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.