Designing Identity Transformations Through Transformative Learning Objectives and Experiential Learning Competencies

Transformative Learning Objectives

While educators use learning objectives to both design and assess curriculum in productive ways (Caspersen et al., 2017), the primary impetus for learning objectives seems to have shifted toward assessment and away from design in recent years (see Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia et al., 2016). But there is a need for educators to further utilize and theorize learning objectives as tools for designing and delivering transformative learning (TL) experiences both within and beyond institutions of higher education. The goals of TL experiences, Taylor and Laros (2014) note, are “often too subtle to be detected by the learner” (139) because they reside primarily in the “subtext of courses” (138) and are “rarely made transparent by the educator” (pp. 138-139); as a result, they note, TL “seems to be a by-product, instead of the primary aim of educators” (139). What would happen if educators made the goals of the TL experiences that they create more explicit and transparent for adult learners through learning objectives? What if educators wrote learning objectives that inspired transformative learning, that became part of a course’s vernacular, and that constructed a stronger bridge across which adult learners could connect their learning experiences to their educational, professional, and personal experiences? What if learning objectives were written to help adult learners become capable of having transformative learning experiences throughout their lives?

Drawing upon Mezirow (1991, 2000), Kegan (2008), Dirkx (2012), Illeris (2014), Hoggan (2016), and others who have written about TL, we propose reconceptualizing learning objectives as transformative learning objectives (TLOs). ¹ If TL educators want their curriculum to facilitate a “profound shift in one’s way of thinking and feeling about one’s self and being in the world” (Acheson & Dirkx, 2021, p. 296), developing TLOs that preview some of the specific ways in which learners can expect to experience this shift can help facilitate it. While no set of TLOs can anticipate every shift in thinking and feeling that an adult learner may experience during a course, program, or learning activity, creating TLOs that illuminate the specific shifts that learners can expect to experience can help actualize a transformation. When educators put TLOs at the center of the curriculum design and delivery processes, they better prepare adult learners to be transformed by their experiences both within and beyond formal educational settings.

TLOs are distinct from traditional learning or course objectives in that they are not tightly tethered to the content and competencies of an educator’s academic discipline or what Patricia Cranton (2016) describes as “technical knowledge and skills” (p. 79). That is not to say that TLOs should have nothing to do with a discipline; rather, they should grow out of the space shared by academic discipline(s) and learners’ educational, professional, civic, and personal realms of experience. TLOs should help adult learners see how a particular discipline might provide them with the ways of being that will enable them to navigate the variety of complex problems and situations that they will encounter in their future. If educators inevitably “invite students to habituate themselves to certain ways of being” when they teach (Jackson, 2020, p. 37), TLOs make those ways of being explicit. TLOs should offer learners a preview of the type of transformation to which a particular course aspires—a transformation that will ideally be marked by “significant and irreversible changes in the way a person experiences, conceptualizes, and interacts with the world” (Hoggan, 2016, p. 71). TLOs should be formulated in such a way that adult learners can connect them to the other areas of their lives. Because learners tend to “give more significance to the personal and social dimensions of change that occur for them at University than the learning gained through the formal curriculum” (Scott, 2011, p. 3), TLOs should create a space within which individuals can connect the learning they achieve in their classes to their vast and varied extracurricular experiences, enabling “deep learning” (Bain, 2012, p. 10) or “vertical development” (Spence & McDonald, 2015, p. 297). TLOs, we suggest, have the potential to create the connective tissue between adult learners’ coursework and their lifework.

