Inquiry Inventory - 06/01/22
Here at The Human School, a big part of what brought us together is a deep love of reading and learning. We commit, as part of our learning journey, to sharing our week’s reading with you and what influences our thinking and learning.
Each week, you will see a post with what we’re reading, a quote, and an insight from that reading that leads us to deeper thinking.
To learn more about what we are reading, please take a look at our Connection Catalog.
Community: The Structure of Belonging by Peter Block
“First and foremost, [John McKnight] asserts that community is built by focusing on people’s gifts rather than their deficiencies. In the world of community and volunteerism, deficiencies have no market value; gifts are the point. Citizens in community want to know what you can do, not what you can’t do.
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Intervention. Remediation.
We are fixated on these in education. There is always some deficit that needs to be addressed. Always something to “fix.”
But what if we focused on assets. The assets of each of the humans that make up our systems––young and old.
If we believe that everyone is capable of excellence and the purpose of education is to create the conditions for these capabilities to be released and shared meaningfully with the world, then isn’t it time to move away for deficit thinking and toward asset thinking?
Imagine the world we could have with this one mindset shift.
—Randy
Healing and Re-Humanizing Our Education System
by John Watkins
“We asked our members to bring a meaningful personal artifact to share with others. After sharing the stories of those artifacts in pairs and quads, they built a sculpture out of them in the center of the Longhouse. This storytelling was one way for our DLD community to move from welcoming people’s individual identities to creating a collective “we” that can more powerfully act in the ways brown describes. The activity both confounded and delighted those who had not before had the experience—either in their own organizations or in an educational gathering—of valuing personal storytelling and the power of connection over a mechanistic approach to technical problem-solving. As Josh Schachter of Community Share says, “Some people say the shortest distance between two people is a story.””
Our beliefs rest heavily around storytelling, what we know is the power of sharing our experiences and anecdotes not just as evidence in an argument but as a way to connect with one another, understand one another, and learn about the variety of contexts that exist in our system. Storytelling is a universal element from culture to culture that we use to build identity and share it with newcomers. If we hope to shift our current system or transform it entirely (let’s be real!), we must keep humans at the center of our decisions and our conversations which means we must know and share our stories and encourage others to do the same.
—Rachel
“Human-centered design methodologies have gained increasing attention in K12 education in recent years. From educators using the process as a pedagogical framework for real world, project-based learning to school leaders leveraging the process as a driver of innovation, progressive leaders of education reform around the world have taken up human-centered design as a mechanism for positive change.”
One of the connections I made to this human centered design work is found within their human centered design mindsets. Many of these mindsets echo those of our mindshifts within the compass points. In addition, there are mindsets here that we might consider as embedded within the broader mindshifts. These ideas help us to both reflect and reconsider our own. -Chad
