The Horizon

Young people need to choose for themselves when and how they wish to share their orientations with the adults and peers around them, and even well-intentioned attempts to define for or figure out kids’ orientations can end in significant harm for LGBTQ+ youth. Whether students come out on their own or are accidentally (or intentionally) “outed” by peers or adults trying to figure out their identity for them, LGBTQ+ youth are among the most vulnerable populations in K–12 education, more likely than their peers to experience increased discrimination, bullying, self-harm, homelessness, and violence (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, n.d.). Educators using the landscape model use strategies to hold space for students to question and explore their own identities, safely and privately, and work to establish the kinds of relationships that make all students—LGBTQ+ or otherwise—feel safe enough to be themselves without threat.

In the worst cases, schools function, as Regan puts it, “to perpetuate inequalities and an understanding of ‘normal,’ as opposed to educating” (personal communication, May 4, 2021). As a transgender person who is studying education foundations, policy, and practice, and who is looking to rewrite the norms of education to better support queer youth, Regan finds that too often education doesn’t just fail to teach to the students in the room but also may even intentionally try to determine the kinds of people they become—with too little regard for who the child already is and might want to be (personal communication, May 4, 2021). Espousing an education focused more on creating space for identity development and an understanding of self and others, and grounded in the ideas of critical pedagogues like Paulo Freire and bell hooks, Regan is interested in creating space in education for deep, meaningful reflection and self-awareness, not just academic achievement. The authors believe that the landscape model will help educators understand how to do this across the curriculum.

The Horizon

On better understanding the identities and experiences students bring to their learning, we can define the horizon, or outcomes of education, in a much more personal way. When we define goals with and for each student as an individual, educators must let go, at least to some degree, of the belief that all students should learn exactly the same content and skills. While we recognize that current educational systems across the world function on the opposite premise and that most countries have developed extensive standards for education as well as myriad standardized exams to validate this form of student achievement, we believe that the system is built on a powerful fallacy: the well-rounded student.

The Myth of the Well-Rounded Student

It is true that schools should expose students to a well-rounded curriculum and a variety of experiences. How does a student know that he, she, or they could become an astronaut if not exposed to aerospace education? Certainly, art class inspires some students to become artists and others to appreciate beauty more, and physical education creates healthy bodies and allows students exposure to sports, games, and theories they would otherwise never be exposed to. But a wellrounded curriculum is not the same as a well-rounded person. Students are not carbon copies of each other. They come varied in their talents and aspirations— as they should.

The well-rounded student doesn’t go to Harvard Law or Juilliard, nor to vocational school to become a top mechanic or a successful farmer, turning soil and sun into food. So, is there a value in specialization? Should we have schools that specialize in performing arts like Juilliard, or schools that specialize in engineering like Massachusetts Institute of Technology? We think most people would say, “Of course, how would we educate the next generations of artists, farmers, educators, and doctors?” The authors would say that yes, there is always a value to specialized schools, and that in fact all schools should create space for specialization at all ages, for students to make choices that allow them to leverage their passions and talents. This doesn’t mean ignoring what our systems insist all students need to know and the guiding curricular documents we’ve created to achieve that learning, nor does it mean avoiding the way exposure to new experiences can help students discover new interests, but it does mean recognizing that the budding artist may not need all the same mathematics skills as the future engineer.

As the academic, author, speaker, professor of education, and self-proclaimed educational antagonist Yong Zhao (2021) calls it, students have jagged profiles in that they have multitudes of experiences and diverse qualities, which offer a way to leverage strengths, interests, passions, and innate talents. If it is true that not all of us will make it to the NBA, then it is certainly true we all have a different horizon. But the jagged profile is not just for the high school senior. It is as much for the toddler, the middle schooler, and the adult learner. Zhao (2021) tells his story of failing to live up to the goal of his education in his childhood in China. Judged by his ability to farm rice, Zhao was considered a failure. His success only came into focus when he was able to change his own horizon, becoming a celebrated educational thinker and author many times over. The profile of a successful rice farmer, a valued and needed profession, is different from that of a successful author and educator. The profile of a happy kindergartener who can’t sit still, who needs to move as part of the learning process, is different from that

of a classmate who may be enthralled by sitting and drawing for hours on end. Both students deserve a well-rounded curriculum and exposure to many experiences. But both students also deserve to be happy, fulfilled, and successful, be it as a rice farmer, author, mechanic, lawyer, artist, or athlete.