To enable adult learners to connect their educational experiences more readily to their personal, social, and professional experiences, we suggest that TLOs are most effective when they structure learning experiences that might be characterized by the “typology of transformative learning outcomes” that Hoggan (2016) identifies—learning experiences that transform the adult learner’s worldview, self, epistemology, ontology, behavior, and/or capacity (p. 65). Educators may, of course, choose to develop TLOs that target any of these or additional forms, to borrow Kegan’s (2008) phraseology, as the intended site(s) of transformation. And while each of Hoggan’s learning outcomes is a worthy form for an educational experience to aspire to transform, we are particularly drawn to TLOs that target and aspire to the transformation of the self and ontology. If, as Illeris contends, “identity” is the form that best captures the “target area of transformative learning” (2014, p. 152), TLOs that focus on shifting the learner’s “sense of self” (Hoggan, 2016, p. 66) as well as their “deeply established mental and emotional inclinations” (Hoggan, 2016, p. 67) will catalyze not only transformative learning experiences but will also increase an individual’s capacity for lifelong learning. While our program focused on TLOs that target identity and ontology as sites of transformation, we encourage other educators to develop TLOs that target alternative forms as sites of transformation.

Ideally, adult learners will perceive the identity elements identified by TLOs as obtainable rather than as fixed personality traits and should be confident that they can use TLOs to describe who they have become as a result of their educational experiences. These types of TLOs help learners perceive transformation not just as a matter of picking up useful skills or acquiring interesting information but as a matter of developing their identities. By establishing the framework within which students can experience and articulate the transformation of their identities, TLOs provide a bridge between a specific educational context and external educational, professional, civic, and personal contexts. TLOs facilitate the illusive educational goal of the transfer of learning—“the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts” (National Research Council, 2002, p. 51); they accomplish this not necessarily by helping students anticipate the specific situations in which they will draw upon a disciplinary-specific competency or recall a precise piece of information at a fortuitous moment but instead by helping them transform their identities to the degree that they can imagine themselves successfully navigating a wide variety of unforeseen circumstances.

Transformative Learning Objectives in a Study Abroad Context

For the study abroad program we codirected in London in the spring of 2020, we identified curiosity and creativity as our TLOs, two identity markers that we hoped our program’s participants would be able to use by the end of the semester to describe the type of transformation they had experienced in London. We defined curiosity as “a mode of engaging with the world that grows out of a deep realization that our current understandings of and assumptions about the world are incomplete and inadequate—a realization that keeps us perpetually open to thinking again.” And we described creativity as “the capacity to construct and share new ways of understanding the world that account for more complexity and nuance than our previous understandings.” Based upon our participants’ written reflections throughout the semester, we feel that these TLOs initiated the type of identity transformation we have described. Not only did curiosity and creativity connect our disciplines of experience design and literary studies to each other but these TLOs were also applicable and appealing to our programs’ 40 participants, whose academic majors were housed under several different colleges at the university where most of them had matriculated. Because of the accessibility and appeal of our TLOs to learners, we talked constantly with them about curiosity and creativity inside and outside of the program’s formal educational settings—they became part of the vernacular of our program rather than overlooked elements of our syllabus.

While we offered the learners on our study abroad program general definitions of curiosity and creativity, we also asked them to articulate their own understanding and practice of curiosity and creativity in a reflective writing assignment prior to the start of the program and to do the same in another reflective writing assignment at the end of our program, inviting them to observe the evolution of their understanding and practice of each identity element. A few of the program’s participants noted in their end-of-the-semester reflections that they had not become more curious or creative during their time in London. One lamented that, “as much as I would like to say that London changed me into a super curious person, I can’t.” But many of the program’s participants felt like they had, to some degree, become more curious and creative during the semester. In reflecting on what she had learned about creativity and how she had become more creative while living in London, one learner observed:

Coming to London I was prepared to fake my way through all the creativity assignments we had, simply because I thought I had lost my ability to really be creative. However my perspective began to change the first week of classes when we had an improv team come and teach us some activities. I was pleasantly surprised about how much I excelled and enjoyed doing improv that day. I had some funny moments, but more importantly I had been creative without making anything tangible. In this situation, being creative meant adapting to whatever challenges arose, and making effective solutions to uncommon problems. As I have reflected back on this experience, I have come to realize that becoming a Physician Assistant will require a lot of creativity. Not the artsy kind I thought of before, but the kind where fast thinking leads to problem solving and innovation … Now since I had the opportunity to come and learn creativity in London, I am more prepared to be a better Physician Assistant, and to have a more fulfilling career.

