Abstract
The authors of the first four articles in this issue use broad conceptualizations of transformative learning (TL) pedagogy to guide their inquiries. While TL pedagogical concepts have historical roots in Mezirow’s theory of perspective transformation many are generally recognized as applicable across a number of TL approaches (Taylor, 2009). Primary concepts include sense of disorientation or disorienting dilemma, critical reflection, and critical dialogue. In each of these studies, TL pedagogical principles were used to evaluate and analyze formal and nonformal intentional educational experiences. Thus, the primary research questions addressed the degree to which an instructional design achieved the kinds of changes intended and in a more exploratory sense to identify how the changes occurred. The fifth article is similar in design in that the authors were interested in identifying experiences that graduate students in a Master of Social Work program identified as transformative learning.
On a broad scale, the authors of each respective study were interested in better understanding developmental change in a learning context in a specific field and TL pedagogical concepts were tools for building and expanding knowledge about their respective topics of global citizenship education, critical service learning and ableism, songwriting and well-being, Theory U leadership development, and graduate level social work. Collectively these studies provide further evidence of the cross-disciplinary appeal of TL theory and pedagogy and largely confirm existing knowledge of TL pedagogy. The value beyond confirmation of existing knowledge is situated in topic and context particularities characteristic of qualitative research.
The article “Towards the Transformative Role of Global Citizenship Education Experiences in Higher Education: Crossing Students’ and Teachers’ Views” by Dalila P. Coelho, João Caramelo, José Pedro Amorim, and Isabel Menezes presents a study of higher education learning experiences designed to foster shifts in how Portuguese college students’ construct meaning about being a member of a worldwide community. According to the authors, global citizenship education (GCE) has shifted toward more transformative perspectives, but in that field, transformation is loosely formulated meaning that differentiation between neoliberal, humanist, and critical approaches can often be lost. Coelho and colleagues undertook the study to better understand the transformative dimension of GCE as a critical approach.
The learning experiences of college students in credit-based courses and the teaching and learning experiences of instructors who also participated in GCE professional development workshops were analyzed using a general TL pedagogical model (Cranton & Wright, 2008; Hoggan, 2016; Hoggan & Kloubert, 2020; Mezirow, 2003; Taylor, 2007). The analytic strategy focused on learning conditions, processes, and outcomes. In general, Coelho et al. found strong alignment between GCE and TL pedagogy and there were several notable insights. First, the students valued the structure of the learning design and saw it as a stark contrast to the prevailing approach to learning they experienced in other courses. Second, the students praised the instructors for their facilitative approach and their role in creating a safe, encouraging, and open environment that fostered relationship building. Third, there were tensions between newly developing global citizenship worldviews and how to act in line with them. With the exception of forecasting actions students could take as future educators and personal consumer choices, students felt unease and a lack of clarity about some global issues and wanted experiences beyond the formal classroom to make them more relatable. They also wanted to bring thinking and action closer together. As Coelho and colleagues described it, students wanted clear scripts for actions to address complex global problems suggesting some discomfort with their evolving worldview. Overall, the authors concluded that the findings supported the claim that the learning was promotive of transformation meaning that they recognized that a shorter duration class would not likely result in fully realized transformative outcomes (Hoggan & Cranton, 2015). They also concluded that future GCE research should focus on clarifying the degree of change especially the relationship between worldview and action engagement.
The second article “‘I Guess I’ll Have to Bring it’: Examining the Construction and Outcomes of a Social Justice-Oriented Service Learning Partnership” by Christa S. Bialka, Stacey Havlik, Gina Mancini, and Helene Marano examined how U.S. college students taking a diversity and inclusion class engaged with ideas about ableism. The learning studied was comprised of the class experience and 10 hours of service learning with high school students who had vision disabilities. As Bialka and colleagues argued, critical service learning (CSL) operates with a change orientation focused on empowering those who are disempowered and for those in the service-learning role, they are expected to realize how individual attitudes and behaviors perpetuate marginalizing social, institutional, and economic systems. The authors noted that this type of CSL pedagogy aligns well with conceptualizations of TL pedagogy rooted in Mezirow (2009) and Brookfield (2003). However, little research on CSL has addressed ableism. Therefore, TL processes served as an analytic frame to better understand CSL tenets.
The aim of their instrumental case study was to determine how the pedagogical design engaged learners with ableism and whether it achieved critical goals of fostering a mutual partnership. They were also interested in whether the experience fostered new worldviews about disability as a social justice issue including exposing systems that perpetuate inequality as well as identifying one’s place in these systems. Bialka and colleagues found that at the start of the class, university students didn’t associate disability with diversity and inclusion and the course content and service-learning fostered rethinking initial assumptions such as individuals with disabilities had less satisfying lives. The change fostered was a shift in worldview where disability was not seen broadly as a deficit. In contrast to the university students, the shift for the high school students related to their preconceived notions around gender. The mutuality achieved in the partnership and the real world practical experience played a key role is these shifts in worldviews. However, the authors noted that the learning experience didn’t result in the university students connecting their new personal awareness to their future professional practice as educators and it wasn’t clear that the personal worldview changes fostered the broader aims of CSL of social change.
The study reported in the third article “Transforming Personal Narratives: An Evaluation of a Songwriting Workshop for Rural Women” by Wendy Madsen was situated in a community-based songwriting workshop in rural Australia. The female participants engaged in a 3-day learning experience and then prepared for two months for a performance of their songs at a regional women’s music festival. The focus of this study was on a subset of participants where the data indicated that they had become emotionally engaged in the learning experience and supported inquiry into community-based learning and the role of songwriting and music in fostering well-being. Noting that previous research indicated links between leisure, adult learning, and well-being, Madsen built upon these conceptualizations and focused more specifically on TL and affective learning from a narrative perspective.
