Transformative Learning Theory Research Articles

Autoethnographic reflections on navigating the path to empower teachers' transversal skills

This inquiry portrays my experiences in enhancing teachers' transversal skills. As our national curriculum changed in 2019, my primary concern shifted to developing learners' transversal skills, but I was not aware of the way towards it. While working as a teacher educator, I could find teachers and teacher educators neglecting learners' transversal skills. Somehow, I have observed similar practices in my facilitation as well. As per the national curriculum on school education, teachers need to facilitate learners in such a way that contributes to developing learners' transversal skills (CDC, 2019, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). But without developing the transversal skills of teachers, can we develop the transversal skills of students? This question led me to observe my practices and practices of teachers. While going to my flash bag, I found that I primarily used a teacher-centered facilitation method similar to other teachers.. Studying STEAM at University became a turning point in my professional career where I felt a shift in my profession and this event became a pathway to shift my paradigm. I have used a multi-paradigmatic research design to present my shift and unfold my experiences. I have extended the investigation agenda using autoethnography and have introduced a sequence of lived experiences and discussions to highlight significant changes. I have completed my inquiry using the theory of transformative learning, constructivist learning, and STEAM-based pedagogical lens. The finding of this inquiry reveals that transversal skills can be developed through following the lens of STEAM education. We can create innovative pedagogy like "3C-R," which I have started by adding theories into practices.

Envisaging creative tourism through boutique hotels: an integrated framework of transformative experience

ABSTRACT Experience co-creation as a distinguishing aspect of creative tourism has garnered significant scholarly attention. However, there remains a dearth of studies that investigates the phenomenon of value co-creation in innovative spaces such as boutique hotels. The present study examines boutique hotels in the creative city of Jaipur in India as potential vehicles of creativity. The study aims to identify boutique hotel attributes that facilitate value co-creation and their association with transformative tourism experiences. By utilising value co-creation theory and transformative learning theory, this study has proposed a research framework which has been empirically validated by performing structural equation modelling on data collected from 508 tourists. The results indicate that the three boutique hotel attributes, namely interactive authenticity, emotional authenticity, and novel atmosphere, are significant predictors of perceived value co-creation and transformative experiences. Further, we find that ethnocentrism, as a pre-trip emotion, exerts a positive moderating effect on the association between emotional authenticity and value co-creation. This study highlights the key attributes of boutique hotels envisaging creative tourism which can be strategically incorporated by hotel managers and destination planners. The findings offer insightful implications for industry practice and policy towards developing business opportunities and entrepreneurial ventures for creative tourism.

Expanding your toolkit: teaching social work practice in the healthcare setting

ABSTRACT For social work education to remain current and responsive to the demands of the field, collaboration is required between those actively teaching, and those actively practicing. Examples, however, of co-construction of curriculums are minimal, with classroom subjects largely being taught as stand-alone components of the overall social work program, perhaps with occasional practitioners providing guest lectures about the practice context in which they work. Informed by transformational learning theory, relationship-based practice, and experiential education, practice-based learning requires social work students to engage with classroom content and skill development while at the same time building their job readiness through exposure to the modern workplace and current practitioners. To achieve this, a case example is given whereby academics and practitioners collaborated on developing advanced practice skills subject in the healthcare context, with a focus on developing empathy, authenticity and honoring the story as a core curriculum gap when teaching grief and loss skills. This case study demonstrates how experiential games, role plays and podcasts have been integrated into the teaching content and provides guidance as to the incorporation of experiential learning activities into formative and summative assessment tasks.

Transforming Learners: A Programmatic Approach to Helping Students Find “The Right Work”

Research suggests the current generation of learners (called Zoomers or Gen-Z) takes a values-driven approach to their careers. Increasingly, this generation seeks out workplaces that center issues of sustainability, social responsibility, diversity, equity and inclusion. The preferences of Gen-Z suggest that building business programs that focus on “the right work” are both relevant and necessary to meet the expectations of this generation. It is unsurprising, then, that leading business education associations like AACSB have placed emphasis on building education programs that have a positive societal impact. In this article, we outline our programmatic approach to help learners engage in the “right work” and to address calls for building business programs that engage in more responsible, ethical, and sustainable models of management education. In sharing our approach, we 1) emphasize the value of using a programmatic design to facilitate curricular change, and 2) demonstrate how transformative learning theory can provide a practical way of reenvisioning business programs that address the concerns of Zoomers.

