Whither Transformative Education? Taking Stock Well into the Twenty-First Century

A Brief Retrospective

Fifteen years ago, and decades after the publication of his seminal article “Perspective Transformation,” Jack Mezirow continued a dialogue with John Dirkx in this journal that they had begun at the Sixth International Transformative Learning Conference (TLC) in 2005 (Dirkx et al., 2006). They provided overviews of their perspectives on transformative learning, its meaning, context, and process. Cranton observed that their views were “complementary rather than contradictory” and that “the complex endeavor that is transformative learning encompasses both a rational process of learning within awareness (Mezirow) and the deep learning that integrates experiences of the outer world with the inner community of the self (Dirkx)” (Washburn, 2006, p. 102).

As the new editor of JTE at the time, I related that I had been half expecting and hoping that this dialogue would mark the inception of a GUT—grand unifying theory—but concluded that I really did not want such a thing. I agreed with Regina O. Smith who, in reflecting on the 2005 TLC, wrote, “A part of me wants to see the theories more bounded by a clear definition, but another part of me resists attempts at boundedness because the theories would have little opportunity to be inclusive of fundamental differences in adults” (Cranton, Dirkx, Gozawa, et al., 2006, p. 152). The diversity of particular concern to Smith was that of race, and it was clear, as Elizabeth Kasl noted in her reflections on the conference, that, although the field had expanded to include emancipatory learning linked to social justice and action, theorists and practitioners from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds were not represented in proportion to their numbers and influence. Joanne Gozawa’s reflections completed the report with a challenge to “deeply transform our frames of reference, to adopt a ‘cyclical, cumulative rather than a linear, discreet perspective of educational foundations’” (p. 103).

In this same issue of JTE, Maureen O’Hara (2006), too, critiqued the philosophical assumptions of Western education, with an urgency that many, perhaps, are just now beginning to feel. She wrote that the charge for education in this time of anxiety- and fear-provoking change and complexity that is the postindustrial information age is to expand and evolve “the modal consciousness of our species” (p. 113). This massive undertaking will require nothing short of a “wholesale reworking of the mission, curriculum content, pedagogy, and modes of inquiry of our educational institutions” (Washburn, 2006, p. 101). To information literacy, O’Hara added eco-literacy, spiritual literacy, and epistemological fluency among the competencies required for these times with learning to be supported by the whole-person pedagogies and contemplative modes of inquiry.

This brief retrospective of how prominent theorists and practitioners viewed transformative learning 15 years ago suggests that the richness of the domain, the expansiveness of the problem space, were apparent then as now. An apt metaphor for this aspect of the enterprise is a riotously-colored and enormous tapestry, the warp and weft of which are the aspirations undergirding a shared interest in “another education” (Markos & McWhinney, 2003, p. 4). Also apparent years ago was the inherent complexity of the individual persons and systems that have been our concern, as well as the great diversity amongst all. Perhaps a crazy quilt is a better metaphor for what we have been about, each patch unique and some clashing with adjacent others, reflecting the tensions amongst the often widely disparate viewpoints of those focusing on discreet areas of the patchwork. It was also clear then, as now, that any attempt to succinctly define transformative learning, the phenomenon of interest, is exceedingly difficult. Switching from fabric to animal metaphors, others (e.g., Cranton & Taylor, 2012; Markos & McWhinney, 2003) have evoked the familiar Sufi parable of the blind men and the elephant to characterize our efforts to grasp a sense of the whole of our work. This challenge has implications for theory development that, in turn, impact our ability, for example, to design and evaluate innovative curricula to support learners who aspire to better their own lives and to improve their communities.

A strategy to advance the field—and the impetus for this special issue of JTE—is to document in a systematic fashion learners’ experiences and to assess the associated outcomes using tools that operationalize key constructs of transformative learning theory. The mix of metaphors that I just used to quickly take stock of the field suggests that researchers will be challenged to design methodologically sound protocols for data collection and analysis. What thread or threads in that tapestry do you pull? Which patch or set of patches do you examine? And then what? If you are focused on the elephant’s trunk, are you missing something vital on its backside? After decades of theoretical and empirical work and faced with sometimes withering critique, I have wondered how we will proceed now and with what success.

Whither Transformative Education?

