The Ecosystem

of learning in a year, while another who started ahead barely moves—how do we honor and measure growth when our starting and ending points are so fixed?

Many educators already recognize that the paradigm of education does not serve students or educators as well as it should. Whether we are in the classroom or the boardroom, we know that children are unique and, as such, shouldn’t be treated like race horses. Most educators can tell when the conditions are right for learning just by walking into a classroom space and watching the teacher-student dynamics and learning flow at play. So can most parents and guardians. But for some reason, most educational systems prioritize test results and academic standards over culture and community, over building the kinds of conditions that don’t just allow for growth, but spark it.

The landscape model of learning is our vision of how schools and districts might shift their thinking away from the racetrack model and toward a student-centered design, which leverages student protagonism to ensure inclusive prosperity for all students. We believe that the model offers a different way of thinking about how students move through their learning and how educators might best support success for each of them. In this chapter, we will explore each of the three elements, debunking various myths about education and offering each element as a more inclusive response that addresses and unpacks that myth. See figure 1.1 for a visual of the landscape model.

The Ecosystem

The goal of understanding students’ broader context and what they bring into the learning ecosystem is not about judging students by their background or assuming educators know what students are capable of based on, for example, their gender or race. In fact, the goals of this element focus on combating the implicit biases we are often blind to, and learning to see students fully, across multiple facets of their lives: their families, their homes, the values they’ve grown up with, the way they see themselves, and their aspirations for the future. It’s about developing a deep understanding of who students are and what they bring to the classroom, across the spectrum of their experiences and identities, so that we are educating whole human beings, not empty vessels.

The Myth of the Empty Vessel

When we begin to address context, we need to debunk one core myth first: students are not a blank slate, a tabula rasa (Locke, 1690/1997) that education serves to fill. In fact, students’ prior learning, their family backgrounds, and other aspects of their identity enter the classroom in myriad ways, inevitably impacting each student’s learning potential and needs in unique ways. Ultimately, students’

Figure 1.1: Visual of the landscape model of learning.

race, family cultures, religious orientations, languages spoken at home, gender identity, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic class will influence their learning, often as much as their cognitive strengths and challenges (Ibe et al., 2018). Whether those influences are positive or negative is not the point. Because students don’t leave their identities at the door when they enter our classrooms, it behooves us to do all we can to understand students’ contexts, so we can understand where they are starting on the landscape.

What It Means to Understand the Broader Context

Students Bring to the Ecosystem

Given that students are not a tabula rasa, understanding the broader context students bring to the learning ecosystem means understanding what each student brings into the schoolhouse, knowing each student as a person, and knowing the individuality and the context he, she, or they bring from groups the student belongs to or identifies with (family, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on).

The following sections explore culture, socioeconomic status, and sex and gender, but these are just starting points of identity and those experiences that create a context for students on the landscape. In the Hawaiian language, this idea is articulated as makawalu. This word, which literally means eight eyes, captures the concept that all situations must be explored through multiple lenses and dimensions, and it extends this concept to explore the interconnectedness of all life. When practicing makawalu, one must engage in the critique of assumptions. Questions one asks include: Does someone else see this same situation differently? And what is an observation of fact and what are the inferences I am making? Most importantly, makawalu asks us to engage in the platinum rule. If the golden rule is to do to others what you would want done to you, the platinum rule is to do to others what they would want done to them (Alessandra & O’Connor, 1996).

The platinum rule and makawalu ask us to think about the context that others bring into a situation and to consider it as we make decisions. They capture the essence of the element of understanding the broader context students bring to the ecosystem. As shepherds of learning, educators must understand the many dimensions of their students’ contexts and understand how those dimensions connect, interact, and shape them as learners on the landscape.

PERSPECTIVES ON INCLUSIVE VALUES

The Platinum Rule

At Gimnasio Los Caobos, just outside of Bogotá, Colombia, Jennifer was able to shift school culture significantly through use of the platinum rule,

particularly when it came to all community members understanding each

other’s lives and identities more fully and accurately. On first presenting

the concept to the faculty, Jennifer found that teachers were confused

about how to implement it, particularly the religion teachers who had been

teaching the golden rule their entire careers. In fact, several immediately

objected to the shift, asking how they would ever know enough about

students to know how each student wished to be treated.

