Journal of Transformative Education

In this article we explore the heuristic power of the Meditative Process Art (MPA) method, a unique, transpersonal, transformative arts-based method developed for a workshop series with women living with HIV. These workshops formed part of the Positively Women research project, which adopted an exploratory approach to examine the transformative potential of contemplative art for women living with HIV. Examining the design and impacts of the method, we found that its creative-contemplative, social justice, and heuristic foundations supported healing, enhanced participants’ agency and self-awareness, and enabled significant transformation. Further, through our engagement with Susanne Langer’s philosophy of art to explicate the workings of the MPA method, we identified foundational elements of the MPA method’s heuristic power. We present these findings for theorists and practitioners interested in transformative arts-based methods, and for all those working to advance understanding of the lived realities of marginalised individuals and communities.

Transformative learning is often a long and difficult process, during which learners may express many forms of resistance. To investigate such resistance, a 2-year qualitative study was conducted on Finnish teacher education. Field diary notes and students’ writings were collected from a group of teacher students (N = 11). The analysis focuses on the whole group and two of its members. Using a phenomenological–hermeneutic methodology and the theories of Ziehe, Illeris, and Agamben, three interpretations of why and how students said no to transformative learning were formulated: regressive no (the need to rest from the process), defensive no (the lack of resources/motivation needed for the process), and emancipatory no (saying yes to something else). The reasons for refusal and withdrawal are based on case examples that do not cover all possible reasons. Thus, future studies should complement these, given the relevance of how resistance is interpreted during transformative learning.

This paper explores the media representation of migrants and examines the role of adult education in fostering sociocultural transformation. Drawing on lifelong learning and collective transformative learning frameworks, we argue media narratives often reinforce stereotypes and exclusion but can also serve as entry points for dialogue and education. We highlight the role of that adult education and argue that it can play a pivotal role in reframing migration as a catalyst for social and cultural transformation. These frameworks encourage critical reflection, empathy, and participatory engagement, enabling learners to confront biases and co-construct more inclusive narratives. The paper concludes by offering implications for transformative multicultural education and suggests strategies for fostering intercultural understanding and socially just learning environments in the context of global migration.

Emotions influencing learning are often overlooked in engineering education, which emphasizes rationality and technical competence. However, recent studies highlight the impact of emotional experiences on outcomes such as academic achievement, engagement, and persistence, particularly for first-year engineering students facing transitional challenges. This study explores how emotional factors, specifically valence and arousal, affect the early transformative experiences of these students. Drawing on the Circumplex Model of Affect and Transformative Learning Theory, it examines how these affective dimensions intersect with the transformative learning journey. Data were collected through surveys including a validated emotion scale and the Learning Activities Survey (LAS) instrument. Results reveal a strong match between students’ affective measures and their transformative learning experience. Findings highlight the need for emotionally intelligent teaching practices to support students’ transformative experience, resilience, personal growth, and academic development. Integrating emotionally responsive pedagogical approaches can better prepare students for the complexities of academic and professional engineering environments.

This duoethnographic study explores the transformative learning journeys of three international faculty at a Midwestern Predominantly White Institution (PWI) in the United States. Grounded in Mezirow’s transformative learning theory, the research analyzed how experiences of cultural adaptation and identity negotiation catalyzed professional and personal transformation. Our findings reveal transformation occurred through interconnected engagement across three academic domains: (1) teaching as a site of critical reflection and pedagogical agency; (2) research as identity work and scholarly agency; and (3) service as a pathway to advocacy and institutional belonging. The duoethnographic process fostered collaborative meaning-making, enabling us to reframe our cultural identities as sources of professional strength. We conclude that international faculty serve as vital agents who co-create transformative learning environments within the institution. The study offers a conceptual framework for understanding this integrative process and provides recommendations for institutional policy and faculty development supporting identity-affirming growth.

This study explored how university faculty members in Sudan conceptualized teacher leadership and examined the extent to which a leadership development module—delivered through either vignette pedagogy or traditional instruction—prompted shifts in those conceptions. Seventeen faculty members participated in semi-structured interviews before and after the intervention. Thematic analysis revealed that, prior to the module, participants largely viewed teachers as compliant implementers focused on discipline, curriculum coverage, and adherence to policy. Leadership was not associated with the teaching role. Post-intervention, particularly among those exposed to vignette pedagogy, participants began to articulate more expansive conceptions of teacher leadership. Vignettes supported critical reflection, deepened empathy with classroom dilemmas, and provoked reconsideration of teachers as change agents and relational leaders. These shifts suggest that pedagogical modality plays a key role in enabling transformative learning among higher education faculty.

