Coming from a background in mental health counseling, Mercedes Flores-Nava knew that she wanted to help foster positive development in children. When she heard about the Human Dignity Curriculum, she hoped it would help her students learn and grow.

In contrast to other curriculums focusing on anti-bullying or kindness, the HDC lessons were different. The curriculum topics address treating persons as subjects and not objects, valuing human beings for their intrinsic worth, and using the powers to think and to choose what is excellent. The HDC message is that each student, regardless of background, has inherent worth and that we are all equal in human dignity. 

Building on her career experience, Mercedes wanted to find different ways to bring these topics to her students and to strengthen the value they placed in themselves. In her previous role at the counseling center, she focused on wellbeing and self-image, two aspects deeply embedded in the HDC. After Mercedes and her team brought the HDC to their community, it was not long before they started seeing positive results in the students. “It really changes the way they view themselves and others.”

The HDC was soon adopted by five different schools in her community from pre-K through grade eight. Mercedes witnessed the students becoming more confident in expressing themselves and participating in the different activities in the lesson plans, particularly in the skits and scenarios in the lessons on friendship and solidarity. Mercedes even noticed the drawings of her students in counseling began to change – from more solitary and somber scenes to images depicting friends having fun together, reflecting the ideas in the curriculum about how true friends act.

Mercedes shared that a striking outcome of implementing the HDC is noticing how much more the students like to communicate their emotions now, through the role playing scenarios offered in the lessons. Her fifth-grade students routinely ask, “can we act it out?”

For Mercedes, the biggest accomplishment and the most rewarding aspect of bringing the HDC to her community is seeing the impact on the students. When students learn through the curriculum that they have intrinsic and inalienable value, no matter their circumstances, and that they have the power to choose what is excellent, “they are that much happier,” Mercedes said. “Students behave differently when they are able to recognize their worth.” 

In the year to come, Mercedes plans to bring the message of human dignity to even more students in her school district. Mercedes’ story reminds us that students thrive when they learn about human dignity.

Read more about the impacts of the Human Dignity Curriculum here!