Jennifer’s enthusiastic response, “You’ll have to ask them,” elicited an epiphany for most educators in the room, and the faculty ended up in

a powerful conversation about increasing their dialogue with students, parents, and each other, in order to understand each other more fully.

This led to additional work around asking good questions and building safe classrooms where students would be comfortable answering. Over

the course of the first year of implementation, Caobos saw far more

of this kind of understanding-context dialogue, including attempts at courageous conversations in many classrooms. In particular, the religion

teachers developed a whole new curriculum to teach the new concept.

A 360º diagnostic evaluation of student life the following year, which

surveyed all stakeholder groups with questions about all aspects of

the school, indicated that the majority of students felt their teachers

understood and supported them.

Culture

Culture is a significant lens through which all people experience the world. Our personal lens is our reality, but it’s often not the same reality those around us share, says Tara O’Neill, director of the STEMS2 Masters in the College of Education at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (personal communication, November 11, 2021). This dissonance causes misunderstandings of intention that can lead to ineffective (or wrong) educational choices. For example, ignoring the student with the pose and look of the farmer in the portrait in the following story ignores an opportunity to check in on a student’s social-emotional well-being and make a genuine connection. These intercultural differences are a central challenge for any international educator working with students of different nationalities, and often working outside of their own culture themselves, given that their success with students and parents depends on accurately reading cultural cues—and responding accordingly. But these differences can be just as acute in any classroom where the educator doesn’t share the culture or experiences of his, her, or their students. Researchers such as Gloria Ladson-Billings (1994, 2014) show how culture can impact not just how students see themselves, but also the degree to which they achieve in school. Culturally responsive teaching has been studied in multiple settings, showing conclusively that addressing culture explicitly, be it the culture of the student or the culture of the place, does support learning success (LadsonBillings, 1994, 2014).

PERSPECTIVES ON CULTURE The Power of Multiple Lenses

Hanging behind Kapono’s desk in Cairo, Egypt, at the American

International School in Egypt, is a painting of an Egyptian farmer, his

head cocked slightly to the left, held gently in his hand. It is a gaze of

longing and fondness, it seems, until Kapono shared this assumption with an Egyptian colleague. “No,” replied the colleague, “This man is not

looking at something longingly. He has the weight of the world on his

shoulders. He is waiting for someone to ask, ‘What’s wrong?’” A simple

pose shares a message in one culture that is significantly different than

one might assume in another. What lenses are we seeing our students

through? What lenses are our students seeing schooling through? How

does culture color their expectations and experiences, and how might our cultural lens shape our facilitation and delivery of learning? The

strategies embedded in the landscape model will help readers address these important questions.

Educators can understand and address intercultural differences through the lenses of culturally responsive teaching, a pedagogy Ladson-Billings (1994) pioneered and Geneva Gay (2018) championed. Culturally responsive teaching, the practice of explicitly leveraging culture in teaching and learning experiences, recognizes the importance of including a student’s cultural reference points and experiences in their schooling, and as such is a powerful lens to understand and leverage culture to positively impact student success.

Culturally responsive teaching includes seven key elements (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2021). The two most important tenets to building an understanding of students’ broader context on the landscape are learning within the context of culture and culturally mediated instruction.

Learning within the context of culture is most important when a student’s culture does not correspond to the prevailing cultural norms of the school. Students who come from many Indigenous and non-Western cultures, for example, may enter a typical North American classroom and find the individual work style foreign and isolating. Culturally responsive teaching asks us to learn about the culture of all students present and ensure that different learning styles are available. When styles clash, the norms of the classroom culture are made explicit, allowing students to know the rules of the learning game, so to speak.

Instruction that is culturally mediated means incorporating and integrating diverse ways of knowing and understanding into learning experiences. Different from learning in the context of a culture, this tenet asks educators to expose all learners to diverse ways of knowing. For example, a culturally mediated second-grade science classroom studying interdependence would naturally incorporate content from the prescribed curriculum. However, it could also include an exploration of interdependence from the perspective of Indigenous people in the area, whether or not Indigenous students are present. Similarly, the learning might also include the voices and perspectives of modern Korean environmental activists, whether or not there are Korean students in the classroom.

