
A human-centered classroom is needed now more than ever. In a time of growing uncertainty, global challenges, and increased threats to democracy, children need space to question, reflect, and actualize a meaning to their lives. These young people, along with their educators, will build a new future of love, care, and respect for all.
A Guide to Human Centric Education

“Passion-Based” puts kids and their interests at the center and changes “teachers” into “educators” who are resourcers, advisors, and supporters.
When we reach Passion-Based Learning we are adding content to context, taking the natural curiosity and interests of kids and making education conform to those individual dreams.
Real Maker

When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.
To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be βconceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem β interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America.
Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children’s strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools
We provide inclusive community and space for neurodiverse, multi-age collaboration online and offline.

Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity
Online, we bring safety to the serendipity with our distributed community and communication stack. Chance favors the connected mind. Our learners connect using 1:1 laptops and indie ed-tech. We give our learners real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades.

Cavendish Space: Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes for Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids
We provide Cavendish bubbles of peer respite and collaborative niche construction where our learners can find relief from an intense world designed against us.

We Believe: Human-Centered, Trauma-Informed, Self-Determined, Equity Literate, Open Technology
Learning is rooted in purpose finding and community relevance.
Social justice is the cornerstone to educational success.
Dehumanizing practices do not belong in schools.
Learners are respectful toward each otherβs innate human worth.
Create more anti-ableist spaces.
Letβs act to hold ALL spaces accountable for providing care and access to disabled folks with all types of bodies and minds.
JEN WHITE-JOHNSON
We can start building more accessible, care-centered communities now. We can combat ableism now. We can lay the groundwork for a world that works better for all of us.
DR. SAMI SCHALK ON TWITTER
The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it.
JAMES BALDWIN VIA GAYATRI SETHI IN UNBELONGING
Table of Contents
π Online
- πΈ Created Serendipity: Chance Favors the ConnectedΒ Mind
- β¨οΈ Writing Online: A Social Equalizer and a Path to Community and Power
- Written communication is the great social equalizer.
- Writing is the path to power for those born without power.
- The Future Is Text: The Universal Interface
- Text Augments All Other Media
- A Workflow-Focused Approach to Writing Offers a Pathway to Agency, Creativity, and Confidence
- Disabled ways of languaging are primarily about modality.
- Writing Online and Community
- Typed Words, Loud Voices
- Letβs Augment Everybody, Letβs Leave No Mind Behind
- π Indie Ed-tech: Rewire and Reshape the World
- π©βπ» Teams, Technology, and Help
βοΈπͺ Offline
- π³ Immediate Contact with the Outdoors
- π Stimming
- π§ Neuroception and Sensory Load
- π Itβs Not Rocket Science; Just Listen
βΊοΈπ₯ Cavendish Space
βοΈ We Believe
- π« Human-Centered
- π©Έ Trauma-Informed
- πββοΈ Self-Determined
- βοΈ Equity Literate
- π§ Open Technology
- π© Our Foundation
- ππ§·π³ Support Our Space
β Continue on Page 2
The story begins on page 2, “π Online: Bringing Safety to the Serendipity”.