From success/failure binaries to teaching for justice: Conceptualizing education as access, responsibility, dignity, and transparency

This chapter argues that the measurement of educational success reifies universalist, linear, sequential conceptualizations of education that require the continuing maintenance of educational actors as failures. Without those measured as failures, there can be no successes, normalizing systemic injustices in ways that most often explain them as individual deficiencies. In its stead, the author proposes understandings of access, responsibility, and dignity, with additional need for transparency by those in position of power over others. When combined, these possibilities can create contexts where a) there is access to what people need and b) with responsibility to communities and one another in ways that c) those with the least amount of power feel and believe themselves to have been treated in ways that were dignified and in which they can maintain their sense of dignity.