In the context of a significant increase in mental health issues and loneliness in academia, there is an urgent need to reimagine the contribution of academic learning to inner development, psychospiritual growth, and flourishing. Integral transformative pedagogies that engage the whole person (cognitive, emotional, somatic, and spiritual), offer a viable response to these challenges. Through the analysis of a community of practice that involved 15 students, the research shows how such pedagogies can cultivate inner and interpersonal capacities that support flourishing. This study examines the way integral transformative pedagogies cultivate the dimensions of Being (inner) and Relating (interpersonal) capacities in the Inner Development Goals Framework. At the Being level, they had an impact on self-awareness, authenticity, and openness to vulnerability. At the Relating level they significantly deepened interpersonal connection and cultivated the experience of mutual care and kindness, contributing to participants’ well-being and flourishing.

This conceptual paper introduces the Transformation-Affirmation-Recognition (TAR) model, a framework that reconceptualizes transformation as a psychosocial process grounded in the dynamic interplay between self-affirmation and social recognition. Drawing on Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, Steele’s self-affirmation theory, and Honneth’s recognition theory, the paper argues that transformation is sustained not by cognition alone but by the affective and relational forces that enable individuals to remain in contact with difficult emotions such as discomfort. Self-affirmation preserves a sense of integrity when one’s meaning structures are disrupted, while recognition validates the emerging self within a social context. Together, these forces form a dialectical movement that allows learners to engage discomfort as a developmental resource rather than as a threat. An illustrative reflection demonstrates how the TAR process operates in practice, revealing how affirmation and recognition jointly enable resilience and growth.

This autoethnographic inquiry explores a personal transformation, tracing the author’s journey from a career in banking to that of an educational researcher. The narrative centers on a “disorienting dilemma” and the realization that foundational truths, like geometric axioms, are conditional. This rupture challenged deeply ingrained binary thinking, leading to an embodied and existential crisis that extended beyond purely rational reflection. The article, presented in a hybrid form that combines narrative, poetry, and collage, illustrates how this initial disorientation fostered a shift toward embracing complexity, pluralism, and an ongoing, fluid identity. It argues that transformation is a recursive, relational process, extending beyond cognitive shifts to reshape one’s being across professional, personal, and spiritual domains.

Examining generative AI through the lens of transformative learning theory, this article conceptualizes AI as a potential disorienting dilemma for adult learners and educators. Critiquing AI applications using Mezirow’s (Cranton & Taylor, 2012) learning theory, this article shows that generative AI simultaneously short-circuits the kinds of cognitive engagement needed for transformative learning and upsets the learners’ most basic assumptions about expertise, intelligence, and learning. This article reworks the logic of transformative learning theory and establishes specific conditions that make AI-mediated learning possible as well as certain conditions in which AI-mediated learning precludes perspective transformation. The article has three theoretical contributions: (1) transformational learning necessitates irreducible personal engagement with premise-level complexity, (2) technological disruption triggers transformational learning only when it upends ontological, as opposed to procedural, assumptions, and (3) AI-mediated learning can only scaffold but not replace critical reflection, situating it as a “sophisticated” disorienting dilemma.

This forum piece examines the emotional, relational, and ethical dimensions of transformative learning in contemporary higher education. Drawing on practitioner experience at a research-intensive Canadian university and scholarship in critical pedagogy, adult learning, and institutional ethics, it illustrates how transformative learning is shaped and often constrained by organizational cultures, political pressures, and unfulfilled institutional commitments to inclusion. While transformative learning aspires to disrupt assumptions and cultivate more just ways of knowing, practitioners frequently encounter institutional inertia, value misalignment, and forms of institutional betrayal that complicate this work. These dynamics intensify the affective labour required of staff and faculty, often resulting in moral injury, burnout, and precarious relational work that remains largely invisible. The paper argues for a fuller recognition of the human conditions underpinning transformative learning and calls for institutional courage, relational accountability, and more sustainable structures of support.

Jack Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory highlights critical reflection and rational discourse as essential for adult learning. This study examines the culturally shaped reflective practices of 15 Chinese tutoring industry leaders as they navigated the dual crises of COVID-19 and the national ban on after-school subject tutoring. Using a multiple-case study approach, the research identified two culturally grounded strategies that supported leaders’ reflective processes: (1) the use of metaphors and analogies and (2) the integration of historical and philosophical wisdom. Leaders employed metaphors to reinterpret challenges creatively and drew on Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist teachings, and ancient war strategies to make sense of uncertainty. Through these culturally informed reflections, they modified or expanded their frames of reference, fostering resilience in times of crisis. The findings emphasize the importance of cultural influences in transformative learning and advocate for incorporating cultural products to support meaningful reflection in non-Western contexts.

