Abstract
In The Hedgehog and the Fox, Berlin (2013) engages in an intellectual exercise whereby he classifies various writers into two categories based on their approach to understanding the world. In this classification system, hedgehogs are those people who use a single lens to see and understand everything. For hedgehogs, one defining idea, such as Marx’s lens of class struggle, provides the unifying structure that supersedes all other analytical lens and is used to frame and interpret all phenomena. In contrast, there are foxes, or those people who use many different lenses to understand multifaceted phenomena. William Shakespeare is such a thinker, as his plays demonstrate varieties of nuance, perspectives, and seemingly contradictory yet coexisting personal realities. In the spirit of disclosure, Isaiah Berlin and I both consider ourselves foxes. Personally, I see great functional utility in taking a hedgehog’s perspective, providing it is a good-enough perspective for the task at hand. In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins also draws on this metaphor and argues that successful business enterprises are those which develop a “hedgehog concept” and focus on that core business model rather than trying to be all things to all people. However, as a scholar, I cannot help but think that the adoption of a single organizing framework to understand all reality is greatly, seemingly purposefully, limiting one’s perspectives and thus also one’s understanding. Life is too much complex and multifaceted for any single lens to explain. To mix my metaphors, it is like the hammer that sees every problem as a nail. There is utility in having a hammer (a lens, a theory), and even to become really good at hammering—but if one insists on restricting one’s tool kit to only having this one tool, then they either have to limit themselves to specific tasks (ones requiring the insertion of a nail) or they greatly, horribly mishandle most tasks requiring to be done (like changing the oil in one’s car).
My purpose in introducing this intellectual exercise is to illustrate how there can be a tendency for scholars to be either a hedgehog or a fox when it comes to theories. It is not always an easy game to play. For instance, was Mezirow a hedgehog who used his theory of perspective transformation as a comprehensive theory of learning? Or, was he a fox because he drew on and incorporated so many concepts from disparate disciplines into this theory? As with all things, the answer depends on how you define the terms—and in the end, it is just a game and does not really matter how one chooses to classify him. What is important, however, is how one’s tendency to be a hedgehog or a fox affects one’s use of perspective transformation or any other theory of transformative education (or any other theory related to anything, for that matter). Just as with my metaphor of a hammer, adult education scholars who, choosing to be hedgehogs, use only a single theory of learning to frame all their work have to be careful in limiting the phenomena they study or they will greatly, horribly mishandle most learning phenomena they attempt to analyze—and will do injustice to their theory in the process.
It is useful to consider transformative learning theory (TL), or any specific theory of transformative education, from a fox’s perspective, as one tool in a larger tool kit of analytic lenses. How does Mezirow’s theory of perspective transformation illuminate the particular phenomenon being examined? What facets of the experience does it bring to attention, and what insights into those facets does it provide? How might Schlossberg’s transition theory illuminate it? How might the lens of Bourdieu, Winnicott, and Honneth illuminate a learning phenomenon (West, Fleming, & Finnegan, 2013)? How might different models of adult development or a postmodern critique illuminate it? To restrict oneself to a single lens is to purposefully be blinded to different facets of experience. This is not to imply that every analysis should include multiple lenses, but it does mean that a scholar or practitioner should have a variety of analytic tools from which to choose the one most appropriate for the purposes of the analysis and the phenomena being studied.
And so, this issue begins with a study by Geoffrey Lummis, Graeme Lock, Clare Freeman, and Catherine Anne Ferguson in which Mezirow’s theory of perspective transformation is used as an analytic tool to understand the first-year experience of university students in Australia. A survey was administered to 72 students, 11 of which were then interviewed, to explore the ways they were adapting to university life and how their experiences might be understood through the lens of Mezirow’s theory of perspective transformation. The higher education experience is inherently disorienting for many students, and so, it makes sense to use Mezirow’s 10 phases, which begin with a “disorienting dilemma,” to explore how these students responded to that disorientation. In this case, the participants’ primary challenges revolved around the adaption to new structures and expectations of higher education, and this was reflected in the findings that the most common phases of perspective transformation they experienced were provisional trying on of new roles and building competence and confidence in new roles and relationships.
