Perspectives on Humanizing the Classroom

 A humanized learning space gives a student a sense of presence and interaction is given more focus. It’s an experiential learning space where less of each student is hidden and more is known. In humanized classrooms, the learners feel safe, respected, and valued.

Humanized learning prioritizes the need for the human-as-person. It adopts teaching practices that aim to bring out feelings of humanity in learning. In this environment, students are likely to be more eager to learn. Humanizing the classroom can transform student experiences and improve the culture of academic and societal institutions. Humanizing learning also teaches important life and work skills.

Humanizing learning doesn’t mean following a predetermined set of tasks or rules that an instructor must follow. Instead, it’s a teaching and learning approach that benefits students and instructors alike. It’s more of an empathic lens through which the instructor deliberately views their students. The ultimate goal is to build better learner-student relationships, prevent conflict, and make teaching more effective.

Humanized learning leverages learning science such as social and emotional learning (SEL) and culturally responsive teaching to foster an equitable and inclusive class climate for today’s diverse learners. The SEL methodology helps students comprehend their emotions better, fully embrace them, and demonstrate empathy for their fellow learners.

In a learning environment, the solution for the potential emotional disruption that can hinder student learning is building more human connections. The connection can help students perform at their full potential, both academically and socially. Towards this, instructors should endeavor to know more about their students and understand their strengths and weaknesses. This knowledge can be brought into conversations and student feedback to humanize classrooms.

Classrooms and schools should enable environments where students can become more and more human as they grow and learn. In particular, this is critical as students and society recover from the pain, trauma, and disconnection in the learning and school sector brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instructors should, therefore, make space to address the COVID-19 pain of social isolation and the associated economic hardships. While nobody expects the individual instructor to have solutions for all society’s hardships and injustices, students increasingly want an environment that acknowledges emerging issues of concern.

When it comes to student success for too long, student success has been seen through the eye of academic achievement. Students have inevitably been categorized into those who succeed and those who fail. When learning is humanized, each student’s definition of success should be freed to evolve with the individual learner.

This, however, doesn’t in any way mean abandoning all emphasis on academic achievement. Instead, it simply means shifting the assessment practices from test scores and quantitative point totals to qualitative feedback that illustrates the story of a student’s experience and learning journey. This liberates teachers and learning institutions from the task of ranking and categorizing students and instead transforming them into thought partners with students in their respective learning journeys.

Student assessment and learning process are also humanized when a shift is made from test scores and numbers to storytelling. Qualitative assessment techniques should inspire new skills among students, such as problem-solving, student-led discussions in the classroom, and application or demonstration of practical skills. Also, such assessments help students process the given feedback to make them active partners in the humanizing of learning.

The Quakers - Advocates for Marginalized People in Early America

 Quakerism, also called the Society of Friends, started in 17th-century England and spread to the American colonies. The denomination was grounded in the belief that all men had the light of Christ within them and that women and men were spiritual equals, with many women speaking in church worship. The Quakers’ interpretation of the Bible prevented them from taking legal oaths. While described as pacifists, the early Quakers advocated for the rights of minorities and women.

George Fox, the founder of the denomination, set out on a spiritual quest in England in the 1640s in the middle of a tumultuous religious environment in which many broke with the Anglican church to start new religious practices. Through Fox’s travels and interactions with others, he concluded that the presence of God was within people and not the churches in which they worship. Fox’s views threatened the religious establishment, and he often found himself persecuted, even jailed for blasphemy in 1650.

The name Quaker was a derisive term that Fox and his followers embraced. The word came from a biblical passage stating that people should tremble at the Lord’s word.

Although many perceived the Quaker movement as radical, its membership grew. The denomination did not have formal rituals or official ministers, referring to members regardless of position as Your Lordship and My Lady. Thousands of Quakers were tortured, whipped, and imprisoned into the 1680s.

The first Quakers arrived in the American colonies in the mid-1650s. Although they were separated from Britain by the Atlantic, they suffered similar persecution.

William Penn, a wealthy English Quaker, received a large land grant from King Charles II and founded Pennsylvania, a place he designated for peace, religious freedom, and tolerance. By 1681, many Quakers had moved to Pennsylvania.

The Quakers advocated for the rights of others. The religious group was behind protecting the rights of Native Americans by creating adoption centers and schools. Quakers also played a role in the abolitionist movement. By 1758, Quaker leaders in Philadelphia prevented Quakers from owning slaves. By 1780, this ban had expanded to the entire state.

Quakers were also behind the sugar boycott. In 1731, Quaker Benjamin Lay, a former sailor, returned from Barbados and protested tea drinking and the slave-grown sugar to sweeten it. According to Lay, slaves harvested the sugar under brutal conditions.

This boycott began an onslaught of campaigns against slavery and the products produced through slavery in the 1780s. By 1791, the sugar boycott was in full effect and supported by a half-million British subjects.

In 1820s America, women had few rights. They could not own property, serve on juries, sign contracts, or attend college. Their career opportunities were confined to working in textile mills or teaching, and they received half the pay made by men. A progressive group of Quakers living near Waterloo, New York, supported the women’s rights movement.

A branch of the progressive Quakers called the Hicksites formed a group they named the Yearly Meeting of Congressional Friends or Progressive Friends. This group developed ways to increase the influence of women in America, including supporting the first women's rights conventions.

According to the National Park Service, five women (Lucretia Mott, Mary Ann M’Clintock, Jane Hunt, Martha Wright, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton) were integral to the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1748, which was declared a great success. Everyone except Stanton was involved with Quakers in some capacity.

Even after the convention, the Quakers helped women organize meetings. The presence of Progressive Quakers was apparent at the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention held a few weeks later. Both events were catalysts in furthering women’s rights in the US.

Many Quakers in the present draw upon this rich legacy to further faith-based advocacy for social justice.