In The Handbook of Transformative Learning, editors E. W. Taylor and Cranton (2012) observed that since the introduction of transformative learning to the field of adult education decades ago, no other theory had shown such promise, stimulated so much research, or sparked such controversy. Addressing this last point, the notion of transformative learning has been characterized as simply good learning (Newman, 2012) and the theory itself as problematic in many respects, except at the level of a conceptual metaphor, albeit a beautiful one (Howie & Bagnall, 2013).

In the Adult Education Quarterly article in which he first shared his “mutinous thoughts,” Newman (2012) discussed a number of flaws that mark explanations of transformative learning. He began with the “false premise” made by Mezirow in 1978 that “transformative learning differs from other learning in kind rather than degree” (p. 40) and ends with the “most troubling flaw…the way some writers have associated spirituality with transformative learning…as if its inclusion were unproblematic” (p. 46). Addressing the responses his critique not surprisingly invited, Newman concluded in his 2014 Adult Education Quarterly article that transformation, the word itself, “raises false hopes” and that the role accorded to transformative learning is “simply too big” (p. 350). He quoted O’Sullivan who in 2012 wrote

Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender; our body awareness, our visions of alternative approaches to living; our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy. (p. 350)

Howie and Bagnall (2013) not only critiqued transformative learning theory but “mutinous” commentary on it such as Newman’s (2012). They discussed a dozen interwoven problematic areas for the theory that together argue for interpreting it as a metaphor. Among these are unidirectional theorizing, with the theory as outlined by Mezirow (1978; 1991) leading to new applications with little impact on the theory itself: lack of quantifiability with no agreed-upon measures; lack of predictiveness resulting from the theory’s descriptively grounded development from a specific, small sample of participants; and problematic exemplary cases. In reviewing this latter area of weakness for the theory, the authors concluded that this inability to identify what transforms is “representative of much of the research, in which outcomes are purported to be transformative while the causal mechanisms remain unarticulated and unclear” (p. 826). Howie and Bagnall concluded that, if transformative learning, which has such strong face validity that it is widely and uncritically accepted, is regarded as a conceptual metaphor rather than as a theoretical construct, then it may be more fruitful in practice. For example, generating an image of learning—the target domain of the metaphor—as a transformative experience—the “light on the road to Damascus” source domain of the metaphor—stimulates “academic enquiry and investigation into hitherto unexamined human learning processes relating to significant shifts in individual’s perceptions of themselves, the world and how the world works” (p. 831). Howie and Bagnall added that, because they can be “extended, modified, reformulated, added to, redefined, re-envisioned, and played with” (p. 831), conceptual metaphors can be applied in more diverse contexts than operationalized theoretical constructs. They cited applications in corporate America in workplace learning and coaching, as well as in women’s education and work in Bolivia and farming schools in rural West Africa.

In This Issue

Whither transformative education? This question suggests, and critiques in recent years have maintained, that transformative learning as a theory and, by extension, transformative education as a practice are wandering and meandering to whatever place, whithersoever. Some may indeed, as Howie and Bagnall (2013) suggested, employ the term transformative learning as a conceptual metaphor, however implicitly. However, that does not seem to be the case with the authors of the articles in this issue, some of whom discuss at length—and reflectively, critically—the theoretical underpinning of their work. Importantly for our purposes here, these educator scholars have proposed and, in some cases, tested new approaches to assessing transformative learning, including methods that operationalize key constructs in transformative learning theory.

Table 1 lists for each article what was assessed, who was assessed, and what methodology was employed to better understand the processes and outcomes of transformative education. This body of work reflects the transformative learning literature of the past several decades both in the variety of the learning experiences examined and in what settings. This work also advances the field in various ways that I address in response to questions that we have often asked ourselves as educator scholars who want to better support our learners.

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Table 1.

Articles in This Special Issue.