ART Praxis: Evidence-Based Strategies for Antiracist Teaching in Nursing.

This integrative review seeks to provide effective teaching and learning strategies for teaching about racism and advancing health equity. Most faculty preparation remains devoid of an exploration of racism and the skills to critique how historical events and socialization create and reinforce the biases that influence how we teach and provide care. It is difficult to teach what we do not know. Using Whittmore and Knafl's approach, we conducted an integrative review of multidisciplinary literature from 2009 to 2021 to uncover best practices for teaching about racism. Seven databases yielded 55 relevant articles from 18 disciplines. Four themes emerged illuminating effective strategies for teaching and learning about systemic racism: encounter education, reflection, discussion, and activism. Findings of this review align with Mezirow's transformative learning theory and highlight the importance of not just "doing" antiracist activities in a course but "becoming" an antiracist educator.

ITAF Pedagogy in Theory and Practice: An Action Research Study of Transformative Growth and Development in University Classrooms

This article shows how a student centered pedagogy called the Improvisational Theater Art Form (ITAF) empowers transformative awareness, growth, and change. In this particular study representative of a larger body of work, 30 undergraduate researcher/participants created improvised games and scenes as expressions of their inner selves to explore “habits of the mind” negatively affecting social living and daily life. ITAF draws upon action research, transformative learning theory, improvisational theater, a democratic learning environment, and learning through play. The purpose of this article is to show how ITAF inspired learners to study the nature of the self, achieve progressive growth and development, and advance the craft of transformative learning and education.

Transformative learning in clinical reasoning: a meta-synthesis in undergraduate primary care medical education

ABSTRACT Clinical reasoning is a vital medical education skill, yet its nuances in undergraduate primary care settings remain debated. This systematic review explores clinical reasoning teaching and learning intricacies within primary care. We redefine clinical reasoning as dynamically assimilating and prioritising synthesised patient, significant other, or healthcare professional information for diagnoses or non-diagnoses. This focused meta-synthesis applies transformative learning theory to primary care clinical reasoning education. A comprehensive analysis of 29 selected studies encompassing various designs made insights into clinical reasoning learning dimensions visible. Primary care placements in varying duration and settings foster diverse instructional methods like bedside teaching, clinical consultations, simulated clinics, virtual case libraries, and more. This review highlights the interplay between disease-oriented and patient-centred orientations in clinical reasoning learning. Transformative learning theory provides an innovative lens, revealing stages of initiation, persistence, time and space, and competence and confidence in students’ clinical reasoning evolution. Clinical teachers guide this transformation, adopting roles as fortifiers, connoisseurs, mediators, and monitors. Patient engagement spans passive to active involvement, co-constructing clinical reasoning. The review underscores theoretical underpinnings’ significance in shaping clinical reasoning pedagogy, advocating broader diversity. Intentional student guidance amid primary care complexities is vital. Utilising transformative learning, interventions bridging cognitive boundaries enhance meaningful clinical reasoning learning experiences. This study contributes insights for refining pedagogy, encouraging diverse research, and fostering holistic clinical reasoning development.

Community-Initiated Science for Transformative Teaching

ABSTRACT In this paper, the authors explore how teachers and community members in Nepal come together to transform students’ science teaching and science learning experiences. The community members, primarily parents of the students, took the opportunity to drive the kinds of science topics and the nature of science activities the teachers needed to teach in their children’s science classrooms. This paper qualitatively documents the interactions between the teachers and the community members, the teachers’ decisions regarding their science lessons, and the nature of critical consciousness discourses in teachers’ built-in classroom interactions with students. The data were collected over 8 weeks through classroom observations, interviews, and student artifacts. The analysis showed that community-initiated partnership with science teachers builds science teaching that values critical community well-being and that the teachers have the agency to provide spaces for learning focused on critical consciousness. The paper uses transformative learning theory, liberation social psychology, and deliberative democracy as the guiding theoretical perspectives to understand transformative science teaching through teacher–community partnership.

