March 12, 2025
Key Takeaways:
- Barriers to humanizing pedagogy include standardized assessments, prescribed curriculum, and school districts' cultures.
- The centralization of standardized assessments in education often interferes with teachers' efforts to cultivate a positive learning environment.
Humanizing pedagogy has recently gained traction in education discourse as an approach that emphasizes student-centered and culturally responsive teaching. It underscores the significance of a whole-child approach at all levels of the education system, particularly in contexts where standardized assessments dominate concepts of educational equity and excellence. Yet, there exist significant challenges to the implementation of this approach as schools navigate the pressures of high-stakes standardized testing, accountability measures, and standardized curriculum frameworks.
In "Precedence of Praxis: Humanizing Pedagogy in a Standards-Dominated System," University of Pittsburgh School of Education Doctoral Candidate and Researcher Emily Thurston, LRDC Post-Doctoral Researcher JoeAnn Nguyen, and Institute for Learning (IFL) Research Fellows Tequila Butler and Pete Compitello explore the challenges and opportunities for educators in implementing humanizing pedagogies within the constraints of a standards-driven education system. The study focuses on how teachers navigate policy mandates and a compliance culture while striving for reflexive, responsive, and student-centered instruction. The article uses the concept of praxis, defined by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire as reflection and action directed at transforming structures, suggesting that educators can actively challenge the system and promote change through their teaching practices.
The study authors used semi-structured interviews and observations in a qualitative study of teachers in 18 English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms, to explore teachers' use of humanizing pedagogy in their classrooms, their perceptions of instructional autonomy, and their perceptions of the influence of humanizing pedagogy on learning.* They found that using humanizing pedagogies in classrooms, such as cultivating an inclusive community, using collaboration and feedback loops for participation, and encouraging students to reflect on their own viewpoints as they analyze texts and topics, resulted in increased trust between students and teachers, higher student engagement, and increased standardized test scores.
There remain challenges to applying this practice. Barriers to humanizing pedagogy are schools' expectations for test preparation, decisions to implement prescribed curriculum, and school district cultures focused on standards. Despite these barriers, teachers in the study still cultivated positive learning environments that utilized humanizing pedagogy.
Read the full article at Journal of Education.
Thurston, E., Nguyen, J., Butler, T., & Compitello, P. (2025). Precedence of Praxis: Humanizing Pedagogy in a Standards-Dominated System. Journal of Education, 205(3), 226-238.
*The site of the data collection was a five-year, grant-funded network improvement community, called a Network for School Improvement (NSI). A subset of teachers participated in a Bright Spots data collection initiative, and 18 from that subset were sampled for the current study.
Written by Amber Eschrich