Author(s)	Assessing What	Assessing Whom	Methodology
Cox	Transformative outcomes—“learner’s profound re-assessment of beliefs”—and their drivers: social support, attitude toward uncertainty, criticality	Adult learners; graduates of a public service management Master’s degree program (full field study)	Development and validation of a 30-item exploratory instrument, TRansformative Outcomes and PrOcesses Scale (TROPOS)
den Hayer, Smith, & Irving	Application of knowledge and skills to enhance community development practice and foster positive social change, that is, behavioral changes	Graduates of an institute that trains practitioners for citizen-led, assets-based development	Learning from Stories of Change—adaptation of two M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) frameworks: Most Significant Change (MSC) and Sensemaker; reflective and participatory data collection with a qualitative summative analysis
Fisher	Personal narrative and perspective transformations; critical moments; personal narratives ⇓→ social narratives	Youth leaders in Colombian comunas	Applied field research; co-inquiry in focus groups and workshops guided by the Coordinated Management of Meaning theory; narrative analysis process
Kwon, Han, & Nicolaides	Transformative outcomes and their drivers: social support, attitude toward uncertainty, criticality	Employees at a steel manufacturing company who had attended a leadership development workshop	Validation study; post-workshop administration of the TROPOS (Cox, 2017, 2021)
Savicki & Price	Critical reflection on assumptions	Undergraduate study abroad students	Construct validation of measurement method: Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a computer-based, quantitative method of content analysis; series of reflective writings
Searle, Ahn, Fels, & Carbone	Perspective changes based on lived experience; also assessing assessment—dialogical learning opportunities embodied within experience and reflective engagement	University students—two bachelor of education courses and one undergraduate course; teachers/authors themselves	Luminiferous inquiry; intertwining narratives and dialogic inquiry—narratives about holistic assessments of students’ learning (conscious, unconscious, emotional, and intuitive ways of knowing); “arts-informed modalities of embodying assessment”
Tedford & Kitchenham	Perspective transformations; critical reflection and critical self-reflection on assumptions	Students in post-secondary English course; instructor/author	Action research framework; “bounded action research exploratory study”; reading journal entries/classwork/self-evaluations/post-semester interviews; reflexive researcher journal—deep self-criticism (epistemic critical self-reflection)
Wiley, Wiley, Intolubbe-Chmil, Bhuyan, & Acheson	Transformations of the self—greater understanding of the self and of the world—through critical reflection on beliefs, assumptions, and values, as well as through working symbolically with contents of the unconscious	University students who had experienced high-impact practices: internships, study abroad, multi-cultural and global studies coursework, undergraduate research abroad	Depth-based quantitative approach; operationalization of TL theory through a crosswalk between Hoggan (2016a) taxonomy of aspects of transformation and the Beliefs Events and Values Inventory (BEVI) based on the Equilintegration (EI) framework; validation of crosswalk mapping through analysis of large dataset of BEVI administrations

Note. Characterization of the methodology used is that of the author(s).

Why Transformative Learning?

To the problematic areas discussed above, Howie and Bagnall (2013) added the “uncritical acceptance of the theory’s theoretical solidity” such that it is describing an existing entity, “a thing out there to be researched, elucidated, explicated, polished and refined rather than as an explanatory and predictive interpretation of experiences and phenomena” (p. 828). That the theory itself has been reified—a thing to be polished—by some is no doubt true but what is indeed solid, or as solid as any complex human phenomenon can be, are types of experiences that learners report and that educators seek to foster. As I began working on this article, two compelling exemplars of what we are about presented themselves as grist for my mill.

My book club recently read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated (2018). The youngest of seven in a Mormon survivalist’s family in rural Idaho, Tara was unschooled until she powered her way through a curriculum she devised to pass the ACT and gained admission to Brigham Young University. Among the new discoveries for the incoming freshman was the Holocaust and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In a meeting with a professor

I explained as best I could, that my parents didn’t believe in public education, that they’d kept us home. When I’d finished, he laced his fingers as if he were contemplating a difficult problem. “I think you should stretch yourself. See what happens.” “Stretch myself how?” He leaned forward suddenly, as if he’d just had an idea. “Have you heard of Cambridge?” I hadn’t. “It’s a university in England,” he said. (p. 230)

Why transformative learning? How can we explain the ascendance and prominence of transformative learning theory in adult education? As Howie and Bagnall (2013) maintained, the theory has face validity, arguably because it names “what is” in some instances for learners, as well as for educators. Individual learners like Tara Westbrook may report a dramatic and qualitative shift in their sense of self and/or consciousness. Alternatively, others may notice a substantive alteration in a learner’s way of being in the world that may materially impact the larger community, as seems to be the case with Slack’s new software engineers. Transformative learning arguably is at once an experience or series of experiences with consequential outcomes for the individual and an approach to adult education that addresses pressing societal needs.