Our program’s TLO of creativity provided this student with the language that she could use to describe a significant shift in how she thought about her personal and professional identities. The language of the TLO gave her a cognitive framework within which she could process her experiences and connect those experiences to her shifting identity. She arrived in London thinking that she had lost her ability to be creative but left with a new identity as a creative person. Our program’s TLO of creativity also encouraged this participant to think about how her educational experience in London would inform her post-study-abroad life. Although she cannot anticipate the exact situations that she will encounter as a physician assistant, she has confidence that, as a creative person who knows how to adapt to challenges and find inventive solutions to uncommon problems, she will be able to draw upon her study abroad experiences to thrive in her career. The program’s TLO of creativity positioned her to become a creative lifelong learner. This student’s transformative experience, which was instigated and mediated by one of our program’s TLOs, echoes what we heard from many of her classmates.

By the end of the program, most of our students thought of themselves as more curious and creative people, recognizing that they had cultivated ways of being that would help them navigate a wide variety of situations, including the world of the pandemic that cut their time in London short by a month. Given the unique circumstances of studying abroad when a global pandemic sent them home prematurely, our students had the opportunity to transpose their transformed selves from one experiential learning environment (London) to a radically different one (their homes). Because we finished the study abroad program on Zoom, we asked participants to reflect on this transposition—to pay attention to the ways that their more curious and creative selves operated within a novel set of physical and social constraints; they were no longer simply predicting how curiosity and creativity might help them in their future lives. In another reflective exercise, one of our participants wrote about her experience during her quarantine:

During this quarantine I have also tried to be really creative in using outdoor spaces that are close to me, especially my yard. One unique way that I am practicing creativity in my yard is by having a walk by violin concert. The way this works is that I will practice my violin to play for my neighbors, and they will walk by my house at a designated time so they hear the music playing out the window … I have had a lot of fun preparing music that will translate well for a drive by concert. I am also excited about sharing music with people in a new way during a difficult time. This student’s reflection not only illustrates her new understanding of and approach to creativity but also demonstrates her ability to adapt one of our program’s TLOs to a situation that we could not have imagined while designing our curriculum in a pre-pandemic world.

Experiential Learning Competencies

If TLOs name the specific transformations that an educational experience has been designed to help adult learners actualize, experiential learning competencies provide them with the capacity to extract the meanings and lessons from a range of experiences with which they can work to inhabit those new ways of being. Competencies, as many have pointed out, are sets of interrelated conceptual knowledge, skills, dispositions, and values (Besong & Holland, 2015; Williams & Balzotti, 2019); experiential learning competencies (ELCs), we suggest, consist of the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and values that students need to be able to learn on their own from their experiences. ELCs constitute an experiential literacy that enables students to read, assess, and find meaning in a variety of situations. TLOs name particular ways of being toward which students should aspire; ELCs give students the tools to turn ordinary experiences into meaningful and transformative ones.

We propose the framework of ELCs as an alternative to the learning-cycle approach to designing Experiential Education (EE) curriculum, an approach that has been challenged on many fronts in recent years (e.g., Bergsteiner et al., 2010; Heinrich & Green, 2020; Seaman, 2008; Sweller et al., 2007; Wilson & Hayes, 2002). While ELCs might readily be mapped onto a sequential or cyclical schematic, framing them as competencies rather than as phases of a cycle or steps in a sequence allows them to operate in the foreground of EE. Rather than function as the curriculum’s hidden infrastructure, ELCs can occupy center stage in a learning experience. In addition to being the means to achieve TLOs, ELCs are also habits of mind worth obtaining for their own sake. Although ELCs do not technically have the label of learning objectives, they function in many ways as learning objectives in the type of curriculum we propose. Turning the phases of a learning cycle into competencies invites learners to be more aware of the ways in which the curriculum has been intentionally designed to help them develop the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and values that will enable them to independently learn from their experiences and step into new ways of being.

