What is Dignity-Driven Education?

Education is filled with soundbites: “direct instruction,” “science of reading,” “we’ve got this.” I’ve heard them all, but none of these truly tells us how to teach our most vulnerable children.

While I appreciate hashtags and catchy phrases—they make discussing education easier—they don’t necessarily provide a clear path for implementation. When people ask me how I made it, they are seeking more than feel-good slogans; they want practical guidance on how to put ideas into practice. What I am being asked for are not more soundbites but something tangible that could tell people how.

Dignity is at the root of any answer to this question. When teaching and learning are not rooted in dignity, progress is hindered, and both our children’s learning and their lives suffer. Perhaps worst, biases take hold, and deficit perspectives dominate, leading to systems that blame our children for our failures.

In the past, I struggled with finding the right words to express the concept of dignity in education. For a while, I clung to clumsy phrases like “culturally responsive-sustaining education,”[i] drawing from the insights of scholars such as Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, and Django Paris. More recently, I’ve realized that these phrases don’t quite capture the essence of what I’ve wanted to convey or where the field has been pointing. I wrote this piece to push our thinking forward while inspiring teachers, parents, and other care workers to embrace the how that I discovered through my own journey.

The essence of this how is dignity-driven education—which is the articulated paradigm of my upcoming book, Pedagogy of the Black Child. The principles of dignity-driven education include love, care, value, balance, story, faith, thick listening, border crossing, acceptance, encouragement, possibility, reparations, hope, and community. Together, these principles form the foundation for fostering environments for all children that honor and empower them, nurturing their growth and potential.

Love takes the form of labor, centering our children and embracing them with wonder. Care embodies the work of the collective unearthing the layers of generational violence that have shaped our children’s lives, ensuring they are free to dream. Value is a virtue, celebrating the worth and unique qualities of each child. Balance reflects social equity, addressing negative influences by providing positive opportunities that acknowledge why equality cannot be our goal; meeting individual needs with tailored solutions is.

Dignity-driven education is about the stories of our children’s lives. It is about listening to and embracing the complexities of their ongoing experiences, which are still unfolding. It involves having faith in our children, seeing and believing in their potential and promise beyond their circumstances. It goes beyond mere empathy to truly understanding and connecting with them. It crosses borders, compelling us to venture into unfamiliar spaces, even when uncomfortable, to connect with and support them meaningfully.

Dignity-driven education is about acceptance, the precondition for transformation, which involves embracing our children as they are and fostering self-acceptance within them. It is about encouragement, the acts of both affirming and uplifting them. It fosters a sense of possibility, guiding them to aspire rather than resigning them to our tragic limitations. It acknowledges reparations as a form of justice, recognizing our debt to our children and seeking to pay the debt and rectify past wrongs.

Dignity-driven education firmly rejects the notion that their stories are predestined or unchangeable. Rather, it thrives on the power of hope rooted in a firm sense of community, where collective support and collaboration become essential for us to do more than survive.

Dignity-driven education is not just a theoretical concept but a tangible commitment to demonstrating love and decency in action. It requires hard work, not something we submissively embody momentarily, but a practice we diligently cultivate even when no one is watching. It is more than responsive education, which is conditioned based on who others are. It is a presponsive in that it is what we do because of who others are.

Embracing these principles gives us the power to create nurturing environments that cultivate growth, resilience, and authentic connections where we can transform the world, uplift generations, and shape a future where every child can reach their fullest potential.

I want to emphasize that dignity-driven education doesn’t overlook the struggles in our lives. On the contrary, the essence of this approach lies in embracing the struggle which begins within us. This acknowledgment emphasizes the need to mend the brokenness internal as a vital step toward repairing the brokenness external in the world around us.

The feminist icon and cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa so eloquently captures this idea when she explains how struggle exists both inwardly and outwardly, how it “has always been the inner, and played in the outer terrains,” where “[a]wareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in society.” In highlighting how awareness of our situation is a prerequisite for initiating inner changes, which paves the way for societal transformation, Anzaldúa gives us a much broader picture of how nothing materializes in the external world without first taking shape in our heads and hearts.

This notion underscores the profound connection between our inner experiences and the changes we aspire to bring to the world. This sequence revisits the Freirian concept of praxis—a process of reflexive action that begins with understanding a reality as a precondition to the intentional transformation of it. Then, what follows awareness, in a fine Freirian sense, is empowerment, and what follows empowerment is the power to act on the world we live in, to both love and to lift it, to dream it into existence, and then aspire beyond it. Put another way, what follows understanding, in the dignity-driven framework that I am proposing, are transformations that occur (1) inward (or personal) transformation, which includes healing or reconstitution of the Self, and (2) outward (or societal) transformation, which includes abolishing social conditions responsible for causing harm and creating/constructing conditions that promote growth, safety, joy, and balance.

I call this transformative process the sunrise, the awakening of the consciousness spurred by the hope we gain through struggle. Buckminster Fuller beautifully captures the essence of this ethereal magic when he observes: “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”[ii] The promise of dignity, thus, lies not merely in what one sees but in the potential of what could be. The struggle is what happens on the inside so that everything surrounding it ceases ever to be the same because, like the metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, change from within has the power to fundamentally reshape our world and who we might become within it.