What Exactly Is Transforming?

And how would we know that a transformation has occurred? I will address this second question in a later section as it very much depends on the response to the first, which asks, as Kegan (2008) has: What “form” transforms? Kegan maintains that the consequential change that we recognize as transformative occurs with a shift in the “deep underlying epistemology (the form that transforms) we use to organize meaning” (p. 46). On this view, we not only construct meanings from what we encounter in our inner and outer experiencing (and with further encounters change these meanings), we also change the very form itself by which we make these meanings. Kegan suggested that Mezirow’s frame of reference is a form of knowing—that is, an epistemology—which can change in the deep and consequential way we would recognize as transformative.

Illeris (2014) later argued that Kegan’s question—What form transforms?—had never been satisfactorily answered and that this is problematic in at least two respects. First, uncertainty about the boundaries of the form in question invites all manner of learning activities and endeavors to be considered transformative. Second, a tendency to prioritize the cognitive dimension—Mezirow’s frames of reference, meaning perspectives, and habits of mind—over the emotional and social dimensions and the situatedness of learning processes has overly restricted the domain of transformative learning. Illeris noted that Cranton (2005), Dirkx (1997; 2006), E. W. Taylor (2009), as well as Mezirow (2006, 2009), had critiqued this imbalance, and he credited Kegan with most clearly defining, although not explicitly naming, the target area. That is to say, the form that transforms comprises intrapersonal and interpersonal, as well as cognitive, lines of psychological development (Kegan, 2008).

So, failure to identify—and name—the form that transforms results, on the one hand, in too broad a target domain and, on the other, a construct that is too narrow to encompass important aspects of the human experience. Among the candidate names for the Goldilocks form that transforms, which Illeris (2014) considered, are the person/individual/learner, the personality, the self, and the soul. Of these, self “as the center of the individual consciousness, collects and holds together the outcomes of important learning” (p. 151). He settled on identity, however, explaining that it is similar in composition to the self but that it has been understood, beginning with Erikson’s (1994; 1998) theoretical work, as a psychosocial construct wherein interactions between the person—and self—and the social environment influence development over the lifespan. Notable among the reasons Illeris gave for adopting identity as the form that transforms is that it then “becomes possible to establish a direct connection to the current conditions and frames of society that create both the growing need for and the conditions of the transforming processes” (p. 153). He concluded that identity “spans all the dimensions of learning and mental processes: the cognitive, emotional, and the social as well as the environmental and societal situatedness of this totality” (p. 160). Arguably, in both of the cases discussed earlier, there were deep and consequential changes in identity; for Tara Westover, it was a compelling, at times tumultuous, personal transformation and, as we read about with the parolee Slack engineers, it is the societal situatedness of their individual transformative experiences that is salient.

Newman (2012) contrasted identity and consciousness, something that he said the transformative learning literature had failed to do. The former, the “more superficial of the two,” is but the “mask, the persona we present to the world” (p. 42), which we can alter at will. Although the notion that we have full control over our identity is likely not the consensus position of psychologists, Newman’s claim serves to make his point that it is consciousness, our “experience of existence,” that must be reworked for something like transformative learning to occur. This ground of our being develops over our lifetimes “in the continual encounter between our self and the social and material world…and any learning effectively done contributes to the continuing creation of our consciousness” (p. 42). Newman added that the contrast between identity and consciousness is evident in a comparison of Mezirow’s (1981; 1991) perspective transformation and Freire’s (1972) conscientization. He explained that, whereas the former tends to involve intense self-examination resulting, for example, in “Provisional trying of new roles” (p. 42), the latter, as a collective activity, results in a “heightened form of consciousness in which we feel and we think and we do with clarity and intensity” (p. 43). Newman cautioned though that educators and program facilitators often mistake mobilization for transformation and added this to his list of flaws in the transformative learning literature.

