the educational philosophies that guide my work and the work of City of Bridges High School.
As promised in the first issue, it is my plan to spend the coming weeks building off of the six components of Progressive Education outlined by Tom Little and Katherine Ellison, in their book Loving Learning: How Progressive Education can Save America’s Schools. Here is the list again with the focus of this week in bold:
1. Attention to children’s emotions as well as their intellects.
2. Reliance on student’s interests to guide their learning.
3. Curtailment or outright bans on testing, grading and ranking.
4. Involvement of students in real world endeavors.
5. The study of topics in an integrated way, from a variety of different disciplines
6. Support for children to develop a sense of social justice and become active participants in American Democracy.
Last week I talked about how these components hold particular weight for me because they were developed based on the practices that Tom Little observed when he spent a year visiting Progressive schools around the USA. If you are new to Traversing and want to read my thoughts from last week you can find the issue here.
Attention to children’s emotions as well as their intellects at first glance seems like a foundational value that we would hope for not only in the school house, but also in the ways in which we attend to all of the members of our communities and society. We all have emotional lives which inform the decisions we make, the tasks we undertake and those emotions influence our ability to learn new skills, knowledge and understandings at any given time. So, for the time being I am not going to waste any digital ink trying to prove that human beings have emotions and that those emotions impact their lives.
If we pretended that the school an emotionless place, a place of pure intellect, a place where the interactions are purely academic and outcome oriented we will be thwarted on the first day by the fact that students bring their whole emotional selves to their lives in schools, just as we all do to the lives we lead regardless of the context. The idea that schools can be an emotionless place is a notion of which we can quickly disenthrall ourselves of simply by spending time in school with children. (This also rings true when we spend time with other adults in the work place, but I will keep my focus on schools for this newsletter.) My evidence from this comes from the fact that I have spent more than twenty years in schools, as a teacher, a principal and an administrator and on every day of each of those years, students’ emotions had an impact on their learning and their well-being. The sample size is large, thousands of students, the sample size is broad, kindergarteners through graduate students and the result is clear. Of the thousands of days that I have spent in schools, 100% of the time emotions have impacted learning and well-being.
Therefore, instead of ignoring or attempting to confine the wholeness of our humanity, it makes a whole lot more sense to design learning structures and systems that support the whole person including their emotional lives.
In addition to this practical justification, there is an additional moral and ethical obligation to see students for who they are and to honor and value them in that wholeness, that I feel compelled to address. My first exploration of this came when I was an undergraduate student studying religion and history at Oberlin College. In my first year, I was introduced to a text, I and Thou by theologian and philosopher, Martin Buber. In that text he discusses the nature of relation, and the experience of divinity.
Buber presents two fundamental types of relationships: I-It relationships in which the I, the subject, interacts with the It, the object, in order to derive benefit for the I. The It, the object, can be anything, another human being, the environment, a tree, a community etc. and the I, the subject, can be an individual or a community or institution. I think it is a fair question to ask ourselves what do our decisions look like if they are designed in order to derive a benefit for the I, for an individual or an institution. As an example, when high test scores are directly connected to teacher evaluations and salary, what impact does that have on the purpose of decisions made in schools?
The second type of relation is the I-Thou or I-You. In an I-You relationship the I, the subject, interreacts with the You, the object, in genuine respect for the inherent worth of the whole being of the other. Again, the You can be anything, another human being, the environment, a tree, a community etc. and the I can be an individual or a community or institution. I think we can ask the same question, what do our decisions look like if we begin from a place where we exist in genuine respect for the inherent worth of the whole being of each student?
Personally, this framework has helped me to understand my moral obligation to do everything that I can to support the whole being of each and every person in any school or learning community.
Before we stray too far into the philosophical, the question is what does this mean in practice…. Actually, a little more Martin Buber will help with the turn to the practical as well.
He also discussed the trust that can only exist in an educational context when the relationship between teachers and students is an I-You orientation.
In Between Man and Man, he says;
The relation in education is one of pure dialogue.
