Abstract
We live in remarkable and deeply challenging times. We are beset by multiple crises—economic, social, political, and of course ecological—which have deep roots and no easy solutions (Douzinas, 2013; Latour, 2017). Reading and watching the news, participating in daily life, working in education or in seeking to strengthen democratic forms of public life one cannot be struck by the complexity and fragility of our world as well as the enormous creativity of people. As the contemporary critical theorist Hartmut Rosa (2013) puts it, we appear to be in an era marked by “social acceleration.”
In other words, we live in transforming times. But we have not yet developed educational systems, and most pertinently forms of adult and lifelong learning (Walters & Watters, 2017; see also Apple, 2013), which are adequate to meeting the pressing challenges of an ever more tightly meshed, unequal, and interdependent world. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that there appears to be growing interest in transformative education and transformative learning theory. We can see this in terms of the writing, citation, and most widely circulated articles in leading adult education journals and in the publication of recent books (e.g., Alhadeff-Jones, 2017; West, 2016; see also chapters in Milana, Webb, Holford, Waller, & Jarvis, 2018) but perhaps most vividly at conferences. In the past year, there have been two major international conferences exploring transformative learning and education (the International Transformative Learning conference in New York and the European Society for Research on Adult Education and Learning network “Interrogating transformative processes in learning and education” event in Milan). Both events were lively and passionate, and it was clear that the researchers and practitioners who attended them feel that we urgently need to develop forms of transformative education capable of responding to our complex, diverse, and polarized world.
The aim of this journal is to create space to engage in sustained and critical dialogue about the theory and practice of transformative education in, and for, transforming times. The authors featured in this issue contribute to this in fascinating ways. Reading through the pieces together is a reminder of just how vibrant the transformative learning community has become. The present issue features four articles exploring transformative learning in Australia, Scotland, Kenya, Côte D’Ivoire, and the United States in a range of educational and social settings. As befits a journal such as this, the issues the authors of these articles raise, and the questions they seek to answer, are broad and wide-ranging. Nevertheless, there are several shared themes, which are also long-standing concerns in transformative education scholarship, that are particularly prominent in this edition. They are the importance of collaborative relationships in transformative learning, the significance of how we imagine the boundaries of education for fostering meaningful and deep learning, and the continuing relevance of Mezirow’s work (1991, 2000, inter alia) once it is treated as “living theory” elaborated and developed through empirical research and through open, critical dialogue with other theoretical perspectives.
Collaborative Relationships, Boundary Crossing, and Theory Building
One of the defining characteristics of most adult education research and transformative learning theory is the importance given to the lifelong and life-wide learning of adults. This holistic, learner-centered approach to education stresses the importance of building on the capabilities developed and insights acquired through experience. By definition, this entails reflecting on how learning occurs across and between settings as well as through the life course and therefore changes the way we imagine the boundaries of educational work. This also alters the value given to collaboration within and beyond institutions and the importance given to the relational dimension of education.
Lyn Tett draws on her extensive, longitudinal research with participants in several Scottish literacy projects in communities and prisons to explore how inequalities and certain forms of socialisation within families, education, and culture as a whole can disable and limit people by creating damaging “learning identities.” The interviews and focus groups offer rich insights into this; as one of their participants puts it, at school, they “sort of left me to one side,” and this undramatic but significant marginalisation as a learner affected the person deeply. Tett also highlights the positive effect of locally attuned and biographically sensitive adult education based on peer collaboration and supportive educational relationships has in overcoming “damaged” learner identities. The impact of good practice, the research findings suggest, can be truly profound, opening up new horizons, affecting people’s sense of self, and refiguring what might be possible for them in the future. The article takes Illeris’s (2014) work on identity in transformative learning processes in a new direction by drawing on Foucault’s notion of power and discourse and sociocultural literacy studies. By doing so, Tett offers a subtle and layered account of how change on an individual basis is limited or enabled by wider social structures.
