COVER STORY
Leveraging Student Protagonism: A New Model for Inclusive Prosperity By Jennifer D. Klein Author, Speaker, Facilitator & Coach CEO, https://principledlearning.org Author, The Global Education Guidebook
4 EARCOS Triannual Journal
In most schools around the world, education looks like a racetrack. Students enter their grade level at the beginning of the year, on the assumption of a common starting place for all students of the same age, and they finish the year having achieved the same outcomes—theoretically at least. But the reality is far from this, and every educator I know is keenly aware of the dissonance between how we traditionally organize our students and the incredibly varied skills and experiences they bring into the schoolhouse each year. Students enter our classrooms at many points in their cognitive, social, and emotional development, regardless of shared age.These differences are all the more apparent and challenging today because of the myriad ways the COVID pandemic has impacted learning around the world. The factors that influence students’ starting points are many, and there are just as many factors that influence whether students reach the same finish line. Sadly, the racetrack mentality, like the factory line model, leaves some students perpetually behind the pack, keenly aware of their deficits at every moment, while others are perpetually held back from what they might accomplish if allowed to fly. When Kapono Ciotti and I started working on the ideas that became our forthcoming book, The Landscape Model of Learning: Designing Student-Centered Experiences for Cognitive and Cultural Inclusion, our questions were many. Why do we generally prioritize access for all students when that’s such a low standard to shoot for? What might change if we envision student learning as taking place across a landscape, based on where students actually are when they walk into our classrooms? What might it look like to really honor students’ life experiences, cultures, opportunities and gaps, to really know who they are and where they stand on the landscape, as well as where they want to go, so that we can ensure every student reaches their own highest level of success possible? And what would need to change in the classroom and schoolhouse to allow such high levels of “inclusive prosperity” to occur? Inclusive prosperity, a term which comes from the world of financial investment, suggests that all participants in a given experience or community should prosper as individuals, but it also suggests that this is good for the collective as much as the individual, and that prosperity for all should be the goal of every group. Schools where all students thrive, are places where all students find authentic, relevant ways to challenge themselves, but also know they have a system of support they can count on that includes people who know them deeply, understand the gifts they bring to the community, and are prepared to support learning needs as they arise. With this in mind, Kapono and I developed what we’re calling the Landscape Model. The model is comprised of three elements we believe are essential to reaching the highest level of success possible for each child, all of which hinge on student protagonism—that is, they are not elements done by teachers to students, so much as elements we empower students to own and communicate and develop in collaboration with educators, even at the earliest ages. The three elements of the Landscape Model are The Ecosystem, The Horizon, and the Pathway.