I have referred to the child, lying with half-closed eyes waiting for his mother to speak to him. But many children do need to wait, for they know that they are unceasingly addressed in a dialogue, which never breaks off. In face of the lonely night, which threatens to invade, they lie preserved and guarded, invulnerable, clad in the silver mail of trust. (116)
The practical turn in schools that honor the whole person and the inherent worth of each child is built upon the idea that every student is “unceasingly addressed in a dialogue,” by the adults in the community and with their peers. When we are in dialogue we are listening fully to the other person and then sharing ourselves as well. I have experienced many tangible practices which create this dialogue, foster trust and manifest a respect for the inherent worth of each person in a school. I’ll share a few and I invite others to share their own additions in the comments to this week’s issue.
1. Morning Meeting: A morning meeting can happen at any level of schooling. I have run them in kindergarten and in graduate school classes. Each meeting opens with a greeting where each person is welcomed by name, starts each day with an acknowledgement of their importance in the community.
2. Appreciations: Each day at City of Bridges High School, we end with appreciations. We gather together as a community and everyone appreciates something about the day and other members of the community.
3. Temporal Flexibility: Rigid adherence to time prevents both learning opportunities from being realized and also, more importantly it prevents human moments, emotional moments from being addressed because of fear of the bell.
4. Student Voice (Organizational): Providing students with real opportunities to be authentically engaged in the life of the school, helping to decide curricular decisions, hiring, scheduling and the daily life of the school allows young people to feel understand that their school is there for them, not the other way around.
5. Student Voice (Individual): Providing individual students with opportunities to shape their learning experiences based on the path that they are walking. Recognizing that a job or travel or out of school experience can have a far greater return than sitting in a classroom.
In all honesty the specific actions are far less important that the belief that every student’s whole person has inherent worth. You can have a morning meeting, or organizational student voice, but if the individuals and the institution don’t believe that every student matters, not for their test scores, but for their full humanity then real trust can’t be established and school won’t be radically humane.
Next week I’ll share some thoughts on personalization and following student interest. Thank you. Thank you.
People, Places and Things
In this section of the newsletter I share people, places and things that have inspired and taught me valuable lessons about rethinking learning.
My earliest exposures to deeply radical educational philosophy came when I was getting my M.Ed. at Antioch University New England in Keene New Hampshire. One of our classes was Philosophy of Education taught by Peter Eppig and in that class, we held a philosopher debate where each of the graduate students would research an educational philosopher or practitioner. The last day of the class would be an educational debate, where each of us took on the persona of the philosopher that we were learning about. The experience of having Rudolph Steiner, John Dewey, E.D. Hirsch, Maria Montessori, Aristotle and Ivan Illich (my role) etc. all debating No Child Left Behind was enlightening and a lot of fun.
During this class I was first introduced to A. S. Neill and the Summerhill School. Neill was a Scottish educator who taught in a number of schools, both progressive and traditional in England and Germany until starting Summerhill in 1921.
Neill believed that children were inherently good and curious and that if left to their own devices, unencumbered by the external expectations of adults that they would grow up to be just, and successful adults. It was the compulsory nature of school and the imposition of adult rules that led to the disciplinary and academic challenges of schools. Neill believed that children would come to learning and that it was the role of the teacher to teach when the student requested it and not the other way around. In fact, one of the only initial rules at Summerhill was that students could not be compelled to attend classes.
I could write for pages about Summerhill and at some point, maybe a long profile will be in order. There are many fascinating things about the school and Neill’s philosophy that are worth exploring including the self-governance of the students and the inspiration for schools, like The Sudbury Valley School here in this country. Right now, I would suggest that if you are not familiar with Summerhill, the school is worth a bit of exploration. Do I agree with everything about the school and philosophy, no. Are they a lot of things that I do agree with, absolutely.
A quick story approximately 10 years ago, Summerhill was selling mugs on their webpage and then they were gone from the webstore. I emailed and asked if they would be back in stock and was told that they were all sold out, but they looked in the kitchen, found one, washed it for me and would be happy to ship it to Pittsburgh. A used mug from the Summerhill school is one of my educational prize possessions.