I want to tell you a story about three bookmakers who were given an incredibly difficult problem to solve: How to create books for the Children of the Rainbow?
The first bookmaker pondered the question and thought, “It is impossible to make books for everyone.” So, she decided to make just one book based on her own likeness and image and give it to every child to read. The Children of the Rainbow who resembled her found themselves in that book, and they thrived and fell in love with reading. The other children struggled and were left searching.
The second bookmaker resolved to make a book for every child. So, she did. She made at least one book for each Child of the Rainbow. She had so many books that each child read a book that resembled themselves. They were glad to see themselves, but they could only see as far as their own reflection could show. Still, there was a whole world beyond them that they were not given a chance to see.
The third bookmaker decided to make one book that she could give to every Child of the Rainbow, where they could experience the rainbow in all its beauty, with all its vibrant colors connected. She gave her book to the Children of the Rainbow, and each child could find themselves in it. They found their friends there, too, and many others beyond the distances their eyes could see. The one book resembled the rainbow and, therefore, reflected every child, giving each a chance to experience the prism of beautiful colors surrounding them.
In learning to read, they saw themselves and others. They saw themselves in others, understanding that we are all indivisibly part of one another. Though different, they were able to see, in the one book, that we all share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth, that they could look upon the face of anyone or anything surrounding them and say—"as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact: You are a part of me I do not yet know” (Kaur, 2020; Lorde, 1984).
This third book epitomizes how dignity-driven education advances curriculum, which, at one level, is about diversity with the understanding that a single person cannot be diverse. A person is unique. A group is diverse. Notwithstanding, diversity results from unique people coming together, sitting alongside each other, and under the fantastic light of both our differences and our similarities. As Bishop (1990) famously articulated, “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author” (p. ix).
In a dignity-driven curriculum, our children are given chances to see and be seen as they look into both mirrors and windows, to see themselves but also gain powerful glimpses of others.
This is what literacy across the disciplines and the temporal experience of schooling is really about—reading the word and the world (Freire & Macedo, 1987). This unique and powerful framework should guide the process of our work: the making of content where our children can look through both mirrors and windows, where they can see themselves and others, not flattened into stereotypes but made alive through rich and meaningful content that adds to the life of words human texture and cultural meaning.
The other process we must take up is about imagining our roles in shaping curriculum around a nation and, as the world increasingly flattens with the proliferation of new technologies, around the globe.
How could we expand markets and create content for the children who read our books, as well as for the children who will read them and the ones we might want to?
In this question, we imagine not only teaching the world to read, write, understand history, think scientifically, etc., but also creating content that can help our children relate to one another and themselves.
What does it mean for us to be guardians and protectors of the secrets of our collective humanity, beyond books but ideas and experiences necessary for social, emotional, moral, intellectual, and relational growth? As James Baldwin (1963) warned, “The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated” (p. 19). Our role as educators is not only to transmit knowledge but to inspire the critical examination of that knowledge and its application in the world.
This journey cannot be taken lightly. Over several months, some days more intense than others, my team and I began to undertake our diversity, equity, and inclusion work with a deep sense of responsibility. While diversity and inclusion were essential concepts framing our thinking and conversations, we understood that diversity and inclusion were not ends in themselves but part of a larger set of things we wanted to accomplish. Diversity and inclusion are about how things look, but belonging, equity, and—thus—dignity are about how things feel. Maya Angelou (2003) aptly remarked, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
How can we create curricula that inspire our children to feel they belong, and how can these curricula feel like they belong to our kids? How can we develop not only the curricula our kids deserve but also curricula that deserve our kids—all of them in their radiant and unpurchased beauty?
To do so, we must journey beyond diversity and inclusion because diversity alone will not get us to dignity. Diversity is like being asked to the dance, and inclusion alone is like being asked to dance. But dignity is about content and experiences that allow our children to dance in their own ways, to their own songs, and to beats and rhythms that make the most sense to them and their bodies.
The dignity-driven experience of education, thus, begs the question: How do we welcome our babies into their learning? This isn’t about relinquishing our commitment to high expectations and the science of anything. As an educator, I want us to hold high expectations for our students, but I also want us to hold the ladder. What good are high expectations if students lack the support to meet them? It’s grossly unfair to expect our students to ascend to places we have not lifted them.
So, beyond windows and mirrors, our work must involve lifting and ladders, centering a commitment to care in all that we do, and carefully considering not only what we make but, most importantly, for whom we are making it.
At forwardED, we understood that if we wanted to make curriculums for our children—the Children of the Rainbow—we had to relinquish the expectation that they would just read what we made. We understood that we had to build better books that they would read. So, in English Language Arts (ELA), for example, we had to answer questions not about disengaged readers but about avoiding the pitfalls of disengaging readers. How could we help all students, particularly our most vulnerable students, experience reading as a site of joy because joy is one of the basics of learning?
I am an avid reader and prolific writer. I am also dyslexic. I read about 50-plus books a year and countless other things, such as research articles and tweets. Before I was an avid reader, I had a chance to allow the lilt of letters to dangle from my tongue. I had a chance to play with words, dance with them, and hear them sing.
From a dignity-driven perspective, the basics of curriculum are not reading, writing, and arithmetic. They are foundational things such as pleasure, play, creativity, and curiosity. And when our children are hurting, they are things like healing, care, and restoration.
We would be remiss to shortchange joy in the dignity-driven experience of learning because joy with dignity is a source of inspiration. In dignity-driven education, it can be used to both motivate and entice but also to transmit, connect, and radically transform. As Audre Lorde (1984) so powerfully put it, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”
How might we as educators create or embrace content that centers joy, where one of the key outcomes of engagement and interaction with the curriculum and learning itself is dignity expressed as pleasure, play, and curiosity?
As I have said before, this dignity-driven reimagining of curriculum will involve more than our current commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; it will also involve grounding our children in their common humanity. A dignity-driven reimagining of education is one in which we create a curriculum that centers students and lets go of anything that continues to marginalize, exclude, and harm them.
References
Angelou, M. (2003). I know why the caged bird sings. Random House.
Baldwin, J. (1963). The fire next time. Dial Press.
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix-xi.
Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. Routledge.
Kaur, V. (2020). See no stranger: A memoir and manifesto of revolutionary love. One World.
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
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Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2024). A Dignity-Driven Reimagining of Curriculum, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/a-dignity-driven-reimagining-of-curriculum.
David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar of education equity. He can be reached via email at: david@forward-ed.com.
I am taken by both the eloquence of the writing and the depth of what lies behind and inside the words. It makes me think of the work the Agastya Foundation in Southern India has been doing for the last 25 years on its Creativity Campus with children and teachers from government schools. The epistemology is captivatingly simple, contained in it's mantra: Ah, Ah-Ha, Ha-Ha! All learning embedded with curiosity, creativity, confidence (agency) and care. More than slogans, it infuses the experience of whomever sets foot on this ecologically and intentionally designed community. As a scholar in residence (more like a story-catcher in residence) not a day goes by without a sense of astonishment and gratitude at witnessing the limitl…