Designing a mock training workshop on poverty —Transformative learning as framework

AbstractTransformative learning has been widely discussed in the literature for challenging and reshaping learners' assumptions and beliefs. However, there is a gap in the practical demonstration of how transformative learning can be effectively designed and implemented in real‐world contexts. This design‐based study fills this gap by designing a mock training workshop for transforming learners' assumptions about poverty. Drawing on theoretical concepts of transformative learning, this study translates abstract theoretical points into practical activities. The study incorporates a comprehensive review of existing literature to identify the main components and phases of transformative learning and to gather practical strategies for designing learning activities. The resulting framework may guide scholars and practitioners interested in turning transformative learning theory into actionable interventions. The mock training workshop designed in this study centers around four main components: engaging in the experience, critical reflection, critical discourse analysis, and action taken. These components are strategically woven together to create a transformative learning journey for participants. By actively engaging participants in experiential activities, promoting critical reflection on their assumptions, analyzing the underlying discourses, and encouraging action‐oriented outcomes, the workshop seeks to challenge and reshape deeply held beliefs about poverty and other societal issues. The insights and strategies in this study can inform those interested in promoting social change and challenging long‐held assumptions through transformative learning interventions. Such insights and strategies can also be extended to other social issues, such as drug addiction, alcoholism, or tobacco use, offering practitioners a versatile framework for facilitating transformative learning in various contexts.

Deconstructing gender identity through transformative learning

The theory of transformative learning and its notion of freedom, that we are not trapped by one way of looking at the world or being in the world, fosters a fundamental re-ordering and radical questioning of how one thinks or acts. As a theory of adult learning, it emerged from the women’s movement in the US, echoing what it means to become a transformation learner, realising how societal norms and expectations due to gender roles have defined and limited one’s way of being. The purpose of this paper is to provide greater insight into deconstructing gender identity through transformative learning by questioning gender binaries through premise reflection. The paper begins with an overview of (1) Judith Butler’s ideas on gender and deconstructing gender as well as (2) Jack Mezirow’s notion of transformative learning theory. This sets the stage for (3) bringing Butler’s and Mezirow’s ideas into conversation, setting the backdrop for a (4) discussion regarding the implications of such a conversation, reflecting on an existing approach from Christine Jarvis.

Evaluation of the impact of leadership development on nurses and midwives underpinned by transformational learning theory: a corpus-informed analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of leadership development programmes, underpinned by Transformational Learning Theory (TLT).Design/methodology/approachA corpus-informed analysis was conducted using survey data from 690 participants. Data were collected from participants’ responses to the question “please tell us about the impact of your overall experience”, which culminated in a combined corpus of 75,053 words.FindingsFindings identified patterns of language clustered around the following frequently used word types, namely, confidence; influence; self-awareness; insight; and impact.Research limitations/implicationsThis in-depth qualitative evaluation of participants’ feedback has provided insight into how TLT can be applied to develop future health-care leaders. The extent to which learning has had a transformational impact at the individual level, in relation to their perceived ability to influence, holds promise for the wider impact of this group in relation to policy, practice and the promotion of clinical excellence in the future. However, the latter can only be ascertained by undertaking further realist evaluation and longitudinal study to understand the mechanisms by which transformational learning occurs and is successfully translated to influence in practice.Originality/valuePrevious research has expounded traditional leadership theories to guide the practice of health-care leadership development. The paper goes some way to demonstrate the impact of using the principles of TLT within health-care leadership development programmes. The approach taken by The Florence Nightingale Foundation has the potential to generate confident leaders who may be instrumental in creating positive changes across various clinical environments.

