Yacek’s Transformative Classroom in the contemporary K-12 system

In The Transformative Classroom, Douglas Yacek lays a striking new path forward for educators seeking to develop a classroom of transformation. To do so, Yacek first examines the three dominant approaches to a transformative education – conversion, emancipation, and reconstruction – outlining their valuable contributions to transformative theory but problematizing both their ethical foundation and regard for student agency. This groundwork then gives rise to a new frame for transformational classrooms: the theory of aspiration. Yacek seeks to prove that the aspirational model is the most efficacious and ethically sound means of fostering a transformative education, and then provide some practical implementation tools for educators.

As such, Yacek’s book promises a tall order: to give an account of both transformative theory and action. The latter is especially important to K-12 educators, who are today asked to justify each minute decision in the classroom to administrators ad nauseum, and will furthermore be the focus of this review. In Yacek’s account of the aspirational classroom, students first experience an ‘awakening’, in which the values embedded in the discipline of study are made apparent to the students in an epiphanic experience and they come to value something they previously did not. After this requisite awakening, the aspirational classroom then facilitates transformation by creating a community in which students undergo three additional key processes. First, students acknowledge their ethical distance from the new value; the status quo is disrupted and students, catching a glimpse of the new value, recognize the divide between who they are and who they want to be. Second, students recognize ethical difference; even if the path toward the new self remains partially obscured, students encounter the incongruity between their current values and the goal, and are moved to change to become the kind of people who can value anew. Finally, committed to moving toward a positive value, students make a conscious resolution to change. In the aspirational model, these four components will push students toward transformation. In Yacek’s trajectory of transformation, therefore, all change hinges on the awakening, and so we must examine the applicability of this theory before turning to anything else.

Yacek’s account of the aspirant’s awakening builds on research from Kevin Pugh’s theory of ‘transformative experience’ (Pugh, 2011: 1101–1137) and Jonas and Nakazawa’s theories of educational epiphany (Jonas and Nakazawa, 2020). During an awakening, students come to grasp both the extrinsic and intrinsic value embedded in a discipline, in which their precursory understanding or apathy toward a discipline is radically disrupted and students encounter a ‘new vision of what human flourishing is’ (Jonas and Nakazawa, 2020: 167). For transformative education to occur, this awakening is foundational. Indeed, the prospect of orienting students to the value of a discipline often seems to be the most daunting barrier to creating meaningful classroom experiences; no educator is stranger to ‘Why are we learning this?’ and the canned responses (no matter how heartfelt) have long lost their luster for contemporary learners in the latter years of their education. Students must see the value of the discipline, and they must then find its value in their own unique journeys and outlets. In chapter six, ‘Awakening Aspiration in the Classroom’, Yacek offers a few practical methods for prompting this awakening. However, before considering these practical methods, it will be helpful to outline some of the key obstacles to a student’s awakening, and, by extension, transformation.

Yacek thoroughly outlines some of these obstacles in his fifth chapter, entitled ‘Psychological Barriers to Aspiration’, most notably the psychological barriers of apathy, distraction, and akrasia (weakness of the will). These psychological barriers to individual awakening experiences are tall enough on their own, but there are also additional external hurdles to consider. Yacek’s focus on the individual psychology of the student is a helpful starting point, but he stops short of referencing the exterior obstacles to transformation all educators must also consider. For example, an absence of student–teacher trust and the frequency of extreme heterogeneity in student language skills within a community further stymie the classroom’s ability to promote an awakening. Both varieties of external obstacles could hinder the dialogue that is so pivotal in the awakening stage of Yacek’s transformative model.

First, deterioration of student–teacher trust undermines dialogue and threatens the possibility of awakening. Over the past 20 years, scholarship has built an extensive literature regarding the efficacy of student–teacher trust in the educational environment. Student–teacher trust, even on the level of micro-interactions, is linked to increased student risk-taking and help-seeking behavior, increased engagement and achievement, increased student identification with their learning community, and a decrease in behavioral incidents (Romero, 2015: 215–236). Conversely, as may be expected, a lack of student–teacher trust is associated with student disengagement and defiance (Gregory and Weinstein, 2008: 455–475). These outcomes may seem fairly plain, but they bear significantly on attempts to create a transformative classroom; lack of student–teacher trust will impoverish dialogue and impede effective modeling. The kind of dialogue required to facilitate Jonas and Nakazawa’s epiphany, for which Yacek advocates, necessitates ‘conditions of mutual ‘trust’ between teachers and students’, as Yacek reminds us in chapter six (Yacek, 2021: 152). But in many learning environments, the student–teacher relationship begins at an inherent disadvantage. Building student–teacher trust is especially difficult in a contemporary classroom, where technology has made cheating and cyberbullying more prolific than ever, students have an unprecedented cognizance of the educational system’s historic failure to treat all students equitably, teachers are overwhelmingly from different geographic, socioeconomic, and cultural communities than their students, and new educational tech allows teachers to spy on their students’ school-issued devices. These barriers to trust are not insurmountable – good teachers overcome them every year – but recognizing them allows us to add yet another layer of challenge we must confront when cultivating epiphanic dialogue.

