Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning
This post is part of our series entitled Teaching and Learning During a Pandemic, in which we invite guest authors to reflect on the challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic for teaching and learning. Our guest authors today are Tia C. Madkins, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alexis Patterson Williams, assistant professor in science education at the University of California Davis. Other posts in the series are compiled here.
Receiving new and conflicting information about COVID-19 is sending families, educators, and communities into a tailspin. Schools remain closed, students and their families are frustrated with remote schooling (RS), and school reopening plans are being revealed slowly—if at all. Many conversations about the upcoming school year have been rooted in fear of what could go wrong. We argue that it is critical to start our conversation from a place of hope and reimagine what could go well in PK-12 education. This requires reimagining PK-12 education through the lens of love. If we don’t use this moment to reimagine education, we are missing an incredible opportunity, which will leave our children wondering why we didn’t work harder to leverage the moment to make their lives and schools better.
What does it look like to center love as we prepare to reopen US schools? When we say love, we mean a commitment to making each other better. Educators commit to being responsible for and to each other, to students, and to families. This is accomplished by having explicit high expectations and demonstrating care through both actions and words. At a time when schools are incredibly unequal, it is really important to show love and uplift the experiences of Black and Brown students. Thus, educators in PK-12 classrooms, both in and outside of schools, must engage in humanizing pedagogies that 1) foster emotionally responsive classroom environments; 2) support students’ critical consciousness development; and 3) co-construct curricula and knowledge with their students. Here is how educators can enact these practices.
Foster emotionally responsive classroom environments. When we center love, we create emotionally responsive learning environments. Educators who see their students as fully human and as children provide meaningful and robust instructional experiences. This requires examining, confronting, and rejecting deficit views of students, families, and communities CONTINUE READING: Shanker Blog: We Choose to Reimagine Education: Centering on Love and Emotionally Responsive Teaching and Learning | National Education Policy Center