Madsen employed an evaluative case study design to examine how the learning experience influenced individual and social well-being and what pedagogical features influenced the outcomes. The findings indicated that learning was connected to the deeply personal life experiences that the women worked with in their songwriting. This process involved contending with the sociocultural constraints of women’s roles in small rural communities. Learning was also influenced by the intrinsic features of songwriting which included working with others in a co-creative and collaborative process. Telling one’s story through the art of songwriting was an expressive and cathartic activity that fostered a reevaluation and validation of self and discovery of strengths and confidence found through re-storying one’s life. These learning features were further developed in the social experience of performance that fostered a meaningful sense of connectedness.
These findings were interpreted as showing alignment for TL pedagogical concepts of critical reflection on past life experience, dialogue, empathic listening, creative expression, and affective-embodied learning. In terms of learning outcomes, Madsen emphasized the relationship between narratives, worldviews, and resolving incongruities in identities. Similar to the previous articles, Madsen also noted that that songwriting workshops were promotive of TL and recognized that the shorter engagement was unlikely to achieve the depth and breadth of change characteristic of fully transformative outcomes.
The fourth article in this issue, “Emotions and Meaning in Transformative Learning: Theory U as a Liminal Experience” by Bianca Briciu reports on a study analyzing the personal experience of the author and other participants in a one-week Theory U leadership development retreat (Scharmer, 2018). Like other articles in this issue, Briciu was interested in the pedagogical similarities between TL and Theory U. However, the approach that Briciu took was to focus specifically on describing how learners experience and manage the liminal space and emotions involved in transformation. Thus, TL was used to elaborate how Theory U pedagogies influence emotional transformation.
The results of the study showed that the collective and embodied features of the Theory U retreat invited participants into a space of letting go of existing mindsets, which generated a sense of fear and vulnerability. In that space, reflection eventually helped participants transition through these emotions. However, the liminal space was also characterized by an inclination to cynically resist change and hold on rather than let go of one’s existing worldview. Theory U contemplative and embodied pedagogies including physically acting out connections fostered reflection, dialogue, and insights that helped the participants stay mindful to and energized with their change process. The findings largely confirmed previous research on edge emotions and liminality in TL (Mälkki & Green, 2018).
The final article in this issue, “Teaching for Transformation: Master of Social Work Students Identify Teaching Approaches that Make a Difference” by Thecla Damianakis, Betty Barrett, Beth Archer-Kuhn, Patricia Samson, Sumaiya Matin, and Christine Ahern examined student learning experiences over the course of a master degree program. Building from the premise that perspective transformation supports the goals of professional graduate education, the authors were interested in identifying and describing the pedagogical features that foster TL.
Employing a qualitative study, Damianakis and colleagues conducted six focus groups over the span of four years and students reported on events and teaching strategies that fostered TL. Students also made recommendations for further supporting TL. The results showed six pedagogical themes: (a) faculty relational qualities, (b) peer-to-peer support, (c) integration of theory and practice, (d) active learning pedagogies, (e) classroom environment, and (f) being challenged to move outside one’s comfort zone. In discussing these findings, the authors stressed the developmentally supportive role of faculty especially in building safe spaces for critical thinking and reflection. However, the authors also noted that the meaning of safety and trust were not well-defined in the data. Also of interest to the authors was the sense of the importance of peer-to-peer connectedness, which they viewed as under explored in the TL and social work literatures including how it relates to instructors and students co-creating transformative spaces. Finally, Damianakis and colleagues raised a concern that current discourses about instruction in social work focus on instrumentally building professional skills and core competencies; a singular narrative about learning that may underestimate the developmental and transformative learning strategies reported in their study.
The issue closes with three book reviews, which further expand the fields of study where transformative learning models are used to explain substantive forms of change. Carol Rogers-Shaw’s thoughtful review addresses the field of transformative justice. Wesal Abu Qaddam provides a comprehensive review of a book that critically examines civic engagement in the context of the AmeriCorps program in the U.S. Then, moving from the realm of community-based learning to organizational learning, the third review by Liam Sheppard provides a succinct analysis of a book that details transformative processes and pedagogy for organizational change.
As described, this issue exemplifies the growth and utility of TL across a wide range of professional fields of study. This cross-disciplinary range of the studies is certainly an indicator of strength and relevance of TL theory and practice. At the same time, the confirmatory nature of the studies in this issue reminds us that if TL theory is to evolve, we need studies of TL experiences that analyze, critique, and expand concepts in context and in relation to specific TL theoretical approaches. Certainly, pedagogical studies in the confirmatory tradition make a valuable contribution, but it seems we need more pedagogical studies with sophisticated theoretical frameworks and designs where findings might expand TL concepts. Yes, there is richness in the particularities but there is also a need to design qualitative studies that generate more specific working hypotheses about varying TL approaches (Patton, 2015; Stake, 1995; Yin, 2016). Yin (2016) argues for qualitative researchers to think beyond the particularities and to employ analytic generalization as a two-step process. In the first step, he emphasizes that qualitative research findings “are likely to inform a particular set of concepts, theoretical constructs, or hypothesized sequence of events…” (p. 105). To inform includes revising and expanding concepts articulated in the theoretical framework of a qualitative study. The findings may support or challenge existing theoretical concepts. Then, in the second step, these new conceptual insights may apply to other similar situations and settings; a form of transferability and extrapolation (Patton, 2015; Yin, 2016). This process involves what Yin (2016) calls posing “working hypotheses and related propositions—at a conceptual level higher than that of the specific findings or the specific conditions of the initial study” (p. 107). As illustrated in this issue, the field of TL will continue to grow in multiple ways but there is still a need for qualitative studies that build and refine theory (Taylor & Cranton, 2013).