Ultimately, the landscape model makes it possible to set goals and design learning experiences that do still meet the expectations of the systems educators currently live and work in, wherever we may be. As technology changes the face of education, however, it’s no longer clear whether all students must take algebra, to name just one example, given that computers can manage complex equations more accurately and quickly than humans ever will. Whatever your answer when it comes to algebra or any discipline impacted by automation, we hope you will make more time for the personalized educational profile, the jagged profile that honors each student’s context and builds toward their highest potential.

What It Means to Define the Horizon

We chose to use the word horizon to represent each student’s potential and how that potential growth is mapped in a strengths-based way that is culturally and cognitively responsive but never limiting. At the core, this image comes from the work of Sarah Lewis (2014), who looks across the history of great artists, writers, and thinkers, as well as following the Vassar College women’s archery team and other groups that practice tirelessly toward excellence, to understand the nature of the search for mastery. Using the metaphor of Utah’s Salt Flats, Lewis (2014) describes absolute mastery not as perfection, but as a limitless horizon people strive toward their whole lives:

Mastery requires endurance . . . Mastery is . . . not the same as success— an event-based victory based on a peak point, a punctuated moment in time. Mastery is not merely a commitment to a goal, but to a curvedline, constant pursuit. (pp. 7—8)

When we write of defining a student’s horizon, we hope that educators envision a landscape that evokes the “curved-line, constant pursuit” Lewis (2014) references: any flat, open space where the horizon is visually limitless and beyond definition, even appearing to recede farther into the distance as we approach. While this image can elicit frustration, suggesting that mastery is basically unattainable, anyone who has learned to play an instrument or speak a new language from scratch knows the importance of progress across a lifetime of practice. The point is not to make the horizon feel eternally unreachable, but to recognize that our students’ horizons should be as limitless as possible. This element is all

about how we might build systems and strategies that support students’ aspirations for growth.

When it comes to classroom practices, there are many strategies that can help make students’ horizons less limited, less restricted by educators’ often incomplete perceptions of what students are capable of. The first and most important step for educators is to unpack their own implicit biases about students’ capacities; as they do so, they are better able to adjust systems in their instruction and classroom management that might be excluding particular individuals or groups. Becki Cohn-Vargas and Dorothy M. Steele (2015) make this point clear, outlining the importance of identity-safe classrooms, and stressing the importance of cultivating a sense of belonging in schools. Through an identity-safe classroom we are able to remove these perceived limits, extending the horizon for all students. We trust that the majority of educators don’t want to believe they’re working from within systemic inequities that have created biases that direct their choices. We trust that most educators believe all students are capable of their own unique form of greatness. But we also know that many educators are far from unpacking their understanding of bias and that all teachers and their students are better for it when they learn to do so. Markus Appel and Nicole Kronberger (2012) make a clear argument for this, asserting that anxiety stemming from ignored implicit bias impacts student performance in testing, and certainly compounds over time.

Individual Horizons and Peaks

Jennifer remembers an eye-opening moment she had while running a mock interview with a colleague for a school she was designing while studying to become a principal. Jennifer had written a vision statement about an inner-city learning community that recognized and lifted every student, a school that erased the social injustices and limitations of the society around it. But when asked what kinds of writing she might teach in her lower-income, inner-city high school classroom, the mock interviewee answered that these students would need to learn to write job applications. She was a perfectly well-intentioned, high-quality teacher, and her private school students loved her in part because she challenged them. But she set the bar so low for these lower-income, inner-city students that she would only have limited students in that context, never teaching them the kind of highlevel writing and thinking required for a college education or a professional future. We believe that the horizon is about each student’s limitless potential, and that defining goals needs to start with students’ own aspirations, not teachers’ assumptions. Here, student protagonism helps us ensure that our work toward students’ individual horizons is designed in ways that leverage what we know about them from understanding what they bring into the learning ecosystem.