Experiential Learning Competencies in a Study Abroad Context

There are a variety of ELCs around which educators might construct their courses, but we offer the three ELCs around which we designed our curriculum as examples. After reviewing a variety of experiential learning cycles and sequences proposed by scholars in EE, metacognitive learning studies, and other fields (e.g., Ambrose et al., 2010; Fischer, 2008; Kolb, 1984; Nilson, 2013; Schenck & Cruickshank, 2015; Zimmerman & Moylan, 2009), we distilled these learning theories into three ELCs: anticipate, participate, and reflect. We wanted to help our program’s participants sharpen their capacities to critically anticipate, intentionally participate in, and thoughtfully reflect on their experiences. If learners could deepen their abilities to anticipate, participate in, and reflect upon their experiences in London, we felt they would be more likely to become curious and creative lifelong experiential learners. ELCs are key to having extraordinary (i.e., memorable, meaningful, and transformative) as opposed to ordinary experiences (Duerden et al., 2018). In what follows, we define these three competency categories and provide some specific sub-competencies associated with each:

Anticipate: the ability to intentionally prepare for an experience in ways that positively enhance engagement during the participation phase

○ Introspection: the ability to identify and critically consider the specific ways in which one’s personal and cultural expectations might shape one’s experiences

Because we wanted the program’s participants to realize the importance of acquiring these three ELCs, we made them as visible as possible by dividing each day on the course calendar into three sections that corresponded with the three ELCs. When we met in the classroom in the morning to discuss course readings and to set up that day’s experiences in London, participants knew that we were practicing the competency of anticipation. When we ventured into the city as an entire class or in small groups to complete what we called City Lab assignments, they knew that we were practicing the competency of participation. And when we gathered at the end of the day to discuss our experiences, they knew we were practicing the competency of reflection. Our three ELCs also served as categories into which we slotted every assignment and learning activity. For instance, by slotting course readings under the anticipate category on our syllabus, we invited students to realize that they were not just completing a reading assignment but also cultivating their capacity to anticipate their experiences through the act of thoughtfully engaging with a text to ask questions that would prepare them to more deliberately participate in an experience. Because we used the ELCs to visibly structure every element of the educational experience, participants were very aware of the lifelong experiential learning capacities that we had designed the curriculum to help them develop. Of course, because of the embedded and cyclical nature of experiences, we believe that the anticipation and reflection competencies can happen during experiences as well as before and after them (Duerden et al., 2015). Various scholars have, for instance, proposed the concept of anticipatory nostalgia, the sense of mourning the end of a positive experience while it is still occurring (Batcho & Shikh, 2016; Bergs et al., 2020). But we wanted a clear structure that would enable students to metacognitively connect each of the specific learning activities to the three ELCs.

When they work in conjunction with TLOs, ELCs act as the fulcrum upon which learners can leverage their education into lifelong experiential learning. If educators rely on disciplinary-specific knowledge to be the hinge upon which the transferability of education depends, they may often be disappointed by the learner’s inability to perceive the applicability of that disciplinary knowledge and content to particular situations and contexts. However, if ELCs are the fulcrum upon which the transferability of an education depends, educators can, by helping learners acquire these ELCs, prepare them to transfer their education to a wide variety of educational, professional, civic, and personal situations. When learners see ELCs as the core competencies of their education, they set themselves up to become lifelong experiential learners.

At the end of our study abroad program, we invited participants to consider the ways in which the ELCs of anticipation, participation, and reflection would enable them to learn from and be successful in their future experiences. Their responses, a few of which we will share, highlight the range of contexts—educational, professional, and personal—in which learners foresee themselves putting these ELCs to use:

“I’m looking at going into International Relations, and the process of Anticipating, Participating, and Reflecting is highly applicable in that field. I will anticipate through researching global issues such as poverty, participate by trying to find cost-effective and efficient solutions, and reflect by looking back on my actions and determining how I will do things differently in the future.”

