Reflection #10 on Humanized Pandemic Teaching with Chris McNutt

Enjoy Barbara Bray's conversation with Chris McNutt, a 9th-grade digital design and media educator and Executive Director of the Human Restoration Project, on how to build a more human-centered classroom amidst a pandemic.<br />Classrooms today<br />Education has the power to shape a new world – one that cares for all, provides equitable outcomes of opportunity, and ensures everyone is appreciated and valued. In theory, our school system should exemplify the overarching goal of students driving forward a curriculum that centers on their values and promotes these outcomes of social justice. However, classrooms are not always a humane place.<br />COVID-19 has brought to light and doubled-down on the carceral practices of schools. Similar to the carceral practices brought forward by the police reform/Black Lives Matter/defund the police movement, our recent foray into “pandemic teaching” has highlighted the dehumanization of students in a place meant for learning:<br /><br />In an effort to maintain “accountability,” adolescents to young children are being assigned many hours of tedious work to replicate the school day at home.<br />To prevent “cheating,” test software companies are employing Orwellian security measures to monitor and surveil students’ households.<br />To ensure “no one falls behind,” schools have doubled down on faux “rigor” through grading even more.<br /><br />It’s not that dehumanization started with the pandemic. For many students, coming to school is a negative experience. Earlier this year, a survey of 21,678 high school students found 75% reported school as a negative experience, signaling they were tired, stressed, and bored. The curriculum is disengaging, centered on a whitewashed narrative that doesn’t connect to students’ lives, the teacher controls (mentally and physically) much of what students can/will do, and the value of learning is centered on standardized testing. Now, as schools lockdown their classrooms in a (needed) effort to contain the pandemic, we find the doubling down of t