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Find the Human
A Pedagogy for Teachers of Life
By Thomas DeVere Wolsey
A teacher I spoke with yesterday told me that his approach to pedagogy is “Find the Human,[1]” and it is the title of this article because it neatly captures what I learned. As children and young adults find themselves lost in the bureaucracy of school, punished until they believe they are not worth another human’s attention, this teacher and more like him look for the human first. Not curricular goals, not standards, not grades nor marks, not past behaviors, just finding the human.
The 2023 Tvind Olympics began yesterday with most participants arriving in cars and buses around 9:30 AM. Not the Olympic Olympics, but the DNS (Det Nødvendige Seminarium) Necessary Teacher Training College Olympics near Ulfborg, Denmark. These games feature some 70 different activities for students from affiliated day schools and care facilities throughout Denmark. Typically, the students are traumatized in some way, on drugs, or have diagnoses that prevent them from attending Danish schools. Often mainstream schools have shown the children and young adults that they were not wanted. However, if you visited the Olympics as I did today, you would never know that these young people have struggled in and out of school for most of their lives.
