My opinion on transformative learning

June 7 2011 (Allen)

In my last article, I clearly stated my opinion about the aim of school education, which is socialization. However, what’s the purpose of adult education or continuous education? Nowadays, more and more adults decide to take some courses to refresh themselves. In order to keep pace with the society’s development, adult workers look for continuous education actively. Adult education may be understood as an organized effort to assist learners who are old enough to be held responsible for their acts to acquire or enhance their understandings, skills, and dispositions (Mezirow, 2000, p26). As a primary goal of all adult education, Jack Mezirow sees it is transformative learning (Cranton, 2002).

Centrality of experience, critical reflection, and rational discourse are three common themes in the transformational learning theory. In an everyday sense, reflection is a ‘looking back’ on experiences. Having an experience is not enough to effect a transformation. The key to transformational learning is critical reflection on experience. Then, what is critical reflection? Critical reflection is a distinctive form of adult learning (Brookfield, 1995). It is the process of analyzing, reconsidering and questioning experiences within a broad context of issues (e.g., issues related to social justice, curriculum development, learning theories, politics, culture, or use of technology). Patricia Cranton (2002) defines reflective practice as about helping people to reflect on their experience of themselves and each other in the work place in a way that builds self insight and awareness so that people have increased choices about action.

How to lead to transformation? A perspective transformation often occurs either through a series of cumulative transformed meaning schemes or as a result of an acute personal or social crisis. A famous philosophy saying goes, “a quantitative change leads to a qualitative change”. That is, a qualitative change, to some degree, depends on the accumulation of quantity, which is suitable to leaning, including transformative learning. Although gaining emancipatory knowledge is transformative, learning of instrumental and communicative knowledge is the foundation or base for achievement of trasformation. It is a long process for students to acquire these two kinds of knowledge and students also need time to understand or digest them. According to Cranton, transformative learning is not a linear process, yet there is some progression to it, perhaps spiral-like (Cranton, 2000). Although we may not critically reflect on an assumption until a trigger event or a serial of trigger events appear, trigger event may not be a single event but rather a long-time accumulation process. According to Merriam’s study, all of the participants have experienced a big life event, which is crucial for their sudden transformational learning, such as death of a child, illness, car accident and so on (Merriam, 2008). It may take a significant or dramatic event to lead us to question assumptions and beliefs, for example, a natural disaster, the death of a significant other, divorce, a debilitating accident, job loss, or retirement. These experiences are often stressful and painful, and they can cause individuals to question the very core of their existence (Cranton, 2002). Although there are no particular teaching methods that guarantee transformative learning, teachers can only use some strategies to induce or stimulate critical self-reflection; teachers can provide the environment in which adult students can articulate and critically reflect on their assumptions and perspectives.

As a Chinese, I can not help thinking about the transformational teaching situation in China. In the last two decades critical reflection and transformative learning have been highly valued in western countries, especially in United States (Wei, 2006). In China, however, there is not even one article which concerns on critical reflection or transformative learning in the main journals or newspaper of Pedagogy or education before 2000(Liu, 2007). Scholars and researchers have just begun to realize the importance of critical reflection and transformation in recent years, only a few researches have been carried out (Fan, 2010). Thus, discussions and studies on critical reflection and transformative learning of adult student are still far to enough in China. As far as I am concerned, transformation is the highest-level of learning, and critical reflection is the key factor which leads to transformative learning. To achieve the high goals and expectations of education in the 21st century, Chinese educators must pay much attention on critical reflection and transformative learning in adult education, which is necessary and urgent.

References

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Cranton, P. (2002). Teaching for transformation, New directions for adult and continuing education. Wiley Periodicals, Inc, 93(1), 63-71.

Fan J. (2010). Research and revelations of the transformative learning theory. Journal of Hebei Normal University, 12(3), 4-79.

Liu, S. B. (2007) Adult transformative learning and its teaching strategy. Educational Research, 10(1), 73-76.

Mezirow, J. (2000). Learning to think like an adult: Core concepts of transformation theory.  In J. Mezirow & Associates, Learning as transformation (pp. 3-33). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Merriam, S. B. (2008). Transformational learning in Botswana: how culture shapes the process. Adult Education Quarterly, 58(3), 183-197.

Wei, J. (2006). Study on adult transformative learning. Global Education, 12(1), 66-68.