Scenery, Machinery, People asks learners to analyze who in their lives they categorize as scenery to be observed or ignored, who is machinery to be used, and who they actually allow to be the people. Learners also analyze to whom they themselves might be scenery, machinery, or people. After this analysis, we discuss the energy that must be expended to let someone move from scenery to machinery and from machinery to people. It’s really much easier to leave people in the category that you originally put them in. For example, the person who takes your money at a fast food place is just a machine until you ask them how their day is going. Only then do they begin to move from being machinery toward being a person. But as a participant once told me, “If I wouldn’t give you a kidney, then I don’t have the energy to let you be in the People category.”

Likewise, if you are used to seeing students who are different than you in some way as only the scenery, it is easy to leave them there, to other them, and not to ever really get to know them. Only when we exert the energy to change our sorting mechanism to default to “different than me is more interesting than same as me” will we begin to see progress in our students—and in ourselves.