Disciplinary Strategies

If, as we have suggested, educators can best help learners become lifelong transformative and experiential learners by designing curriculum that privileges TLOs and ELCs, we are necessarily proposing that they reconsider the role that disciplinary knowledge and content plays in both the design and the delivery of educational experiences. We turned to our fields of study as reservoirs of specific strategies and tactics that learners could use to anticipate, participate in, and reflect upon their experiences as they strove to become more curious and creative. Broadly considered, disciplines are “interwoven patterns of knowledge, language, habits and social relations that shape individual dispositions” (Bager-Elsborg, 2018, p. 198). While a traditional curriculum may be designed to help students acquire as much as possible of the knowledge, language, habits, and social relations of a discipline, a curriculum that privileges TLOs and ELCs reframes an academic discipline as a set of anticipatory, participatory, and reflective practices that learners might use to cultivate particular ways of being that will enable them to successfully navigate a variety of educational, professional, civic, and personal circumstances. Thinking of a discipline as a set of strategies that should be accessible to both insiders and outsiders, rather than as a body of knowledge that one must master, opens the contexts into which students can transfer their education, paving the way for lifelong transformative and experiential learning.

Thinking of a discipline as an assemblage of strategies is especially useful in an interdisciplinary educational context. Rather than focusing exclusively on the intersections of subject matter or discursive overlaps, educators working together to integrate their disciplines in a single course or within a broader program might also focus on the ways in which their respective fields provide students with complimentary strategies for asking questions, examining assumptions, finding meaning, and working toward solutions. When learners come to understand a discipline as a bundle of strategies, they will be more inclined to see the need to supplement the competencies they acquire in a particular field with strategies from other disciplines—an interdisciplinary disposition that is critical to lifelong transformative and experiential learning. When students recognize that they must approach complex challenges with strategies from multiple disciplines and are confident in their ability to both locate and pick up the necessary strategies, they have positioned themselves to become lifelong transformative and experiential learners.

As we designed our integrated, interdisciplinary study abroad program, we had to think carefully about how we would use each of our disciplines to provide students with strategies for anticipating, participating in, and reflecting upon their experiences in ways that would help them become more curious and creative. We hoped to accomplish this goal by assigning students to work on a semester-long group project that required them to use strategies from each of our disciplines. Throughout the program, students worked in teams to design and deliver a 2-h experience for a group of 25–30 participants at the end of the semester—a project that we called Designing the London Experience (DLE). We intentionally designed the curriculum to help students acquire the disciplinary strategies that would enable them to develop and execute their DLE. We did not help our students acquire broad cross-sections of our disciplines’ patterns of knowledge, language, habits, and social relations but instead tried to provide them with narrower cross-sections of knowledge, language, habits, and social relations that were useful in the specific context of the DLE project.

Designing Curriculum around TLOs and ELCs

Whether it be for a study abroad program, a course at an institution of continuing or higher education, or an educational experience in an alternative setting, we propose that designing curriculum for lifelong transformative and experiential learning ought to begin with TLOs. We suggest that starting the curriculum design process by identifying and developing TLOs that help learners see how a particular educational experience will help them nurture the ways of being that will enable them to successfully operate in a variety of future contexts. But how should educators go about identifying the kinds of transformations that they hope learners will experience through their curriculum? Educators might consider beginning this process by asking themselves what they want learners to say about who they have become or the ways in which they have changed by the end of an educational experience. Imagining what learners should be able to say about the ways in which an educational experience has transformed their identities (or a different form) will help educators identify and develop appropriate TLOs. These TLOs should be connected to the disciplinary strategies and subject matter on which an educational experience focuses but should avoid getting too bogged down in the technical language of a field or the skills that they will develop. Instead, TLOs should provide learners with the language that they can use to describe who they have become because of their educational experiences. TLOs do not foreclose the possibility of learners experiencing additional types of transformation but they do place a premium on a very specific set of transformations.