For a new world to breathe, a new paradigm must be born. Ancient traditions teach us that new wine cannot be put into old wineskins. New wine requires new wineskins because, as the new wine expands during fermentation, it stretches, and old wineskins will burst under pressure.

Similarly, to achieve the change we yearn for, we will need new systems to sustain the new realities we create. Mere abolition of the existing thing will not suffice to bring about the transformation we seek because you never change things by simply abolishing the existing reality. To change something, you build a new model to make the existing model obsolete.[iii] Dignity-driven education is that new model.

This isn’t it, though. In speaking of our wounds, the late civil rights leader Malcolm X alluded to the three dimensions of dignity-driven education (the core, the inner, and outer aspects) in his metaphor of the 9-inch knife. According to Malcolm:

If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.[iv] 

What’s striking about Malcolm’s analogy is its conceptual value. It speaks to the process described above: acknowledging the wound and then working to fully heal the wounded. Recalling this process, Malcolm never blames the person who is stabbed for being stabbed, which is also about awareness of where our wounds come from. Malcolm understands that the person who is stabbed is not the issue. We don’t heal by simply hearing someone say, “get better,” especially when the wound is fresh and while the wounded still has a knife in their back.

The knife in the back is the sociological and historical equivalent of conditions that symbolize our vulnerability and our continued susceptibility to structural violence. It is also a social artifact, symbolic of the external tools used to wound us. We can change the Self to feel our worth inwardly, but if this worth is not reflected beyond ourselves, then we are still under threat because where the knife is, the possibility for more cutting and stabbing exists. For Malcolm, it is not progress if the 9-inch knife buried in our backs is removed only six inches. It is only progress once the knife is removed and the wound is addressed and healed.

I will take Malcolm’s point a step further because dignity-driven education is not just about responding to the wound and healing the person; it is also about presponding so that the likelihood of being stabbed is reduced or eliminated. Put another way, it is not progress until people who are vulnerable to being stabbed are no longer susceptible to being stabbed! This means not only addressing the wounds (the response) but also creating and maintaining conditions, i.e., systems, that do not inflict wounds but create conditions of safety from them (the presponse).

Dignity-driven education is more than equity (how we respond within an inequitable system). It pivots to belonging (how do we create systems that accept our children and keep them safe). In a state of belonging, our children grow better because they are given room to exist on their own terms and space to blossom in their own time. I once heard it said: “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”[v]

Dignity-driven education is the all-encompassing methodology that moves our children from their knees to the sky. It is an approach to teaching and learning that acknowledges and embraces the struggles within our children’s lives. It starts with the inward journey of recognizing our brokenness as a prerequisite to mending the brokenness in the world around us. This process underlines the transformative power of understanding our children’s situations, empowering them to initiate both personal and societal transformations rooted in their worth. This model is not merely responsive but presponsive, forging a path that begins (as opposed to ends) with our healing, where belonging sits at the core and our power hinges on our ability to believe in the magic our children bring with them into the world.

Notes:

[i] The concept of culturally responsive-sustaining education was originally coined by me in 2018 and conversation with Angelica Infante, former Deputy Chancellor for the New York State Education Department. Infante had enlisted my services when I served as the executive director of NYU Metro Center. She originally wanted to develop a state framework on culturally responsive education, since CRE was among the most popular education concepts in circulation at the time. She later shifted, opting for the more fad concept of culturally sustaining education as the title for the framework. Since culturally responsive education was so well defined across New York State in ways that did not align with the person who coined the term, Geneva Gay, but in ways consistent with the desires of the people, I encouraged Infante to keep the term responsive in the title and to define in ways that were consistent with how people across New York State understood the concept. I also encouraged her to keep the term sustaining, as the critique that culturally sustaining pedagogy posed to culturally responsive education was an important one. Unlike other scholars, I did not see culturally sustaining pedagogy as a replacement for culturally responsive education, particularly as culturally responsive education was being defined in communities and by the people. At best, it was another perspective on education from a cultural lens that was needed to create education conditions that could better serve vulnerable people. Thus, Infante and I combined the two concepts as one unique idea that shifted its meaning from pure academic definitions of the terms to meanings that were being operationalized by communities around the U.S. By responsive, the people tended to mean an education customized to their legitimate and contingent needs, and by sustaining, the people tended to mean an education that valued and preserved their cultural ways of knowing and being but also the establishment and conservation of social conditions needed for high quality optimal education and social life. Please note that while my use of culturally responsive-sustaining education is related to its academic cousins, it vastly different from them and emanate not from the academy but from the community.    

[ii] See R. Buckminster Fuller. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/r_buckminster_fuller_100112

[iii] Cf. Buckminster Fuller quote in Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure (1999), by Daniel Quinn, p. 137.

[iv] Malcolm X in TV interview, Mar. 1964.

[v] See Friedrich Nietzsche. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved March 20, 2022, from BrainyQuote.com Web site: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/friedrich_nietzsche_159166.

__________________________________________

Suggested citation: Kirkland, D.E. (2024). What is dignity-driven education. In forwardED Perspectives, https://www.forward-ed.com/post/what-is-dignity-driven-education.

David E. Kirkland, PhD, is the founder and CEO of forwardED. He is a nationally renowned scholar of education equity. He can be reached via email at: david@forward-ed.com.