Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning

Understanding and Promoting Transformative Learning

Patricia Cranton's ongoing investigation of the transformative power of educating and discovering is compellingly recounted and documented in this second version of Professional Development as Transformative Learning (New Perspectives for Teachers of Adults by Patricia Cranton). In her preface, Cranton reiterates the initial aim of her 1994 publication, namely, "to interpret transformative discovering idea, recount the method from the learners' viewpoint, discover one-by-one dissimilarities in transformative discovering, present functional schemes for fostering transformative discovering, and talk about how mature individual teachers themselves are transformative learners" (p. vii). In our work as mature individual teachers and as designers of extending learning techniques, we regularly mention to the "transformative" influence of our efforts. In this new version, Cranton encompasses quotations to John Dirkx's (2000) concepts about the function of fantasy and spirituality in transformation. Her "guide for mature individual educators" locations the power of the affective, as extracted through the use of verse, melodies, or the visual creative pursuits, to enrich learning-even on topics not conspicuously creative pursuits related. "Any scheme that connects learners to soul work" is to be boosted, Cranton proposes, echoing Dirkx, who recounts this as "critical" to individual transformation (p. 67). A line from "The Dry Salvages," in T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, arrives to mind: "We had the know-how but missed the significance / and set about to the significance refurbishes the know-how in a distinct form." In the course of our expert undertaking, we often know-how transformative learning-our own and our students'-without completely appreciating either its source or its meaning.

Cranton's publication asks for us to contemplate on both and, in the method, assists not only as a direct but furthermore as an affirmation of our own best practices.

Beginning with an overview called "Dimensions of Adult Learning" (in the first of her 10 chapters); Cranton sets up a structure that situates transformative discovering idea inside the more general publications on mature individual learning. She recounts that idea in Chapter Two and presents revisions in Chapter Three, "A Theory in Progress." Since my learned control and esteem is English publications and not mature individual learning, the first three sections, though informative, were less engaging than the genuine "Learner's Story" documented in Chapter Four. Recognizing one-by-one dissimilarities in Chapter Five, Cranton indicates that "theorists as well as learners have distinct modes of glimpsing the world" (p. 97) and, accordingly,  "Educator Roles," she ...