In 2023, it is almost impossible to escape some form of the “culture wars” being waged in the “battle grounds” of classrooms and libraries. There are book challenges and bans, vocal opposition to school curricula, and the ever looming threats of misinformation and disinformation. Solutions to these problems are evasive; they cannot be addressed with a single-pronged approach. It will take the support and mobilization of an entire network–our network of progressive educators around the world “harnessing the dynamic power of progressive practice for the next generation of students, schools, and democracy” (PEN, 2023). An essential element of this network are our school librarians and the best practices of 21st-century librarianship, which are deeply rooted in a progressive philosophy and pedagogy.

When I was little, I loved kaleidoscopes.  I would look through the lens in amazement at the myriad of color fragments that all seemed to be moving at once; sometimes toward one another, sometimes away from one another, yet all in concert to make a beautiful whole.  As I left Hanahau’oli School this week, I felt like I had just discovered life in a kaleidoscope.  I came for a two day visit to look specifically through the lens of thematic learning and yet I experienced so much more.  This colorful kaleidoscope of students, teachers, administrators, staff, and support teams were constantly on the move with pieces shifting moment by moment through the day with students at the center.  Each move was never random or haphazard, but carefully crafted to bring out the best in one another to allow each individual to shine as part of a cohesive whole.  

An often underemphasized and misunderstood essential element of the progressive education movement is its relationship with scientific research. The idea that teaching, learning, and schooling must be systematically studied through observation and experiment has been a defining feature of progressive education philosophy and pedagogy from the very beginning. “As much as they wore their hearts on their sleeves,” early progressive educators like Francis W. Parker, John Dewey, and Ella Flagg Young “prided themselves on their allegiance to science, culling ideas from research from all over the world and exhaustively testing their hypothesis and methods” (Little & Ellison, 2015, p.41).

On July 25, 2022 I had the opportunity to participate in a Modern Progressive Education Panel Discussion, a component of Human Restoration Project’s first ever Conference to Restore Humanity! The conference was an international invitation for K-12 and college educators to center the needs of students and educators toward a praxis of social justice. It featured Dr. Henry Giroux, Dr. Denisha Jones, and tracks on disrupting discriminatory linguistics, ending carceral pedagogy, building for neurodiversity, and promoting childism. The purpose of the conference was to help change systems and reimagine education.

In the previous blog I shared how I honed in on the following problem of practice while teaching handwriting (or letter formation) within my early elementary classroom: The handwriting program I was providing was not very effective for teaching letter formation to the children who needed it most. I noticed this problem most when children were engaged in independent practice, using worksheets and workbooks that were intended to reinforce skills and habits that I had taught through a variety of other letter formation activities in my classroom (see Part 1 of this blog series). This was a problem I had seen before, within my first grade classroom at a different independent progressive school. However, during my semester teaching in a K-1 classroom at Hanahau‘oli School, I honed in on these specific observations:

Teaching is an incredibly complex and dynamic endeavor. Teachers must navigate a complicated web of critical relationships on a daily basis and work together to guide learners through a changing landscape that includes aspects of multiple fields of knowledge. A teacher’s work is influenced by small and large–personal and societal–shifts in the outside world that inevitably make their way into the classroom, sometimes explicitly, other times on the soles of their students’ shoes. Teaching is both an art and a messy science, one that cannot be realistically limited to a single variable.

The Hanahau‘oli Teacher Collaborative is a two-week institute for educators that focuses on interdisciplinary curriculum design for the purpose of engaging youth in meaningful learning. It is led by progressive educator and former Hanahau‘oli Head of School, Dr. Robert Peters. Held on campus, participants have the opportunity to engage in foundational seminars, learn from practicing teachers, observe interdisciplinary lessons and units in action, experience interdisciplinary strategies and resources, collaborate with other educators, design interdisciplinary units of their own, and receive individual coaching as they implement curriculum and reflect on their practice.

Progressive education is guided by the idea that we must actively prepare children for participation in a diverse democracy. In this blog I want to lend my expertise as a school librarian to share how I translate this progressive philosophy into practice. I want to speak to the powerful role that culturally responsive and sustaining children’s literature can play in helping educators achieve this goal. Responsible for building and maintaining school and classroom libraries, I’ll share how I carefully consider book selections that provide children with tools for developing empathy and potential frameworks for thinking about, assessing, and accepting (or challenging) the world around them. I’ll explain how I consider books that will both allow children to step into another’s experience and provide them with a mirror that reflects their own experiences back at them.

There are a number of characteristics that help to define a progressive educator’s approach to assessment. This includes an overall philosophy of education that values intellectual curiosity, initiative, independence, collaboration, and evidence of growth over time, and a pedagogy for measuring student learning in accordance with these values. Assessment is differentiated, allowing children many ways to demonstrate what has been learned. Individual learners are responsible for learning and are taught how to set goals, define evidence of goal achievement and reflect about progress. Students’ skill development (e.g. in math, language arts, inquiry, etc.) is reported on a continuum with descriptors to show what children are able to do at various points in time.

