Takeaways

• How well do you feel your educational context encourages engaged, student-centered practices? To what extent do you use pedagogical strategies that encourage student voice and choice, and where do you see opportunities to increase student agency in your community? • How inclusive were your own educational experiences? As part of the minority or majority culture, with whatever learning needs or talents you might have had, did you ever experience implicit bias from educators? If so, how did it impact your learning, sense of self, or both?

Takeaways

The following summarizes key ideas from the chapter. • The landscape model is possible anywhere, and desirable everywhere. • Inclusive prosperity is about ensuring that every student reaches their highest level of success possible. • Student protagonism is the heart of equitable and inclusive education. • Every student has the inherent right to be seen as a full human and treated as such.

© 2022 by Solution Tree Press

CHAPTER 1

The Landscape Model’s Three Elements

I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in. —Gretel Ehrlich

The old model that many of us received as a guide in colleges of education and practical experiences, implicitly or explicitly, has always felt like a racetrack even more than it feels like a factory line, though the factory line has become a more common metaphor because of Ken Robinson’s (2016) work. Students line up on a starting line at the start of the school year, engines humming, excited to hit the gas. The school year starts, and the race begins. Nine months later, some race cars are broken on the side of the track and others are stuck in pit row, being fixed by the pit crew. Our hope as teachers is that most have crossed the finish line, able to be promoted to the next race, or rather, grade. This model has always felt lacking for the authors. Firstly, we have never taught a class where every student starts with the same level of performance, the same background knowledge, the same anything for that matter. We always felt that we spent more time as teachers with students “in the pit,” getting them unstuck, and letting those at the front of the pack move along with minimal support. And if it is true that some students start the year significantly ahead or behind the metaphorical starting line in whatever subject it might be—and one student makes up months and months