MZ세대 미혼 남성의 부성 이데올로기에 관한 비판적 학습 경험

The purpose of this study is to help unmarried men in the MZ generation understand in-depth the fatherhood learning of unmarried young man by examining the critical learning experience of fatherhood ideology. It analyzed and interpreted the process of critical learning on fatherhood ideology of unmarried men of the MZ generation in a socio-cultural context, and furthermore, how the transformation of fatherhood ideology centered on young men appears at a microscopic level through transformative learning theory and autoethnography. As a result of the study, the process of transforming fatherhood ideology by unmarried men in the MZ generation can be explained as the transformative learning that changed meaning schematics and semantic perspectives through critical self-reflection on the experience of fatherhood ideology and acquired self-knowledge of fatherhood based on this. The results of this study will contribute to expanding the base of fatherhood research by exploring in-depth the learning experiences of unmarried men in the young generation, which previous studies have missed. In addition, this study will be meaningful as an empirical basic data to understand the change in perception of fatherhood ideology of the young generation, which has the position just before becoming a father.

Didactic dissonance-embracing the tension between classroom and clinical education.

The United States is undergoing a transformation in the way pain is viewed and treated. This transformation affects pain education, as some degree of disconnect will be expected between what is taught in classroom settings and what learners observe in clinical settings. We term this disconnect "didactic dissonance" and propose a novel process to harness it as a learning tool to further pain education. Based on principles of transformative learning theory, we describe a structured, three-step process beginning with (1) priming learners to recognize didactic dissonance and identify specific examples from their education, followed by (2) encouraging learners to search the primary literature to resolve observed dissonance and reflect on the system factors that created and perpetuated the disconnect, and then (3) providing an opportunity for learner reflection and planning for how they will address similar situations in future practice and teaching environments. Fostering an environment conducive to learning-through modeling the intellectual virtues of curiosity, humility, and creativity-is a critical task for educators when implementing this process. Recognizing challenges faced by educators in both classroom and clinical settings, it may be a more feasible first step to integrate the concept of didactic dissonance into existing curricular elements. For programs able to implement the full three-step process, a discussion guide along with an example of a facilitated discussion have been provided. While proposed in the context of pain education, this transformational approach can be utilized across all topics in medical education to foster autonomous lifelong learning.

Transformative Learning and Experience

This paper explores experience that is both misconstrued and under theorized in adult education. Human experience is expressed in the public sphere as the motivation for social and political change. The connections among experience, the public sphere, and democracy are identified. The allies in exploring the role of experience in education are John Dewey and Jack Mezirow's transformation theory and their understanding is a basis for outlining a more critical theory-inspired understanding of education as the reconstruction of experience. The work of Oskar Negt on experience will be the starting point for engaging in re-thinking the role of experience in education. This will be the basis for exploring the transformation of experience as a way of better understanding aspects of Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. The author concludes with a brief presentation of sociological imagination as the key to developing a pedagogy of imagination and a pedagogy of the transformation of experience. Hannah Arendt's work provides a thread woven through the paper.

Book review: Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning (2nd edition)

This book is a well-crafted guide to Transformative Learning Theory (TLT). Cranton first distills the components of TLT and its evolution. She then shifts focus to the learner’s perspective and individual’s psychological differences. The subsequent chapters look at educator roles to empower learners and lastly how educators can self-reflect and support learners through their own transformative journey.

COVID-19 and Collective Transformation: Changes in Online Nursing Faculty Pedagogical Practices

Our study explored the experiences of fully online nursing faculty during COVID-19. Using Mezirow’s transformative learning theory and Hoggan’s typology as our framework, we engaged in qualitative hermeneutic phenomenology, interviewing 10 online nursing faculty members to learn about their experiences teaching online during the pandemic. Results from our findings suggest COVID-19 was a collective disorienting dilemma. While working through this disorienting dilemma, faculty discovered the importance of both collaboration and professional development in the sense-making process. Furthermore, faculty pedagogical practices transformed as flexibility and compassion emerged as a necessary part of supporting students during the pandemic.