Transformative learning, collaboration, and boundary crossing are taken up from a different perspective by Neva Lozada and Ane Turner Johnson. They explore the powerful effect of peer support and peer leadership in the context of American higher education. They emphasise the significance of relationality and recognition in peer learning activities that go beyond the prescribed curriculum and disciplinary learning. Engaging with other students and staff in an open, horizontal, and supportive way builds confidence, changes how students see themselves and their university, and leads to the elaboration, modification, and transformation of meaning perspectives. This is framed through a highly stimulating discussion of the phases of transformative learning, which synthesises Mezirow’s work with ideas offered by Nohl (2015) in Adult Education Quarterly. The result is a novel framework for capturing the unfolding of critical learning processes which begins in multiple, contingent ways and which results in changes and transformations of varying levels of intensity and scope.
One of the most significant challenges facing us as a community of scholars is to develop a theory of transformative learning which is capable of recognising and working towards what De Sousa Santos (2007) has called a global “ecology of knowledges.” This requires knowledge and understanding at a very deep level of the rich diversity of contexts and cultures across the world and the multiplicity of ways the local and global is being reconfigured. While our community is certainly international, it is not yet fully global if we judge by our conferences, journal authors, editors, patterns of citation (see Nylander & Fejes, 2019). It is therefore especially engaging to read about research that has been conducted in sub-Saharan Africa. Ane Turner Johnson explores the role of public universities in Kenya and Côte D’Ivoire in building peace after disturbances and communal violence that resulted in many lives being lost in both places. Rich qualitative research explores the way these institutions operate as (un)bounded spaces in relation to wider communities that are shaped by their layered histories and ongoing struggles over power and politics. Johnson details how the case study university in Kenya decided to reach out to the surrounding community after a period of conflict in order to bolster peacemaking efforts and to do so engaged with a range of civil society actors and student organisations while also banning politicians from the campus. By contrast, in Côte D’Ivoire, the response postconflict was to strengthen the boundaries between the campus and the community and to ban student unions in defence of academic space. The author concludes from these two case studies that “consensus building infrastructures” in universities—collaborative relationships and dialogical space over time—are a precondition for transformative learning and for contributing to peacebuilding more widely. This nuanced account indicates why flat, decontextualized accounts of the role and boundaries of higher education—such as the liberal ideal of the university as “a place apart” or simplistic notions of community engagement—are not workable in fostering transformative education. Johnson’s research offers a useful reminder of the complexity and variety of political and social conditions that impact on transformative and emancipatory education as well as the need to work through theories of learning in a careful, grounded, and contextualized way.
As noted already, Mezirow’s work informs all the contributions made to this edition of the journal. It is a set of ideas that is being adapted and changed through research, close critique, and engagement with other perspectives. Steven Hodge’s article is an outstanding example of this, and his piece makes a substantive contribution to research on transformative learning. The boundaries—and the assumptions that go with them—that he explores are mainly theoretical. Based on small-scale qualitative research, he asks highly critical and generative questions about the role of formal and disciplinary knowledge and specifically “threshold concepts” (see Meyer, Land, & Baillie, 2010) in transformative learning processes. In his review of the development of adult education as a field and what he calls “mainstream” transformative education theory, he suggests there is a dominant orientation that overlooks the potential of propositional, codified, and disciplinary specific knowledge in transformative learning. Hodge poses highly stimulating questions to researchers in transformative education, which highlight the assumptions of the research field. This is a line of inquiry which deserves further debate and exploration and brings us back to Dewey’s (1916) comments in Democracy and Education about overcoming dichotomous thinking about knowledge and learning and the ideas of Vygotsky (1986) on scientific concepts as well as more recent developments in the sociology of knowledge (Young, 2007).
It is appropriate that these stimulating and critical reflections in challenging times are followed by a review of Antonia Darder’s book introducing Paulo Freire most famous work Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Janet Ferguson.