Important Terms

for all students, this element asks educators to recognize that there are many ways to reach the horizon.

This metaphor may sound exciting to some and terrifying to others. How does one shepherd a class of thirty students? It is far easier and more organized to keep the herd tightly packed together. How might one navigate the demands of an administrator conducting a walkthrough to see the exact standard for the day’s lesson on the top right-hand corner of the whiteboard and every student able to recite the learning objective? It is easier to be “on page 53,” for example, because it’s Thursday, rather than have each of your thirty students working on a different page or skill. But educating this way ignores the messiness of what students bring into the classroom with them, of the lives they lead and the families they come from, and doing so dehumanizes every one of them. We believe that a more humanizing, individually appropriate education is possible, and that such an education will result in excellence from more students, demonstrated in more varied ways that leverage their strengths and full selves. While the landscape requires something different from educators, we don’t believe it will amount to extra work, particularly as teachers learn to harness pedagogies with student agency at their core.

Important Terms

The authors have been investigating three terms we believe help capture our vision for education in general and the landscape model in particular: (1) student protagonism, (2) inclusive prosperity, and (3) rightful presence. The landscape model hinges on each of these terms, and the broader concepts they address, because they move education beyond the factory line toward something much more authentic, inclusive, and student centered, which will improve learning experiences and outcomes for all students.

Student Protagonism

Sadly, the English language rarely uses the word protagonism, only the word protagonist. Even protagonist is a word we rarely hear in reference to education in the English-speaking world, more commonly used to describe main characters in literature. When Jennifer was working as a head of school outside of Bogotá, Colombia, she found that protagonismo was a fairly common educational term in Spanish for active student participation in learning experiences, for a sort of ownership over the learning journey, albeit limited by the goals of the educator and broader curriculum. As a student of literature and writing, Jennifer was immediately compelled to adopt the word protagonismo in her daily work, to

help teachers and parents expand their thinking about just how much student agency might be achievable.

Student protagonism is crucial to any form of student-centered learning. In its simplest form, student choice, such as that seen in pedagogical approaches like project-based learning, problem-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and design thinking, motivates students by tying learning to their interests, which in turn improves learning outcomes (Taub et al., 2020). In its highest form, such as the level of student agency we envision for the landscape, protagonism requires constant critical thinking and metacognition, as students learn to understand their own learning needs (ecosystem), set goals for their own growth (horizon), and identify steps to achieve that growth (pathway). When students participate in these processes, instead of having the teacher define and control their pathway, their motivation to meet those goals increases significantly (Taub et al., 2020). And in a practical sense, student protagonism will lower the pressure on teachers to manage all aspects of learning—moving more of the tracking, monitoring, and managing to the students themselves and freeing up educators’ time for scaffolding, guiding, and supporting students’ growth.

Protagonism suggests that students lead the way, not that they follow passively; it suggests that they construct meaning, not just consume information; and it suggests that they act from center stage, not from the audience, because this play is theirs. The idea of students as creators of knowledge is not a new one, born in the earliest forms of constructivist education such as Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia, and tied to the highest levels of Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy. Students as creators lives at the heart of modern student-centered learning, an essential element of pedagogies like project-based learning, design thinking, “maker” education, STEM education, and deeper learning. The emergence of educational technologies makes the shift more urgent, in our opinion, as students need to use technologies in creative and constructive ways that set them up to thrive in an increasingly digital present and future (Oddone, 2016). If all we do is ask students to recall, summarize, or passively consume technology, we are missing an opportunity to foster the skills our students need for our times and our uncertain future.

While what Jennifer has seen in many Latin American schools may fall short of student agency in its highest form, the authors agree that the word protagonism provides the language to describe what’s possible: that students can and should become the main characters of their own learning stories. And this leads us to our next term, as the landscape model asks us to ensure that such protagonism, and all the learning journey entails, be inclusive in its design and implementation,

equally powerful and meaningful for all students, regardless of where they are on the landscape.

Inclusive Prosperity

Because we want to remove limits and personalize possibilities, we find terms like diversity and inclusion inadequate in this context. Diversity suggests that we have a broad mix of people at the table but offers little guidance once we have that mix. Inclusion, though a reasonable improvement over diversity, still suggests that educators have the power to include or not, and it therefore negates the unique right of protagonism we believe every student should have, always. This distinction is particularly important when we consider the negative impact that implicit bias can have on educators’ sense of what students are capable of; if teachers hold the power to include or not, their assumptions become more dangerous. In fact, according to professors Angela Calabrese Barton and Edna Tan (2020), “Reform efforts focused on inclusion do little to disrupt systemic inequities in classroom practice” (p. 434).

We came across the term inclusive prosperity early in our investigations, originally an economic concept calling for policy changes that shift profit distribution systems. Applied to education by Roberto d’Erizans (2018), head of school at the Millennium School in San Francisco, in a letter to his faculty at the Graded School, the term:

signals both unity and an inclusive view of success. Not just success in traditional terms, but a desire to jointly work for the betterment of each other’s lives. It signifies joining together, not leaving anyone behind, as we work in unison to meet our goals.