In response, Dirkx (2012) argued that Newman’s (2012) analysis was based primarily on a sociological framing of self-formation that “minimizes important psychological dynamics associated with consciousness development” (p. 399) and, further, that he used the idea of consciousness development to argue against transformative learning as being anything other than good learning. Dirkx characterized transformative learning as self-formation that involves critiquing the self as it has developed in a particular sociocultural context as well as nurturing that which is innate in one’s psyche. That is to say, the “former seeks to address self-deceptive practices and the latter helps encourage the unfolding of a more integrated and authentic self” (p. 402). Further, these intertwined processes, which tend to be continuous and ongoing, manifest themselves a deepening and broadening understanding of one’s sense of self, the world, and being in the world that may, on occasion, be experienced as a transformation—and even an abrupt one—of consciousness. On this view, then, the form that transforms is consciousness, as Dirkx recently confirmed (personal communication, November 18, 2019).

Cranton and Kasl (2012) also commented on Newman’s (2012) article, asserting that many of the flaws he identified in the transformative learning literature are the result of a general failure to distinguish among process, outcomes, and context. Outcomes for Mezirow, they explained, would be shifts in habits of mind or, using Newman’s terminology, shifts in consciousness. Among the processes that could foster or precipitate these shifts are critical reflection, experiential learning, and ideological critique, any of which could occur in a wide variety of contexts, “and then within that, several ways in which people revise their perspectives (cognitive, extrarational, social, relational, artistic, and intuitive.). Each path leads to transformative learning in a different way” (p. 397). Cranton and Kasl suggested that a unified theory of transformative learning that takes these different trajectories into account would directly address many of Newman’s “mutinous thoughts.”

How and for What Ends Do We Broaden the Construct of Transformative Learning?

In their concluding chapter to the 2012 Handbook of Transformative Learning, Taylor and Cranton observed that the theoretical tensions among scholars and practitioners appear due, at least in part, to differences in the discourse used to characterize the dramatic shifts associated with transformative learning. They contrasted, for example, the emphasis by K. Taylor and Elias (2012) on psychological changes experienced by the individual learner, using a developmental perspective after Kegan and Daloz (as cited in E. W. Taylor & Cranton, 2012), with Brookfield’s focus on the individual’s changing relationship with society, using critical theory after Habermas. In the first instance, the transformation might be from a socialized mind, characterized by an inner state of subjectivity and self-consciousness, to a self-authoring mind that can reflect on these and is experienced as autonomous and individuated (Kegan, 2008). In the second, the transformation is “from the competitive, individualist ethics and systems of capitalism to the collective, interdependent, and cooperative ethics and systems of democratic socialism” (Brookfield, 2012, p. 131).

E. W. Taylor and Cranton (2012) noted, however, that despite their different emphases, these theorists and others represented in the volume were attempting to expand the focus of their scholarship and research. The new discourse they saw in Brookfield’s (2012) work includes individual cognition as a unit of analysis with transformation defined as a “qualitative ‘change in the way people think, not just a change in external political and economic arrangements’” (p. 557). Similarly, Dirkx (2012) and K. Taylor and Elias (2012), while focused on personal transformation, recognized that changes in one’s self occur in, and are affected by, the community in which one resides. Whereas these efforts suggest that a more integrated theory of transformative learning seems possible, what all it might encompass was not clear at that time. Taylor and Cranton concluded that most theorists still seemed “strongly rooted in their units of analysis” (p. 558).

Several theorists have explicitly argued for a broad interdisciplinary systems approach to transformative learning theory. To understand the inherent complexity of individuals who themselves live and learn in multiple social-ecological contexts—from the microsystem of the family and school to the macrosystem of cultural attitudes and ideologies (Bronfenbrenner, 1979)—requires, as Alhadeff-Jones (2012) suggested, “multiple levels of analysis (individual, organization, institutional, societal) in order to question what characterizes their mutual relationships and how they are intertwined with each other” (p. 184). In their review of research on transformative learning theory from 2006 to 2010, E. W. Taylor and Snyder (2012) found increased interest in how relationships at the microsystem level affect the individual learner. They cited Nohl’s (2009) early biographical explorations with a small sample of individuals that found that transformative learning depended to a large extent on social recognition—that is to say, acknowledgment and possibly appreciation by peers of the changes experienced and manifested. He later replicated this work with diverse age and topic domain groups (2017) and presented a detailed typology of phases of transformative learning that departs in significant ways from earlier models. For example, he found that the process of transformation typically begins, not with a disorienting dilemma, but when “novelty, neither anticipated nor planned, breaks into life” (p. 39). In two of the phases—social testing and mirroring and social consolidation and reinterpretation—interpersonal relationships are central to and “boost” the process.

