About Rachel
I’m Rachel Davison Humphries, a civic educator, writer, speaker, and learning and experience designer.
For more than fifteen years, I have worked at the intersection of education, civic life, and human development: teaching, designing learning experiences, building programs and institutions, and leading teams and initiatives across the United States.
Underneath all of that work has been one question:
What is the pedagogy of a free society?
Education for Freedom
I have been circling this question for most of my adult life.
I studied the Great Books at St. John’s College, where education meant taking ideas seriously enough to argue about them around a table. I became a teacher and Montessori educator, drawn to learning environments that treated young people as capable of meaningful independence and responsibility.
Later, I earned my M.A. in Learning, Design & Technology at Georgetown University, which gave me another language for work I had already begun: designing experiences and environments around how human beings actually learn.
For nearly a decade, I have pursued that work at the Bill of Rights Institute, where I now serve as Senior Director of Civic Learning.
Over those years, I have served in almost every kind of role the work allows. I have led teacher programs, conferences and national outreach; built student programs and civic-learning experiences; developed partnerships; designed new initiatives; and led teams and projects across the country.
That range has allowed me to see civic education from many angles: as a teacher, a learning and experience designer, a program builder, and a leader.
It has convinced me that civic knowledge is essential.
It has also convinced me that knowledge is not enough.
Self-government asks human beings to make judgments when the answer is not obvious. To exercise freedom responsibly. To disagree without treating disagreement as an emergency. To decide when to stand alone and when to join with others. To build relationships and institutions. To take responsibility for things no one has assigned them to fix.
Those capacities have to be learned somewhere.
Learning Flourishing
Learning Flourishing is where I pursue the question of how.
What is the pedagogy of a free society?
What kinds of experiences and environments help human beings become capable of exercising freedom well?
The question begins in education, but it does not stay there. It takes me into civic life, philosophy, childhood, family, community, association, work, technology, institutions, public spaces, books, and the ordinary experiences through which human beings learn to live with other people.
Three ideas increasingly help me make sense of what I find: formation, association, and self-government.
I am interested in where those ideas become practice: classrooms where students make real decisions, neighborhoods where people know one another, institutions that invite people into meaningful responsibility, children discovering what they can do without an adult directing every move, and communities in which people learn that they are participants rather than spectators.
Learning Flourishing is a place to follow those connections, test arguments, return to old questions with new experience, and think in public about what education for a free society might actually require.
The Work So Far
Over the years, I have given more than 200 talks and presentations, written essays and commentary, contributed to research, designed national civic-learning initiatives, interviewed thinkers and public figures, worked with educators across the country, and spent an enormous amount of time in conversation with teachers and students.
I’ve also changed my mind about plenty.
The projects have changed. The roles have changed. The question underneath them has not.
Learning Flourishing gives me a place to bring that body of experience into conversation with the things I am still trying to understand.
I live in Sarasota, Florida, with my family. Parenthood has made much of this considerably less theoretical. When I think about education for a free society now, I am also thinking about two particular human beings who will inherit one.
What will they know? What will they be capable of doing? What judgments will they be prepared to make? How will they understand their freedom and their responsibilities to other people?
Those questions are not only about children.
They are questions about all of us.
Learning Flourishing is where I intend to keep working on them.