Socioeconomic Status

Culture is just one aspect of the broader context students bring into the learning ecosystem with them. Socioeconomic status is another. It is not hyperbole to say that the income level of a student’s parents can help us accurately predict their SAT scores—one of many reasons high-stakes standardized tests are a detriment to the educational process. In fact, studies show that over 21 percent of a student’s SAT score can be attributed to their socioeconomic status (Meyer & Benavot, 2013; Sackett et al., 2012).

Students from low socioeconomic status are up to twice as likely to display learning-related behavior problems (Islam & Khan, 2017). While in some cases these can be attributed to a learning disability, in many cases these learningrelated behaviors are not hardwired into the brain or predetermined at birth but are an addressable product of the availability of resources. Research by Tuba Seçgin and Semra Sungur (2020) and Paul Tough (2014) clearly attributes lower phonological awareness to low socioeconomic status experiences from birth through lower elementary, and research shows these gaps exist before children enter school. These studies show that the phonological gap is real but caused by economic status rather than an innate ability (or inability). Research also shows long-lasting effects of low socioeconomic status on students, with low socioeconomic status linked to problems with memory and social-emotional processing that in turn lead to lower income and poor health in adulthood (Seçgin & Sungur, 2020; Tough, 2014). On a basic level, socioeconomic status differences signal differences in the availability of resources and, as such, suggest that not all students will be able to turn in “pretty” work unless equitable resources are provided in the classroom. It is clear that students’ socioeconomic dimension plays a major role in where they start on the landscape—but in a just world, it should play no role in where they arrive.

Sex and Gender

Sex and gender are other major contextual pieces to explore. Each student’s sex and gender come with them to the landscape, impacting the student’s starting place and ability to move through learning experiences. PhD candidate Page Regan explains it this way:

Simplified, sex and gender are different components of human identity and experience. Sex refers to a medical assignment at birth based on anatomy and chromosomes including male, female or intersex. Gender is an inner, cognitive sense of being a man, woman, or other gender. Gender is expressed or communicated to others through mannerisms, clothing, demeanor, behavior, and the adoption of social roles often

characterized as masculine or feminine. While gender is socially considered to be binary—either man or woman, masculine or feminine—the interrelationship between sex, gender, and expression is expansive and manifests differently across culture, place, and individual experience. Common terms to refer to gender include cisgender, transgender, and nonbinary; however, terminology is consistently changing and evolving. (personal communication, April 19, 2022)

In fact, sex and gender are our primary filter as students enter school. We try to ensure a balance of boys and girls in a classroom, we often line up students to go to recess with boys or girls first, and we reinforce gender norms through assigning colors such as pink to girls and blue to boys (Nduagbo, 2020).

These gender assignments, and the assumptions that come with them, pose significant dangers in an educational setting. Girls, for example, continue to be underrepresented in science and mathematics education, which in turn exaggerates their underrepresentation in the labor market (Breda & Napp, 2019). How might this underrepresentation impact a girl on the learning landscape? Sex, gender, and gender expectations also interact with cultural expectations and create stereotypes that create an important context for students on the landscape. Stereotype threat, the self-worry of confirming negative stereotypes about a group one belongs to (Steele & Aronson, 1995), impacts girls, for example, by an average of sixty-two points on the SAT. When researchers ask students their sex prior to taking the SAT, girls perform measurably lower than when they are asked to report their sex after taking the test (Breda & Napp, 2019). Stereotype threat, and the doubt and anxiety it creates in the brain, impacts performance.

We can also see this play out in experiments where researchers ask lower elementary students of all genders to draw a picture of a scientist. Almost exclusively, students draw older White men. However, as Herb Lee of the Pacific American Foundation, a nonprofit grounded in Native Hawaiian practice, asserts, when students receive exposure to gender, age, and racially balanced role models—as well as the opportunity to do science themselves, rather than just learn about science—the same students, when asked to draw a scientist, overwhelmingly draw the scientist looking like themselves (personal communication, August 30, 2014). Teachers in science classrooms around the world use this intervention to bias and stereotype threat with success, and it’s an easy intervention to test out yourself.

Understanding students’ identities when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation is much more about creating space for students’ own development than it is knowing what a given student’s identity is. It’s not the educator’s job to try to figure out what students are still trying to figure out for themselves.