Abstract
Part of the reason transformative education research continues to thrive is that key thinkers in the field such as Mezirow grasp at a very deep level that reality is highly complex and fluid and makes this central to the framing of the theory. The articles featured in this issue illuminate some of the kinds of experience and social forces which contribute to this complexity and which also create disjunctions and dilemmas in everyday life, work, and education. We become sick, experience trauma, suffer injustice, or simply waste our energy in dysfunctional educational institutions and workplaces. Less dramatically, but just as importantly, we get stuck in ourselves—pinched by ritual and routine—or discover we have somehow lost ourselves or others. All the while economic and political forces are in motion beneath us, powerful and often hidden, and like magmas they suddenly crack through the crust of tradition and fracture or even destroy established ways of life and patterns of meaning-making. Once thriving towns become another forgotten part of the rust belt when industry moves on or closes down. Educational systems rooted in centuries of national tradition are disturbed and challenged by the drive to compete internationally. These sorts of social circumstances and life situations, our contributors suggest, also create opportunities for transformative learning.
These are familiar but necessary arguments. A great deal of transformative education research can be described as an attempt to think about how certain practices and ideas and certain forms of relating to self and others can allow us to generatively respond to just such disjunctions and dilemmas. It is by acknowledging and working through the full complexity of our lives that allows us to develop rational, collaborative, democratic modes of thinking and being which bolsters the capacity for meaningful agency. It affords—to use an idea drawn from narrative inquiry which surfaces in three of the four articles collected here—the opportunity to elaborate new narratives and to re-story ourselves. It is also noteworthy that all the articles reassert another core idea within transformative education: Substantive dialogue and a commitment to equality are integral to transformative learning processes.
But these pieces are not simply concerned with vindicating well-established ideas in transformative education, they also seek to develop it in new directions and in relation to new contexts. And in all the articles, it is argued that developing advancing transformative learning theory requires that we consciously avoid thinking dualistically, specifically in relation to the pairs tradition/innovation, mind/body, and individual/collective.
The first article by Barton Buechner, John Dirkx, Zieva Konvisser, Deedee Myers, and Tzofnat Baker is a remarkably ambitious and thought-provoking piece. Part of this is because of its scope: It draws freely from very diverse bodies of research (arts, humanities, adult education, somatics, trauma studies) and describes findings from highly varied research contexts (alternative democratic schools, exonerated women who have been imprisoned, veterans’ retreats, workers coping with the loss of long-held jobs as well as management training). Each case study is interesting in its own right, but what is particularly exciting is the argument that to fully understand transformative learning amongst these cohorts, we need to approach body–mind and the individual–within groups and shared settings in a far more integrated and holistic way. This is based on a reading of the anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) notion of “liminality” (the state of being in-between, at a threshold) which he used to describe rites of passage. The authors describe these groups as being in ambiguous threshold states. Being at the margins is often thought of as potential damaging and isolating, but it is argued here that liminality presents opportunities for growth. One of the major resources for such growth is the experience in liminality of what Turner (1969) called “communitas,” that is the recognition of a shared bond or developing a deep sense of self and other as equals. In discussing various groups in terms of liminality and communitas, the article brings into view something I think is weakly developed in our field—the specific dynamics and qualities of intersubjective experience which lead to collective transformations. This richly suggestive article points us towards groups as having transformative qualities that go beyond the individual which can enhance “self-understanding, relational capacity and a collectively felt sense of possibility.”
Persons in groups, the power of social institutions, and most centrally of all the intertwined nature of mind and body are addressed by Helen Payne, Joy Jarvis, and Amanda Roberts in the second piece featured in this edition. Suffering from what is termed “medically unexplained symptoms” (MUS) is commonplace in contemporary society. People with MUS (things such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia) have to deal not only with pain and discomfort but also the fact that the cause and therefore the hope of a cure remains unknown. The authors argue that supporting patient “self-management” of these symptoms is something that deserves more attention and is a process that transformative learning theory can help explain and support. They discuss an approach that is designed to support such self-management which combines transformative learning theory with other types of adult learning theory and practices, mindfulness techniques, psychotherapy, and self-expression through the arts. They have pioneered this in workshops under the auspices of the National Health Service in the UK. The article describes the types of activities that are involved, and their research on these workshops suggests this can make a very significant difference to patients with MUS. The workshops treat mind and body as inextricably coupled and seek to create space where labelling by medical institutions and an identity tied to suffering can be re-storied. By altering the shape of what Archer (2007) calls our “inner conversation,” one can become more agentic.
