Journal of Transformative Education

North American and European models of higher education often claim to be committed to the nurturing of social justice. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire described how most education shares some complicity in the maintenance of an unjust status quo of oppression. Following Freire, this article focuses on how educators among the world’s privileged can encourage students to move from postures of ignorance, guilty remorse, or paternalistic activism vis-à-vis the world’s oppressed toward a respectful, dialogical interrelationship.

Questions abound in the literature and in practice about how best to advance social justice among groups who are content to ignore the chorus of marginalized voices pressing for social change. This qualitative study of 20 community-based practitioners explored how to assist the transformation of privileged learners on issues of race, class, and gender when they are in the training rooms. Pedagogy for the privileged presents an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of adult educators who work with privileged learners on a daily basis in antiracism and diversity training, human rights development, leadership training, sensitivity training, and organizational development workshops. This article describes how grassroots educators understand the transformation process, including its ethical dimensions, and presents a new model for this pedagogy based on confidence shaking and confidence building.

This qualitative research study explored racial identity change among a group of White graduate students who took a multicultural course required for a master’s degree in counseling and psychology. Using weekly journal entries and reflection papers as data, the researcher tracked each student’s racial identity development from the beginning to the end of the course. The results showed that students developed more nonracist identities toward the end of the course. Their racial identities followed the trajectory described by Helms (1994) in her White Racial Identity (WRID) model. This study provides evidence that thoughtful classroom instruction can help students unlearn racial attitudes and replace them with more culturally inclusive beliefs.

The Tillery Experience provides a unique, cross-cultural opportunity for students to learn and practice occupational therapy skills in a rural, primarily African American community in northeastern North Carolina. This qualitative study investigates how involvement in this community-based experience affects participants. Twelve past and current students participated in a focus group. Results indicate that participants valued the hands-on learning they experienced, felt enriched as a result of the hands-on learning, and developed cultural competency as a result of their involvement in the Tillery Experience. These themes relate to theories of transformative education, transformative learning, and situated cognition. Implications for supervision and planning educational experiences are discussed.

In earlier research on religious coping and intimate male partner violence, the author interviewed African American women who had experienced physical, emotional, or sexual abuse by a spouse. This article describes how she uses these narrative accounts to help university students empathically experience the women’s responses to spousal abuse. Interview data, researcher accounts, and gender violence literature combine to validate both the universal and uncommon nature of Black women’s struggle with intimate male partner violence. Black feminist principles are used as a framework for exposing the multiple dynamics that intersect abused African American women’s experiences and worldviews.