Abstract
With this issue, we are very pleased to announce that Dr. Patricia Cranton has joined the editorship of the Journal of Transformative Education. Dr. Cranton will serve in the role of coeditor of the journal through the current calendar year. Patricia Cranton is a professor of Adult Education (retired), currently affiliated with the University of New Brunswick in Canada and Teachers College at Columbia University. Many of you will recognize her name from her numerous publications in adult education and transformative learning. Most notably, she coedited, with Dr. Edward Taylor, the recently published Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice (Taylor & Cranton, 2012). This handbook represents a remarkable compendium of the scholarship that has evolved around the ideas of transformative education and transformative learning. In addition, she is the coauthor of Stories of Transformative Learning (2014, with Michael Kroth). She has taught courses on transformative learning since 1998. We have asked her to write the Editors’ Notes for this issue and the remainder of this Note is her voice.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be involved with the Journal of Transformative Education as a coeditor with John Dirkx. The year of 1991 was an important one for me. I had been promoted to full professor, and I founded and became director of the Instructional Development Office at Brock University in Ontario. And, of course, Jack Mezirow’s book, Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning, was published in that year. The students in Brock University’s graduate program in adult education were mostly part-time professionals, but there was a small group of full-time students. We seized on Mezirow’s book that year, and we held intense conversations where we discussed the meaning of each sentence, or so it seemed in retrospect. I laugh now, when I think of it. We contemplated, for example, how many meaning schemes would be in a meaning perspective.
Two of the students in this group were my helpers in the Instructional Development Office, and we had a small budget. We had a brilliant idea. We would invite Jack Mezirow to come and speak to university faculty about transformative learning. And meanwhile, of course, we would be able to ask him all of our questions. We didn’t really think he would agree to come. But he did agree. We entered a frantic and excited planning mode. He would speak to faculty, justifying the use of the Instructional Development Office budget. We would ask him to speak to graduate students and, best of all, we would arrange a casual lunchtime conversation for our full-time student group.
Twenty-four years later, I still have vivid memories of that day. We actually did ask Jack Mezirow how many meaning schemes there could be in a meaning perspective! He said, “how would I know?” He responded to most of our questions in this way, moving himself out of the role of authority and turning the questions back to his audience.
From that time on, transformative learning theory became a primary interest in my research and writing. Initially, I followed Mezirow’s theory as closely as I could, while also trying to make it more practical for educators. I also introduced the idea that the process of transformative learning would depend on individual differences in learning styles and personalities. But over the next 10 years or so, I became conscious of and appreciative of alternative perspectives, but I still thought of them as “alternative” perspectives. This thinking is evident in the second edition of Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning (2006).
In recent years, I have become hopeful that there could be an integrated or unified theory of transformative learning which incorporates a wide variety of perspectives. I and Ed Taylor wrote about this in the Handbook of Transformative Learning (2012) and, I think, we demonstrated that thinking in the Handbook in general. At the same time, I believe that transformative learning cannot and should not become so general and so overused that it loses its meaning, as Michael Newman suggests in his “Calling Transformative Learning into Question: Some Mutinous Thoughts” in the Adult Education Quarterly in 2012.
I have been teaching courses on transformative learning at the University of New Brunswick in Canada and at Teachers College in the United States for just about 20 years. Those courses have evolved as my thinking has evolved. I currently teach at least two sections of an online course at Teachers College called “Imagination, Authenticity, and Individuation in Transformative Learning.” In that course, we do not talk about imagination, authenticity, and individuation, but rather we work with images, poetry, fiction, drawings, collages, music, and dreams. Sometimes we have a forum where no words are used, only images. Through this course, with the help of my wonderful students, I continue to expand my understanding of transformative learning. I am sure I will continue to do so.
I hope these stories let you know something about who I am and where and how I come into the field of transformative learning. I don’t know what comes next, but I look forward to seeing what it might be.
In this issue, the articles illustrate the variety of perspectives that are becoming a part of transformative education. In the article by Pamela Coke, Sheila Benson, and Monie Hayes, the transition from being a doctoral student to being an early-career professor is examined through a mentoring framework. Transformative learning has long been associated with mentoring, and this article gives us an intriguing way of thinking about how new faculty create spaces for themselves.
The concept of mindfulness has come up in recent issues of the Journal and has been discussed by John Dirkx in his Editor’s Notes. In this issue, Leigh Burrows discusses how teachers respond to conflict with students, colleagues, or parents with mindfulness and reflection. The author found that mindfulness led to a better understanding of their teachers’ dilemma and that their relationships with others changed.
On a different note, the third article in this issue, by Sharon Patricia Fraser, is concerned with student-centered teaching in science in higher education. The author suggests that placing students at the center of the learning process can be a transformative process.
Authors Laura Beer, Katrina Rodriguez, Christina Taylor, Jennifer Griffin, Naomi Martinez-Jones, Tony Smith, Margaret Lamar, and Reyna Anaya support contemplative practices in higher education, but recognize the difficulty of integrating these practices into the higher education context. The article presents a qualitative study of 17 higher education teachers where the educators talked about contemplative practices; awareness, integration, and interconnectedness were the themes identified in the study.
I am very much looking forward to our continued conversations through the journal and our work to understand and shape the field of transformative education and learning.