The concept of inclusive prosperity resonates for the authors as an intentional orientation for this deeper work: we are not just making sure all kinds of students are at the table (diversity), nor that traditional power structures are allowing them a certain, albeit limited power (inclusion), as we see in schools with limited and highly controlled forms of student choice—or none at all. Instead, inclusive prosperity suggests that everyone in educational communities has a role in ensuring all students receive acceptance and support and that stakeholders view students as the little humans they are, recognizing the experiences, gifts, and challenges each brings into the classroom. It suggests all students can thrive, not just survive their schooling. It suggests not just the protagonism of every individual but, by extension, the prosperous power of the whole classroom or learning community. Inclusive prosperity might even guide educators toward a better understanding of the classroom and broader community culture they need to build to support

the success of every individual. As d’Erizans puts it, “Collective action leads to collective responsibility; inclusive action leads to inclusive communities” (personal communication, June 1, 2021).

Inclusive prosperity is the heart of the landscape model, as an education built on the goal of all students reaching their highest level of prosperity, or success, has the potential to erase many educational inequities we find in schools and the broader social inequities that a limited education creates. Further, such prosperity can only happen when educators recognize every student’s essential humanity and potential and his, her, or their essential right to a voice in his, her, or their own education.

Rightful Presence

During our investigations, the term rightful presence emerged, a term that comes originally from critical justice studies of the potentials and limitations of sanctuary cities (Squire & Darling, 2013). These studies sought to look critically, through an equity lens, at how well historical and modern social systems have been designed to support and protect the rights of immigrants and refugees in cities across the United States. Schools are built on similar systems, and critical justice orientations in the classroom, more often referred to as critical pedagogy, seek to identify and deconstruct systemic injustices that harm students. Addressing the inadequacies of terms like inclusion, Barton and Tan (2020) apply the concept of rightful presence to education, establishing it as a critical justice effort that moves educators beyond common conceptions of equity and asking us to design schools and classrooms in ways that ensure the essential, inalienable rights of all students:

What rightful presence offers teaching and learning exceeds the limits of equity. Rightful presence, as a justice-oriented political project, focuses on the processes of reauthoring rights towards making present the lives of those made missing by the systemic injustices inherent in schooling. (pp. 435–436)

“Making present the lives of those made missing” (Barton & Tan, 2020, p. 436) captures beautifully the idea of the schoolhouse as a place where one can and should deconstruct the injustices of the broader society—and of education itself—allowing educators to rebuild something better and ensure the highest levels of achievement possible for every student (another concept worthy of deconstruction). Rightful presence suggests that such presence is a right, not a gift those in power bestow, which Paulo Freire (2000), liberation theologist, author, and the grandfather of the critical pedagogy movement, insists is essential if the goal is to avoid perpetuating oppressive and dehumanizing systems. Such

presence is—or should be—a natural, rightful state afforded to every student in every circumstance. Ultimately, rightful presence also suggests student protagonism; it requires that students aren’t just in the classroom but are active members of a learning community, members who consistently see themselves as owners of their own education and who feel valued for their own voices and experiences. As Barton and Tan (2020) assert:

When allies, such as teachers, help students to challenge and transform what participation in the disciplines entails or what meaningful representations of learning look like . . . they shape opportunities for humanizing participation by valuing students as cultural and whole people, whose knowledge/wisdom, experiences, and fraught histories are integral to disciplinary learning. (p. 436)

And what do we mean by achievement, then? We believe that educational policymakers around the world have simplified this term to make it more easily assessed: the ability to accurately recall content knowledge or demonstrate academic skills, on demand, usually on a multiple-choice exam. Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy has long established that pure recall is a low-level thinking skill, yet even many project-based classrooms depend on summative products that simply summarize the content learned, albeit in a unique or creative form. We believe students from all backgrounds and cognitive abilities are capable of taking on real challenges, of doing real problem solving, and of doing real thinking. But this can only happen if educators reframe the concept of success to focus more on the individual’s movement across the landscape: their application and articulation of learning, their willingness to challenge themselves, and their progress toward mastery.

Is achievement the same for every student? Of course not. Toddlers walk at different points in their development, and they are no less children based on this. It’s when students enter formal schooling that we, as educators and parents, start expecting a similar starting and ending point for all students of a given age each year. The systems of school are easier to manage when we have concrete, uniform ways of determining what students are learning, but standardizing achievement requires standardizing how we view students, which we believe is dangerous. Achievement should be as personalized as the pathway to get there, and honoring the complexity of each student’s multiple identities, gifts, and challenges will inevitably lead to higher-quality, transferable, and deeply purposeful learning for all, even if specific outcomes vary from student to student.

While we believe that education is a political act, at its best and worst, political perceptions or partisan divisions should not impede improving educational