After laying the foundation of the curriculum with TLOs, we encourage educators to develop ELCs that will help learners actualize not only the TLOs but also additional transformations that are not targeted by the TLOs. These ELCs should help them learn how to learn not just from the experiences demarcated by the curriculum but also from the range of experiences that they will have beyond the boundaries of the curriculum. Given the centrality of reflection in the transformation process, we encourage educators to consider including it as one of the ELCs. Educators can facilitate transformation by explicitly inviting learners to reflect on how learning activities help them actualize the curriculum’s TLOs. On our study abroad program, for instance, we regularly invited learners to respond to the following kinds of prompts: “As you think about the experiences you have had this week, both those that we designed as part of the curriculum and those you have designed on your own, what have you learned about the relationship between curiosity and empathy? How has your understanding of and ability to practice empathy shifted this week as you continue to practice curiosity?” We asked learners to connect their experiences to the TLOs through frequent reflection in a variety of settings and through a variety of media (i.e., written, oral, and multimedia). Additional ELCs can play a role similar to reflection in helping learners tether their learning experiences to the TLOs.

After establishing a curriculum’s TLOs and ELCs, educators can turn to their fields of expertise to identify the disciplinary strategies that learners will need to practice the ELCs needed to achieve the TLOs. For example, we identified storytelling as a disciplinary strategy that would help students practice the ELC of reflection. Drawing upon our fields of literary studies and experience design, we designed learning activities to provide students with the tools they would need to be able to articulate narratives for themselves and others about the ways in which their experiences shaped their needs, decisions, and identities. This capacity to tell stories was, we proposed, central to becoming a more creative person; creative people tell stories to construct and share new ways of understanding the world that account for more complexity and nuance than one’s previous modes of understanding. Situated within the context of TLOs and ELCs, disciplinary strategies should play a vital role in the transformation process.

With the curricular structure of TLOs, ELCs, and disciplinary strategies in place, educators can populate the course calendar with content, assignments, and experiences. The curricular structure described in this paper should act as a type of filter that educators use to determine which readings, writing assignments, group projects, and site visits belong on the syllabus (see Figure 1). Every learning activity that passes through the filter onto the syllabus must explicitly provide learners with disciplinary strategies and ELCs that will move them toward the TLOs. Making curricular decisions in this way can be painful because it sometimes means that educators must relegate to the sidelines a familiar article, refined lecture, ready-to-go assignment, or favorite activity.OPEN IN VIEWER

We champion the design of curricula in which students encounter every learning activity in the way that one of our students described her experiences on our study abroad program: “Starting with the learning [objectives] in mind helped me to focus on how I could be creative and take pieces from each of our activities and make them my own for my DLE project.” As she reflected upon her study abroad experience, this participant saw each learning activity as an opportunity to gather “pieces” (or strategies) that she could repurpose to contribute to her group’s DLE project—a gathering and repurposing process that enabled her to “be creative,” to actualize a way of being to which our TLOs had oriented her.

Next Steps

While study abroad programs naturally lend themselves to the kind of curriculum we have described, we hope this paper serves to instigate additional ideas and future discussions about other types of educational experiences that could benefit from curriculum built upon TLOs and ELCs. Questions worth exploring include the following: How can educators incorporate TLOs and ELCs into on-campus courses, continuing education courses, or other less traditional educational programming? How might educators determine what aspects of identity transformation to focus on, especially in a non-study abroad context? If an educator wants to facilitate a different type of transformation than identity transformation, will TLOs and ELCs be effective pedagogical tools for helping students actualize these alternative transformations? Would this pedagogical process work in any educational context if the transformative objectives challenged a learner’s deeply held beliefs? The relationship between ELCs and TLOs in terms of both their coordinated design and their assessment is another topic for future consideration.

Conclusion

Without having yet concluded a longitudinal study of learners from our study abroad program, it is difficult to determine the degree to which the curriculum we designed has translated into lifelong transformative and experiential learning. But we are confident that the fields of transformative learning and experiential education have something valuable to contribute to the current conversations about lifelong learning. We also believe that value inheres not just in the fields’ commitment to educating learners in the type of professional and civic contexts that will constitute their postgraduate milieu but also in their capacity to help individuals learn how to learn from experience. However, assisting learners in developing the type of transformative and experiential fluency that is critical to lifelong learning demands that educators be even more intentional in designing curriculum than they perhaps have been in the past. Our approach to developing a more rigorous systematic pedagogical process through the triangulation of TLOs, ELCs, and disciplinary strategies will, we hope, be a useful one for those invested in the project of lifelong transformative and experiential learning.