This article examines the theoretical foundations of the Science of the Positive (SOTP) framework, presenting it as a conceptual and practical model grounded in the principles of transformative community leadership. Developed over two decades of applied research, the SOTP framework is founded on the core assumption that the Positive is real and worth cultivating within ourselves, our workplaces, our communities, and our cultures. The SOTP framework is a holistic model that employs a praxis-oriented process known as the Cycle of Transformation, which includes the domains of Spirit, Science, Action, and Return. It is based on eight core principles and corresponding action steps designed to help community leaders navigate change and transformation with authentic integrity. This transformative community leadership model is envisioned as a manifesto for positive cultural renewal that is feasible and imperative in today’s world.

The social model views disability as diversity rather than tragedy, making disability studies a transformative experience in higher education. This study examines the impact of the course “Persons with Disabilities in the Circle of Life,” taught at an Israeli academic college, on students’ attitudes. Using the Multidimensional Attitudes Scale (Findler et al., 2007), 206 students were surveyed at the start and end of the course. Results showed significant improvements in affective and behavioral attitudes toward people with disabilities. These findings underscore the value of transformative learning in disability studies for fostering positive attitudes and promoting inclusion in educational settings.

In this theoretical and methodological article, we address the need for a more comprehensive understanding of development that integrates and innovatively analyzes individualistic and collectivistic elements of Western and non-Western epistemologies. A graduate-level course responded to this need, exploring adult development through the theoretical lenses of constructive developmental theory, whole person theory, generative knowing theory, and Indigenous ways of knowing. We present a collaborative autobiographical narrative inquiry that emerged during this course as a pedagogical project, benefiting educators and researchers seeking ways to enhance understanding and representation of transformative growth. Thematic and diffractive analyses were incorporated to reveal developmental similarities and differences in adult developmental complexity. Kaleidoscopic analysis, created by combining and re-patterning significant thematic and diffractive phrases with others, revealed adult developmental potential. Like light reflecting and diffracting through shifting shards of color, kaleidoscopic analysis momentarily captured entangled and (un)predictable patterns of development, visibilizing new transformative pathways.

This paper addresses the post-truth crises facing society in general and education in particular. Rather than one dominant meaning framework (religious, ideological, etc.) there are multiple, competing frameworks. Both philosophical and folk epistemologies are valued because they bind anxiety by offering trustworthy ground. However, multiple epistemologies (both academic and folk) are emerging—many of which critique and offer alternatives to Western-centric, patriarchal, traditional epistemologies. However, when frameworks are relativized, that capacity to bind anxiety is lost, and nihilism begins to haunt our thoughts. Are we moving through a liminal zone where traditional meaning frameworks have lost their purchase? The responsibility for creating new frameworks will first be generated individually. Then, if effective, they will gradually be adopted by others, and a collective will begin to form. Toward that end, I describe a practice that orients a person to a sensorimotor way of interacting with one’s circumstances pragmatically rather than ideologically.

This qualitative case study explores a Peer Mentor Circle (PMC) initiative as a catalyst for transformative learning for international graduate students entering graduate school in the United States. Utilizing Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory (TLT), the study takes into consideration disorientation, critical thinking, learning, and reintegration. Fourteen international students (mentors/mentees) participated in a 5-week PMC focused on supporting their transition, cultivating a sense of connection, increasing self-awareness, and providing peer networking. Interviews, focus groups, and observation uncovered students were significantly transformed in personal, academic, and cultural domains. Themes included identity development, belonging, emotional resilience, and adaptation. In a low-stakes, culturally appropriate environment, the PMC created a forum for students to share experiences, normalize difficulties, and fortify confidence. Peer mentoring initiatives hold the potential for student advancement and engagement. Institutional policies for international student success must focus on incorporating community-based, relational support structures, as noted in this inquiry.

We are interested in the transformative potentials of intersubjectivity as it is enacted through second-person contemplative approaches. Our work here focuses on contemplative practice as a pedagogy that reveals and enacts intersubjectivity within postsecondary education. How might contemplative higher education practice as a pedagogy enable students to access these underlying intersubjective dimensions, thus creating conditions for a shift in the forms of transformative learning that affect the nature of the learner’s consciousness as well as their overall journey of transformation through the course of their studies? We review the theoretical and research literature on postsecondary contemplative education, particularly in its intersubjective dimensions, and then offer data from a qualitative study involving students enrolled in a graduate program in contemplative inquiry that offers evidence of the transformative potentials of these intersubjective, contemplative approaches to learning and inquiry.