Curriculum Study Commission Asilomar Conference, 2026

The Personal Creed Organization

Asilomar, CA. October 2026 – Can Curriculum That Nourishes Students Revive Their Engagement in Learning?

Working hard to reach our increasingly disengaged students, we lose sight of a more essential problem: curriculum that fails to nourish them. Pioneering new understandings of child development bring us long-needed renovation of curriculum. Come launch your own renovation project, innovating with a supportive community during and beyond our session!

When your roof leaks in one or two places, it may just need repairing. If each year it springs more leaks, chances are it’s time for a new or redesigned roof. In May 2025, California English editor Carol Jago marked a significant worsening of disengagement over the previous year: “Teachers across the country are reporting that their students are disaffected, disengaged from school, barely putting in seat time, stuck in neutral” (5).

The project of re-engaging students can only truly begin as we renovate our notion of curriculum to reflect the reality that we and our students are not static empty vessels but developing beings. 

What would a curriculum that nourishes young people’s full development look like? Could it revive their engagement in learning? Would such a curriculum be the umbrella that naturally brings together the range of valuable approaches we are now deploying to restore lost engagement: building fuller, more authentic relationships with students, making learning relevant and inviting to all student communities, offering choice and autonomy, prioritizing mental health and basic needs? If we find that evolving and introducing developmentally nourishing curricula supports us in meeting multiple such needs, essentially by redesigning and renewing the roof, might this be our best hope of newly engaging our young in learning — and elevating their well-being in the process? These are some of the questions we’ll consider in our session’s conversations.

In this innovative, interactive session, we will:

• open the conversation by reflecting on two demonstrations of developmentally nourishing learning experiences that point to a “two-legged” design of curriculum. 
• contemplate a long-considered set of understandings from established developmentalist-educators about child development that a) illuminates children’s innate needs in each period of their development, and b) suggests how teachers, parents and other adults in their lives can nourish those needs. 
• consider in pairs or teams what students say about how they experience learning in a two-legged course designed to balance support for academic progress with nourishment for developmental needs — particularly its effects on developing writing, reading, and conversation skills. 
• divide into teams according to our roles in education to brainstorm how we can apply what we’ve learned in this session, with classroom teachers launching plans to renovate our own practices of curriculum and instruction.
• consider Resource Person’s invitations to connect further in collaboration to create next steps for teachers, families, departments, schools or districts.