Other scholars and researchers have incorporated insights into their work from seemingly far-flung disciplines. Complexity theory, which originated decades ago to investigate physical and biological systems, has framed recent studies of teacher practices and education (e.g., Martin & Dismuke, 2018). The approach to the study of transformative learning advocated by Alhadeff-Jones (2012; 2019) is also informed by complexity theory, as is that of Lange (2012; 2015; 2018). This perspective from New Science “means embracing tensions found between a linear (such as phases) and a non-linear (for example, recursive, spontaneity) transformative process, the singular or local and the universal, and the predictable and unpredictable” (E. W. Taylor & Cranton, 2012, p. 358). To theoretical insights from quantum physics, Lange added what can be learned about transformative learning from other relational ontologies, including North American Indigenous philosophies and Eastern mysticism.

Ntseane (2012) contrasted adult education in collectivist African and individualistic Euro-Western systems, the latter often paying little attention to the sociocultural contexts that shape learning—and transformation. Among the African worldviews that she saw as potentially contributing to the continued development of transformative learning theory is übuntu or botho, an African humanism that holds that we can only be human in relation to others and that through understanding this deeply, we come to care for and be of service to others. Ntseane noted that the “persistent determination” she and her Third World colleagues have to bring African worldviews like übuntu to the further development of transformative learning theory “speaks to our marginalization in knowledge construction circles” (p. 278). Indeed, Finnegan (2019) recently observed that judging by our conferences, journal editors, etc. our community is not yet fully global. A global community of scholars is required to map the “ecology of knowledges” that reflects the “rich diversity of contexts and cultures across the world and the multiplicity of ways the local and global is being reconfigured” (p. 109). Beginning to join such an effort are scholars familiar with the German notion of Bildung, a 200-year-old concept prominent in continental Europe education.

According to the editors of Transformative Learning Meets Bildung, with no literal translation into English, Bildung connotes a “cultivation of the self by the self, as well as to the state of being educated, cultivated or learned” (Fuhr, Laros, & Taylor, 2017, p. ix). They observed that the two theoretical approaches conceptualize learning in a similar fashion—namely, the reconstruction of experiences as one comes to develop a critical perspective on knowledge—with Mezirow from one tradition and Marotzki from the other agreeing that meaning is, at once, a cognitive event and a “social construct that is produced and changed in social interactions” (p. ix). Two differences between Bildung and transformative learning are particularly pertinent to this discussion. One, the former is embedded in continental and other philosophical traditions with much of the scholarly discourse based on theoretical inquiries whereas research on the latter has been predominantly empirical. Fuhr and colleagues suggested that the latter pay more attention to its own theoretical foundations, as well as to recent inquiries into “core concepts of transformative learning outside research on adult learning” (p. xiii). Two, and related to the first, is Bildung’s application to learning across the lifespan—from childhood to youth to adulthood—in contrast to transformative learning’s focus on adult learning. The editors conclude that the transformative learning theory might advance from studies that examine, for example, the similarities between learning in youth and adulthood. ¹

Shortly before transformative learning theory met Bildung (Fuhr et al., 2017), Hoggan (2016a) suggested that Mezirow’s rather circumscribed approach be referred to as perspective transformation and that transformative learning be applied to a broader range of similar phenomena. As such, it would serve as a metatheory—that is to say, an “umbrella under which several theories of development or learning are classified together based on their commonalities regarding human nature” (Aldrige et al., as cited in Hoggan, 2016a, p. 63). Derived from a systematic review of research literature published over 12 years (2003–2014) in JTE, Adult Education Quarterly, and Adult Learning, Hoggan’s (2016a; 2016b) typology comprises six broad categories of outcomes that represent changes in Worldview, Self, Epistemology, Ontology, Behavior, and Capacity. Each category includes subcategories that reflect the complexity and richness of learners’ experiences as documented by the research literature. Hoggan (2016a) concluded the presentation of his empirically-based, wide-ranging typology of transformative learning experiences with a definition of transformative learning as a metatheory: “Transformative learning refers to processes that result in significant and irreversible changes in the way a person experiences, conceptualizes, and interacts with the world” (p. 71). He explained that three criteria must be met for a change to be considered transformative. First, the change must be of sufficient depth that it has a significant impact on the person’s lived and felt experience, on how he or she understands or how makes sense of the world, and on how he or she acts, including the specific behaviors chosen and the way in which they are performed. Second, the breadth of the change must be such that it is manifest across a number of contexts in the person’s life. And third, the change must evidence relative stability; indeed, in common parlance, the term transformation implies that the new form is permanent, irreversible. With perhaps the exception of third, which implies that that which has transformed cannot change further, Hoggan’s conceptualization appears to be the consensus view of most educator-scholars, including the contributors to this issue.