Jae Hwa Lee, Margaret Portillo, and Jason Maneely look at transformative learning which stems from efforts to teach “creative confidence.” In the article, they weave tidily summarised research on creativity with transformative learning theory underpinned by a humanist infused notion of authenticity to frame their empirical study of first-year students’ experience of a course on creativity. The study is based on an analysis of the students’ digital portfolios compiled for the course. Three types of perspective transformation related to creativity emerged from this analysis. They found that enhancing creativity amongst students entailed the “demystification of creativity” and learning to see creativity as a common capacity and as a process that requires failure and experiment. The findings suggest that the common understanding of creativity as a ‘gift’, and rare, possessed by individuals can block creativity and thus unpicks a dualistic way of thinking about individual and collective creativity. As one of the participants in their study puts it: “I scoffed at the idea that creativity could be taught…I just assumed that some people were born with the ability to be more creative [but I now see] that all people are creative in their own way.” This is fascinating. It suggests that higher education should seek to design programmes and use pedagogies that tap into everyday creativity rather than solely discuss and celebrate culturally significant works or support individuals to acquire disciplinary, professional, or vocational expertise.
In the final article in this quarter’s edition of the Journal of Transformative Education, Haijun Kang, Qi Sun, and Lei Lyu discuss the effects of a yearlong professional development programme on Chinese school leaders. The programme is designed to expose these school leaders to Western educational theories and practices. The programme is a result of internationalisation polices and the wider globalisation of education. The authors say while the overall effects of internationalisation are not yet clear, it has certainly led to profound shifts in the assumptions of this group of school leaders. The emphasis on personal meaning-making and distributed leadership models common in Western educational have had a transformative impact. This has prompted them to reconsider aspects of their Confucian-influenced approach to education which is based on the ideal of service to wider community and maintaining clearly defined hierarchies of power and authority. As a result, the authors say school leaders are now engaging in a critique of existing school practices in China, which it is believed “turned students into examination machines.” The authors report that this has resulted in a new educational culture that engages with Western ideas while still drawing on Confucian heritage and significantly requires a change in how individuals within collectives are seen and treated.
From my perspective, these articles confirm again just how much progress transformative education scholars have made in unpacking what Damasio (1994) memorably called “Descartes’ error” (the false separation of mind and body). Within transformative education research, we now have a well-elaborated, integrated social, cultural, and biological conception of cognition as an embodied process. The challenge that remains significant is perhaps more practical than theoretical. How can we ensure adult learning spaces, and sites of adults learning in institutions such as hospitals as discussed above, operate in a way that does justice to the interconnected nature of body and mind? On the other hand, it seems to me we are at a much earlier stage in developing adequate theoretical tools for the discussion of the collective and relational in transformative education. Exciting new ground is being broken on these questions, including in this issue. But in a culture which is so saturated, and even constituted, by ideas of the bounded self (Taylor, 1989) and which is often highly individualistic (Macpherson, 1962; Moran, 2015), an enormous amount of further empirical and conceptual work will be required to truly grasp the dialectics of collective/individual change processes and the potential role of transformative education within such change processes. With this in mind, it is worth mentioning to readers that we have just issued a Call for Papers on Civic Education and transformative learning which offers scholars an opportunity to address some of these issues in more detail. We also very much look forward to seeing how the collective dimensions of transformative processes are discussed and debated at the forthcoming conference being held by European Society for Research on the Education of Adults Transformative Processes in Learning and Education Network in Athens in June.