Aspirational Standing: Recognition in the Transformative Classroom

Appeals to transformative education are so ubiquitous that if an educational advertisement claimed to only offer instruction, consumers might worry they were being shortchanged. However, the meaning of transformative education is often superficially understood, shifting between various conceptions, each bearing distinct ethical complications. The result is an educational concept that provides unreliable guidance to educators – that is, those charged with transforming the lives of students. This article contends that Douglas Yacek’s recent book The Transformative Classroom offers a compelling and ethically defensible theory of transformative education-as-aspiration. However, Yacek’s account does not adequately define the sociality of the transformative classroom and risks reducing a diverse group of students to a paradigm of individual transformation. I seek to strengthen Yacek’s account by examining the kind of recognition that ought to occur between students who are diverse in terms of their stages of aspiration and aspirational projects. I call the property of this recognition “aspirational standing,” and explain how acknowledging it can advance our understanding of an aspirational community in the classroom and at school