How Do We Assess Transformative Learning to Advance Transformative Learning Theory?

In their critique of a “theory in progress,” E. W. Taylor and Cranton (2013) outlined issues that they hoped would provoke further discussion and research. Three focus on central constructs of the theory: experience, empathy, and desire to change. They noted that, although ever present, these aspects of transformative learning are “rarely deconstructed or explored in depth” (p. 35). Most central is experience, the “core substance of a transformation,” about which can be asked: “What constitutes an experience (which should lend insight into what is not an experience)? What gives meaning to an experience? What distinguishes a transformative experience from other types of experiences?” (p. 35). Imperative for future researchers, they concluded, is to recognize the “dialectical nature of experience and context—it is a reciprocal process of the sociocultural and historical setting, others (social recognition, relationships) and the personal interpretation of change” (p. 37). Another issue that Taylor and Cranton discussed concerns the inherently positive orientation of transformative learning; grounded in humanistic and constructivist assumptions about learners, an outcome such as self-actualization that, in turn, contributes to the greater good of the community is presumed.

Figure 1, which is intended to represent the complex space in which educator-scholars and researchers work, presents a heuristic that could be used to suggest future research questions, the answers to which could drive further theory development. In its construction, I considered the issues raised by E. W. Taylor and Cranton (2013) in their critique. Reading from left to right, the figure first lists examples of antecedent personal and sociocultural factors that characterize or affect the learner. In the center are intervening mechanisms—mind/body systems—and processes—experiential/educational—that mediate or moderate transformative changes. Outcomes at both the individual and social/organizational levels of analysis are listed on the right. The ellipses are placeholders for additional antecedents, mediators/moderators, and outcomes.

Hoggan’s (2016a) typology of learning experiences provides examples of constructs that could be explored using qualitative strategies—such as semi-structured interviews, narrative inquiry, and arts-based techniques—or operationalized and assessed using quantitative methods. Several of his constructs are included at the top of the figure as experiential outcomes, and others at the bottom as proximal outcomes. Including measures of selected antecedent personal and sociocultural factors in research designs could lead to a better understanding for whom a particular type of experience or intervention leads to change that is transformative. In addition, research that systematically varies aspects of an innovative educational strategy and compares outcomes in between-groups designs would increase our understanding of the process of transformative learning.

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Figure 1.

Research framework.

I shared an earlier version of this figure with a colleague who immediately saw “path analysis” in the whole whereas I, as one interested in individual learners’ lived experience of personal transformation, had thought “phenomenology” in focusing on the upper right-hand quadrant. This is indeed a great time to be a methodologist. Quantitative researchers like my colleague have increasingly more sophisticated data management systems and innovative statistical tools: multidimensional scaling, hierarchical clustering, etc. (Rencher & Christensen, 2012). Qualitative researchers, as well, have more—and more confronting—strategies of inquiry: critical ethnography, hermeneutic phenomenology, dramaturgical interviewing, performative writing, etc. (Berg & Lune, 2017). With the exception of King’s studies from 15 to 20 years ago that combined student surveys and interviews (e.g., King, 1999; 2004), largely missing from the research strategies employed in our endeavors are mixed methods. A search of the databases accessible through my university library yielded just three recently-published mixed methods studies of transformative learning (Kum-Yeboah & James, 2014; McCusker, 2013; Wilhelmson et al., 2015).