Next, Roxanna Senyshyn and Paula Smith report on the outcomes of a faculty professional development program focused on teaching and learning in linguistically and culturally diverse classrooms, employing Mezirow’s theory of perspective transformation to understand the outcomes of the program in the first 2 years as well as 4 years afterward. The design of the program (one to two seminars per semester for 2 years) shows elements consistent with Mezirow’s theory, most especially in the frequent dialogue between faculty participants, as well as panel discussions to help participants see the educational experience through the eyes of international students. New ideas were presented and challenged via readings, guest speakers, panels, and other resources. Participants described their learning in terms of expanding their perspectives, increasing their awareness, and so forth, and their long-term outcomes show that the program impacted their teaching practices for years to come.
In our third article, Thomas Mark Edwards and Michael Walker draw on and explore narrative therapy techniques as a useful approach to promote critical self-reflection, and thus also help students develop “a healthy skepticism and a growing sense of autonomy, if not a willingness to act in the face of injustice,” as well as the development of contextual (as opposed to absolute) ways of knowing. A ubiquitous theme in the literature of transformative education is that critical self-reflection is extremely challenging; it does not simply or automatically just happen. These authors provide an analysis of how and why narrative therapy techniques can help break down the barriers and difficulties of critical self-reflection.
Our final article is a theoretical piece on critical pedagogy as viewed through the lens of Zen Buddhism by Kevin Holohan. A primary argument is that the fiction of identity, “the notion of a separate, independent self,” leads to feelings of difference and inferiority, which in turn lead to human suffering. Therefore, the development of a “deep, intuitive awareness” of the interconnectedness of all things has an “ego-diminishing” effect that precludes the causes of suffering at the individual and social levels. Rejecting traditional binaries, including that of rationality versus irrationality, the article rejects reason and nevertheless advocates for “a critique (employing psychological, emotional, and somatic knowing) of the internalized assumptions, attitudes, and biases of the individual in order to transform the individual’s functioning in the world.”
Finally, this issue includes a review by Beth Yoshida-Fisher of the book Peacebuilding Through Dialogue: Education, Human Transformation, and Conflict Resolution, edited by Peter Stearns. This book explores various aspects of dialogue, including its potentialities, requirements, and limitations, as an educational pedagogy, a facilitator of transformation, and a tool for conflict resolution.
I return to the metaphor of the fox and hedgehog to illustrate how one’s place in this classification system—and one’s assumptions about the authors’ place in the system—changes how one understands and interprets articles such as those in this issue. A common critique of transformative learning is that learning experiences that are truly transformative are exceedingly rare, and therefore, a given scholar might have applied Mezirow’s theory too broadly, talking about a learning phenomenon that, albeit having some transformative dimensions, was not a life-changing transformation in and of itself. However, that critique is flawed in that it assumes a hedgehog approach. If, by contrast, one assumes the author is thinking like a fox, then the use of theory is seen differently. The author is not [and is thereby] drawing on a theory of transformation [not] because he or she believes all learners are transforming during a particular experience, but rather because the analytic lens provided by a theory of transformation provides valuable illumination on important learning experiences, even though they [that are] may not necessarily be full-blown transformations. As James (1902/1994) said, “I took these extremer examples as yielding the profounder information” (p. 529). The “extremer” experiences of transformation can provide “profounder” insights into less dramatic learning phenomena, and conversely, significant-if-not-necessarily-transformative-of-every-aspect-of-a-person’s-life learning experiences can help us understand more facets of all types and varieties and degrees of transformative education. This shift from a hedgehog to a fox perspective is incredibly important to becoming a critical yet open-minded reader of academic literature.