A junior kindergartener celebrates her 5th birthday with a gift to her school library. She presents her gift–the picture book Little Green Donkey (Allepuz, 2020)--and her first public booktalk to her learning community at Hanahau‘oli School.

My name is Emma.
I’m in JK [Junior Kindergarten].
And this is my birthday book, [reading/looking at the cover] Little Green Donkey.
The story is about–the donkey likes to eat grass, but he ate too much, and he becomes green.
And his mommy told him to eat other things.
My favorite part of the book is

I want to know what love is.

For some, this line is the title of a cheesy, power ballad from the 1980s by the band Foreigner. For me, the phrase and the song represent a simple, direct desire to understand one of the fundamental aspects of being human, love. I am interested in love songs. I am curious about their universality across almost every culture as a genre. Even if you are not one of the 493 million+ people who have listened to I Want to Know What Love Is on Spotify, it’s pretty difficult to argue against the importance of love. Certainly, when one lacks love, the pain of its absence can make life incredibly difficult. Alternately, if one loves something and has fun doing it, it’s a lot easier to do that thing…and, often, that love and fun we experience causes us to want to continue doing whatever it is.

In 1945, the Star Advertiser published a story about Hanahau’oli School during the “War Years.” A quote from the article stated:

The present emergency has made certain changes necessary in every school, but the principles upon which Hanahau’oli was founded remain the same today–emotional stability as a fundamental need; learning by doing; intelligent appraisal of facts rather than blind acceptance; assuring responsibility for the individual’s share in the future. To help children think straight and meet the present threatening world with sanity are Hanahau’oli’s great tasks today.

In 2019, the Hanahau‘oli School Professional Development Center (PDC) was awarded a grant from the Samuel N. & Mary Castle Foundation to grow progressive approaches to early childhood place-based Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) education in the State of Hawaiʻi. Titled, Natural Scientists: Children in Charge, a portion of the funds for this project were dedicated to documenting and filming early childhood STEM education at Hanahau‘oli School. The films produced will be used to support professional teaching and learning at a Spring 2022 PDC workshop series, which will include 24 early childhood educators from across the state. Permanently housed on the PDC website, the films are also available as an open access resource illustrating examples of place-based approaches to progressive early childhood STEM education. View the films and accompanying curricular resources by clicking HERE.

Hanahau’oli School celebrated 100 years of joyous work in the 2018-19 school year. At the time, the Board of Trustees called on Hanahau’oli Head of School Lia Woo to think about her vision for the school for the near term. Woo studied the school’s history and educational philosophies, and reflected on her own personal experience learning and growing at Hanahau‘oli as a student to identify timeless and universal themes. The themes helped to provide a framework for thinking about the current and future world and helped to lay the foundation for her vision moving forward.

In the previous blog we reflected on changes experienced by faculty and staff over the course of the pandemic, regarding how and why they gather together. In this entry we continue to explore the art of gathering in the context of progressive philosophy and pedagogy by celebrating an enduring hallmark of the progressive education movement--the schoolwide assembly. Progressive education pioneer Colonel Francis Wayland Parker was the first to experiment with whole school gatherings as a regular part of the weekly school schedule. He called them “Morning Exercises,” and they were primarily student-led.

In Remaking Gathering: Entering the Mess, Crossing the Thresholds, author Priya Parker shares about the “art of gathering.” She explains, “gathering matters because it is through each other that we figure out what we believe.” Given the number of ways human gatherings have changed over the course of the pandemic, she contends that the current moment has the potential to transform the ways we spend our time together – at work, at home, in our communities, and beyond. She elaborates, “this time of regathering”--as many transition from online large-group community meetings to in person events-- “offers a threshold we can decide to cross with imagination, purpose, and joy.” This message resonated with me as I recently joined Hanahau‘oli School faculty in our first in-person faculty meeting since March 2020.

Founded in 1918, Hanahau‘oli School is a one-hundred-year-old testament to the American progressive education movement. Originally conceptualized by Sophie Judd Cooke and Gudrun Thorne Thompson from the Francis Parker School in Chicago, Hanahau‘oli—which means joyful work school…

In 2019, Hanahau‘oli faculty and staff visited more than 20 progressive schools across the country. This was the ambitious Hele A‘o (Learning Journey) initiative, and the purpose was to spark new ideas, inspire innovation, and plant seeds for future growth at our beloved school. Among the key takeaways from Hele Aʻo was a desire to learn more about social justice as it pertains to progressive education. At a number of schools, Hanahau‘oli faculty and staff saw teachers referring to students as “changemakers.” They also observed language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a fully integrated part of progressive school curricula. Above all, the students were able to articulate ways in which they were promoting social justice, and were taking action in their communities.