The next external barrier to consider on this point before turning to Yacek’s practical applications is the heterogeneity in student language skills that can undercut the coherence of whole-class dialogue. While the empirical data vary significantly by school type, size, organization, tracking philosophy, and so on, the reality is that most teachers at some point face a class where students enter the classroom at wildly different skill levels. If the dialogue required for awakening an epiphany must be such that allows the “students to share ownership over the dialogue’s trajectory”, students must be able to have an access point to enter into this dialogue (Yacek, 2021: 149). And, as we’ll find teaching any discipline from Algebra to Astronomy, finding the right access point to the conversation for one student can often exclude or undermine another.

Yacek compellingly argues that dialogue, aporia, and modeling (doing, showing, and telling epiphany) are crucial to initiating a student awakening. However, the transformative literature must go still further to respond to the external challenges as well as the internal ones on which Yacek focuses. The transformative classroom literature should continue to seek methods to rebuild student–teacher trust and find ways to differentiate the dialogic process to ensure the transformative educator has a methodology for confronting these issues when they arise. For the first task, there are several paths to travel. Many contemporary educational trends advocate for beginning the year with low-risk activities, get-to-know-you icebreakers, and social-emotional learning (SEL) mini-lessons to construct strong student–teacher relationships. However well-intentioned, the efficacy of these techniques is questionable. Their primary fault is student perception of inauthenticity. Rather than frontloading the year with a series of get-to-know you games, educators should (a) seek to build trust with a prolonged commitment and participation in the school community inside and outside school walls and (b) push students toward serious and meaningful conversations that they do not traditionally encounter in other educational spaces. Last year, when I interviewed a focus group of students on how to build student–teacher relationships in remote learning, an 11th-grade female spoke up: ‘I was asked five times on the first day of school what my favorite color was and not once about how my family was dealing with everything [unemployment and loss in the pandemic]’. Trust-building is something every educator wants, but few feel confident in cultivating. For the transformative educator, Yacek has proven it’s especially important, but finding a path toward it still remains hazy. We will return to discuss additional possible methods for trust-building below in the examination of the final three steps of aspiration.

The second task in supporting the transformative educator to cultivate epiphanic dialogue is to find a way to differentiate the classroom dialogue so that students of different skill levels may participate without impinging on their peers’ experiences. While this task is necessary for our first step of transformation – awakening – Yacek actually provides us a solution to this problem in his discussion of the latter steps of transformation. Yacek’s discussion of Kieran Egan’s theory of the ‘the narrative arc’ in chapter seven, ‘The Aspirational Classroom’, offers a solution to the problems of dialogue that may hinder an awakening (Egan, 1986). Egan’s theories harness the natural inclinations in all students toward imagination and narrative to create a story arc in each lesson or conversation through use of traditional story forms. While by adolescence some students may have fallen behind or rushed ahead in relation to their peers in language skills, the fundamental aspects of story, such as conflict and climax, remain universally accessible. The narrative arc presented here offers a novel solution to the problem articulated, where all students, but especially those students who have traditionally not found success in the classroom, can re-engage collectively in material via an engrossing narrative arc as a gateway to learning and discussion. While Yacek presents the narrative arc as a method for students to change in response to their awakening, it seems an even more fitting tool for prompting that awakening in the first place.

Once the transformative educator has overcome the internal and external challenges of initiating an awakening in students, Yacek contends that educators are then given a distinctly important charge: the educator must make her classroom an environment in which students can fully engage with the task of embracing the new life of value they have glimpsed within the epiphany. Yacek admits that this undertaking is both broad and difficult, as students will likely confront the psychological barriers he labels ‘dispositions that rival aspiration’, such as hedging, ambition, and obsession, or simply find the transformative path to be too difficult. However, Yacek offers three tools for the educator to create an aspirational classroom environment. The narrative arc described above is the first, and while it seems particularly relevant to awakening, Yacek suggests that the narrative arc can also ‘“close the gap” between students’ seemingly distant aspirational futures and their current level of understanding’ as well as to create an arc with students as the key characters (Yacek, 2021: 156). In this way, the narrative arc not only communicates the learning content, but positions students as characters – agents – who can become the transformed version of self first glimpsed in the intimation of value.