Researchers in the social and behavioral sciences are increasingly combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in more, as well as more complex, strategies of inquiry (Tashakkori & Teddlie, 2010). As qualitative—as well as quantitative—methods have evolved, researchers have found that by combining these disparate approaches, greater insight can be gained about the inherently complicated human condition and the wicked problems persons and communities often face. ² Among the many mixed-methods designs is one characterized by an initial phase of qualitative data collection and analysis that yields themes that are then used to inform the development of a quantitative instrument to further explore the research problem; in the final phase of these exploratory sequential designs, the findings from the two strands of data are integrated or linked (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). Taken as a whole, our field appears to be engaged in the first phase of such a strategy with ample qualitative findings to inform the creation of quantitative measures of processes and outcomes—a sort of widely- or crowd-sourced exploratory sequential design that is ready to move into phase two.

Having Taken Stock, Whither Transformative Education?

To continue to support transformative change in adult learners now that we are well into the 21st century, we have asked: What have we aspired to do? What do we think we are doing? To what extent are we speaking past one another? (And is this really a problem?) There are no easy answers to these and other questions about the status of this work, but it does it not seem to be such a stretch to say that we have a general, shared sense of what we are about and for what ends. We have found that certain types of interventions—educational and experiential, formal and less so—appear to foster deep learning that otherwise might not have occurred. Further, to help us better understand the underlying processes involved, we have increasingly more sophisticated methods of inquiry. We have also reached consensus about broad categories of proximal and distal outcomes, situating our efforts at the intersection of the individual and social. And we have at hand, or can see our way to fashion, reliable and valid measures of these desired ends.

That our work is important—even urgent—is indisputable. As I write this, the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus is known to have killed over three million people ⁵ worldwide as health care workers themselves sicken and die trying to save them (Johns Hopkins University & Medicine Coronavirus Research Center, 2021). This crisis, which has upended all of our lives, is undoubtedly made worse by the stressed systems and institutions that were already failing so many. Fifteen years ago, with no deadly pandemic in sight, I considered several scenarios from Garreau’s (2005) Radical Evolution (Washburn, 2006) in musings about thriving in a world with weird frogs and fewer polar bears. Both the Technology Drives History: Hell Scenario where technology virtually dissolves us into a “gray goo” and the Technology Drives History: Heaven Scenario of bionic organs and neural implants were terrifying, so I opted for the Human Beings Shape History: Prevail Scenario envisioned by Jaron Lanier, a world in which we make intelligent and ethical choices in what is an

“infinite game…where people are in the center and there’s this ever-expanding game of connecting people that creates a game into the future (p. 197)” The Prevail Scenario, then, will require a search both for “deeper and better ways of bridging the interpersonal gap” (p. 200) and ways to employ human care, wisdom, and creativity, as well as connectiveness, to transform our consciousness and transcend our nature. Our field’s practitioners, researchers, and scholars, with our fellows in other disciplines, have been engaged for some time in this quest. At this point in human history, transformative education is not merely something nice to do, it is an imperative. (Washburn, 2006, pp. 100–101)

In the second edition of Dancing on the Edge: Competence, Culture and Organization in the 21st Century, published in late 2019 as the first COVID-19 cases appeared, futurists O’Hara and Graham observed that the first step for one seeking to become what Carl Rogers termed a “person of tomorrow” is awareness—that is, awareness of the fraught landscape we are in and of the ways we, individually and collectively, tend to respond. The next step is practice, practice that comes with the “rediscovery of agency in the face of a confusing and unknown future” (p. 9). At this perilous time, we are called to see more broadly, to care more deeply, to, as O’Hara and Graham have suggested, to “blow an uncertain trumpet” as we dance on the edge. The charge to transformative education is to continue to lead efforts to foster deep change and growth in adult learners who aspire to be persons of tomorrow.

To be successful, we must continue to develop innovative methods by which to generate new theories and practice concepts—and then to assess them. As Rogers, who with Abraham Maslow strongly influenced Mezirow’s conceptualization of transformative learning (Cranton & Taylor, 2012), said in one of his last speeches “I hope we’re always on the move to a new theory, new ways of being, to new areas of dealing with situations, new ways of being with persons. I hope we’re always a part of the ‘growing edge’” (Rogers et al., 2005, p. 396).