An Exploration of Transformative Learning Applied to the Triple Bottom Line of Sustainability for Fashion Consumers

Growing awareness and concern about sustainability worldwide has drawn attention to the sustainability practices of the textile and apparel industry and its consumers. In particular, educating consumers about sustainability becomes more important as it can increase their sustainability awareness and prompt action. Therefore, based on the transformative learning theory, this study was designed to explore the current knowledge of sustainability of Generation Z fashion consumers by observing and analyzing a focus group discussion. A qualitative research method was used, twenty participants in four focus groups participated, and two activities were implemented during the focus group sessions in this study. A thematic analysis was used to interpret the qualitative transcribed data. Five themes emerged from the focus group discussion, including Normalizing Customer Activism, Short-Sighted Actions, Story Sharing with Others, Filling the Information Gap, and Challenging but Not Impossible. The results show that consumers have a limited understanding of sustainability, i.e., they are primarily concerned about the environmental aspect of sustainability. However, the knowledge and discussion extracted through video and website browsing led to transformative learning among the participants, thereby changing their understanding of sustainability from a predominantly environmental perspective to one that encompasses social aspects. In addition, after this learning process, fashion consumers can perceive sustainability more holistically as a balance of the three aspects of sustainability. The findings of this study can be applied to inform educational programs and create opportunities for reframing marketing strategies by leveraging various technological platforms.

Exploring the Transformative Effects of Service-Immersion Programs on Faculty

Service-immersion programs are prevalent at many universities, often housed in ministry, mission, or service-learning departments. These experiences vary from domestic to international exploration, often lasting five to twelve days. Unlike study abroad programs that usually last a semester, service immersion “trips” are shorter and often include some sort of community service component. Current scholarship in experiential learning has focused on the influence of service immersion programming on undergraduate students. What is missing from this literature is the effect of immersion participation on adult accompaniers such as faculty. Since these adults share the same basic experience as the students, they may experience some of the transformative development as their students. Using Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory, as our guide, we explored three areas of transformative development – the influence of the immersion experience on faculty themselves, how the experience affected the faculty members’ relationships with students, and how the experience affected classroom instruction. The results were positive as the participating faculty reported positive personal growth, a deeper understanding of their students, and an enhanced learning environment that included the classroom as well as additional opportunities such as mentoring.
 

Women-only training programmes as tools for professional development: analysis and outcomes of a transformative learning process

Purpose Based on the transformative learning theory, this paper analyses a French women-only training programme (WOTP) that aims to develop women’s soft skills in their professional contexts. This paper aims to focus on the process of personal transformation, the collective dimensions and the unexpected effects of the transformation. Design/methodology/approach This paper used a mixed qualitative design that mainly combines a qualitative two-step study of 47 women to assess their personal changes in terms of self-confidence, self-efficacy and assertiveness. This paper used 13 semi-structured interviews to explore the perceived changes in-depth. Findings The analysis shows that beyond “fixing their lack of skills” – including self-limiting behaviours, low feelings of self-efficacy and difficulty claiming one’s place – a WOTP can trigger a transformational learning experience at the individual level and can modify the surveyed women’s attitudes and behaviours at work. The results also highlight the collective dimension of transformation and, to some extent, an avenue for a societal transformation. Practical implications One can state that these WOTPs may positively contribute to human resources development in organisations, and that they may be considered a relevant practice in the move to promote women and gender diversity in organisations. Originality/value The findings reveal that, at their individual levels, these women may become agents of change by influencing and acting in their professional lives. The results stress that training women may contribute to organisational changes in terms of gender diversity. These findings contribute to the enrichment of the transformative learning theory by developing the collective and societal dimensions.

Narrative-based learning for person-centred healthcare: the Caring Stories learning framework

This paper describes the learning framework for an innovative narrative-based training platform for healthcare professionals based on older patients’ narratives. The aim of Caring Stories is to place patients’ desires...