The second tool Yacek suggests is transformative care, which draws on Kenneth Strike’s theory of ‘initiation’ (Strike, 2008: 234–237) and Nel Noddings’ theory of the ethic of care (Noddings, 2002). Trust is foundational to the aspirational classroom because students are asked to take a ‘transformative leap’, in which they do not really know what the path to transformation looks like, having never traveled it, but are initiated into the practice by a trusted guide (Yacek, 2021: 162). Noddings’ ethic of care also requires the trust mentioned earlier, especially in that the caring relationship Noddings prescribes requires vulnerability between student and teacher as the student communicates their concerns and the teacher takes a receptive role. The same challenges with student–teacher trust are relevant here as they were with epiphanic dialogue during the awakening stage, but building on the work of Strike and Noddings allows Yacek to bring their additional input to confront the problem. Yacek, however, amends the conception of Noddings’ caring for students as they are, to caring both for students’ current selves and their aspiration selves, or caring for who they could be. Yacek calls this dual care transformative care. Practically, transformative care manifests in the educator when they treat the student as if the student has already become the transformed self. In an affecting anecdote of his high school physics teacher, Yacek describes a man who treated his students as if they were already capable of the goals that he had set for them; Yacek writes, ‘he transformed his hopes for his students into expectations’ (Yacek, 2021: 163). The same idea comes through in current pedagogical tactics like habituating referring to your students as ‘mathematicians’ or ‘scholars’, but in Yacek’s description, this technique emerges as a part of a holistic classroom ethos centered on guiding students to actualize their transformation.

The final tool for creating the aspirational classroom is what Yacek calls the aspirational community. Yacek’s aspirational community builds on research regarding the value of communities in a successful and long-lasting commitment to values as well as John Dewey’s ‘interactive’ principle. Student perception of one another as co-aspirants is a particularly striking possibility, one Yacek artfully presents in the final pages of chapter seven. When students can spur on one another to pursue values, and when they see one another’s input and critique as distinctly valuable, the educator can rest in a job well done. All three of the tools Yacek offers in chapter seven for the aspirational classroom are both innovative and pragmatic. What muddies the waters, and where we will turn for a final note on this theory of transformative education, is the relationship of this aspirational classroom to its broader communities: namely, the individual school and the complex system in which it is mired.

The classroom is a space apart: it can be a haven, a threshold. The familiar atmosphere of a classroom’s routines and patterns pays dividends in strengthening student trust and belonging that contributes meaningfully to their aspirational journey. But the classroom does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it exists in a large and complex interplay of a seemingly endless number of actors and systems and criterion. The aspirational classroom, for better or worse, is inextricably linked to the larger community in which it is situated. A final point for conversation on Yacek’s theory of transformation is how to cultivate an aspirational classroom when the values embedded in the discipline clash with the values of the broader learning community and its stakeholders. What is to be done when the psychological barriers to aspiration are not only present, but actively perpetuated by the broader learning community? These barriers are certainly community-specific, but they will emerge, even if they look different in your community than they do in mine.

Perhaps one of the most prolific barriers Yacek points out that is perpetuated by the broader community and hampers aspirational efforts is that of ambition. Yacek explains that ambition is ‘characteristically fixated on the external and extrinsic values of activities rather than on their internal good’ (Yacek, 2021: 129). As a high school classroom teacher in a large, public institution, the problem of ambition is one I see most frequently among my students. As Yacek asserts, and Rousseau so scathingly articulates, demands on students to prepare themselves for future success not only degrades student opportunities to find intrinsic value in the learning process, but ‘burdens a child with chains of every sort and begins by making him miserable in order to prepare him from afar for I know not what pretended happiness’ (Rousseau, 1979). This psychological misery has manifested, particularly in the last year, in high rates of student burnout. Students are told that they must succeed on standardized tests and get high grades to be successful in the future, and the stakes are both dizzyingly high and holistically material. For students who traditionally encounter success in the classroom, this mindset frequently leads to the degradation of physical and mental health. For students who do not, this mindset frequently leads to self-doubt, low self-esteem, and apathy. But in many districts, for a variety of complex reasons, teachers and administrators do see education only as valuable as it can lead to extrinsic benefit. So the barrier of ambition manifests not only at an individual student level, but at a systems-wide level. One morning in my classroom, as we listened to the morning announcements – a message broadcasted to all 3400 high school students – the principal told students that the sole reason they were there in the school building was to get a job, make money, and buy a nice house. He has reiterated this ambition four times over the morning announcements since I began working at the institution. It is a perspective I’ve heard echoed by other teachers, guidance counselors, parents, and deans. In light of these clashing values between classroom and system, important questions emerge: Does this theory of transformative education have certain structural requirements? Or is any structure conducive as long as it is populated by stakeholders who do not present or perpetuate psychological barriers to students? Does a classroom need to be situated within a broader learning community where the psychological barriers to aspiration are nonexistent, or at best minimal, in order for a student to engage on a path of aspiration? It is not clear to me that Yacek provides answers to these questions.

What Yacek does offer us, though, is a vision. Yacek imparts a vision of transformation and enough practical guidance to start trying. Many educators today feel that the cards are stacked against them. They probably are. But Yacek’s theory of transformation is a fresh and diligent reminder that there are still reasons to strain after the aspirational classroom, and seek to be so transformed ourselves.