Transformative Education: Philosophical, Psychological, and Pedagogical Dimensions

One of the enduring mysteries of the human experience is our capacity to undergo profound changes in the values, modes of thought, self-conceptions, and guiding ideals that have given shape to our lives. Moved by an encounter of sublime beauty in a piece of music, thrust into a new way of life after immigrating to a foreign country, inspired by the courage of a character in a novel, or impelled by the example set by a trusted teacher, we decide to follow a new path for ourselves — one that, just a short time before, was either unforeseeable or seemingly unforgeable for us. We call these experiences transformative, and we often look back on them with gratitude for the person they have made us into and even a bit of awe at the obscurity of their inner workings. Understanding the human capacity for transformative change has a long history in Western philosophy. We see already in Plato's Allegory of the Cave a dramatic depiction of personal transformation, and Augustine, Kant, Hegel, James, and Dewey would devote pages to its study as well. It is also a popular and recurring theme of literature and art. From Ovid's Metamorphoses to T. H. White's Once and Future King, the idea of personal transformation continues to capture the Western imagination. Perhaps Wotan of Wagner's Das Rheingold captures this sentiment most succinctly: “Transformation and turmoil are loved by those who live.”11 Richard Wagner, Das Rheingold (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2009). In spite of this long legacy of thinking about transformation, only recently has it become a topic of extensive empirical and theoretical research. Especially in education, but not only there, the mystery and promise of transformation has had broad appeal. In educational psychology,22 Kevin Pugh, “Teaching for Idea-Based, Transformative Experiences in Science: An Investigation of the Effectiveness of Two Instructional Elements,” Teachers College Record 104, no. 6 (2002): 1101–1137. social justice education,33 C. Alejandra Elenes, “Transformando fronteras: Chicana Feminist Transformative Pedagogies,” in Education Feminism: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Barbara J. Thayer-Bacon, Lynda Stone, and Katharine M. Sprecher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 341–353. adult education,44 Jack Mezirow, “Perspective Transformation,” Adult Education Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1978): 100–110; and Jack Mezirow, “A Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education,” Adult Education Quarterly 32, no. 1 (1981): 3–24. school leadership studies,55 Carolyn M. Shields, “Transformative Leadership: Working for Equity in Diverse Contexts,” Educational Administration Quarterly 46, no. 4 (2010): 558–589. higher education,66 Richard P. Keeling, Learning Reconsidered: A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience (Washington, DC: National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, 2004). and philosophy of education,77 Andrea English, Discontinuity in Learning: Dewey, Herbart, and Education as Transformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). researchers have pointed to the transformative potential lying within the educational environment. Unlocking this potential is a fundamental aim of teaching and learning, proponents of transformative education have argued, and it is the task of the researcher to provide theoretical and conceptual resources to understand how we might do so. If education is about something more than providing the epistemic goods necessary for a productive career and the social and cultural appurtenances of middle-class life, then perhaps it is this: to transform us, to jumpstart processes of profound and existentially meaningful change that make us into the people we — or at least our educators — know we can be. Driven by something like this conviction, educational researchers in the last half-decade or so have offered numerous conceptions of what a truly transformative education might look like, employing terms like transformative pedagogy,88 Elenes, “Transformando fronteras,” 341–353; Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda, Patricia Gurin, and Gretchen E. Lopez, “Transformative Pedagogy for Democracy and Social Justice,” Race, Ethnicity and Education 6, no. 2 (2003): 165–191; David Lusted, “Why Pedagogy?,” Screen 27, no. 5 (1986): 2–16; and bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994). transformative learning,99 Edward W. Taylor and Patricia Cranton, The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass); and English, Discontinuity in Learning. transformational teaching,1010 Todd Finley, “4 Things Transformational Teachers Do” edutopia [Website] (2015), https://www.edutopia.org/blog/big-things-transformational-teachers-do-todd-finley (last modified July 15, 2014); Thomas R. Rosebrough and Ralph G. Leverett, Transformational Teaching in the Information Age: Making Why and How We Teach Relevant to Students (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2011); and George M. Slavich and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Transformational Teaching: Theoretical Underpinnings, Basic Principles, and Core Methods,” Educational Psychology Review 24, no. 4 (2012): 569–608. Compare with Peggy Albers and Tammy Frederick, “‘We teach who we are’: A Study of Two Latino Transformative Educators,” TESOL Journal 4, no. 2 (2013): 233–260; Laura E. Pinto et al., “Charismatic, Competent or Transformative? Ontario School Administrators' Perceptions of ‘Good Teachers,’” Journal of Teaching and Learning 8, no. 1 (2012): 73–90; and Henry A. Giroux, Paulo Freire, and Peter McLaren, Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1988). transformative experience,1111 Laurie Paul, Transformative Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and Kevin Pugh, “Transformative Experience: An Integrative Construct in the Spirit of Deweyan Pragmatism,” Educational Psychologist 46, no. 2 (2011): 107–121. transformative school leadership,1212 Eric J. Weiner, “Secretary Paulo Freire and the Democratization of Power: Toward a Theory of Transformative Leadership,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 35, no. 1 (2003): 89–106; C. M. Shields, “Dialogic Leadership for Social Justice: Overcoming Pathologies of Silence,” Educational Administration Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2004): 109–132; and Shields, “Transformative Leadership,” 558–589. and transformative Bildung1313 Hans-Christoph Koller, Bildung anders denken: Einführung in die Theorie transformatorischer Bildungsprozesse [Thinking about Education Differently: Introduction to the Theory of Transformative Bildung Processes] (Stuttgart, Germany: Kohlhammer, 2012); Winfried Marotzki, Entwurf einer strukturalen Bildungstheorie: Biographietheoretische Auslegung von Bildungsprozessen in hochkomplexen Gesellschaften [Drafting a Structural Theory of Bildung: A Biographical-Theoretical Interpretation of Bildung Processes in Complex Societies] (Weinheim, Germany: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1990); and Rainer Kokemohr, “Bildung als Welt-und Selbstentwurf im Fremden. Annäherungen an eine Bildungsprozesstheorie” [Conceptualizing World and Self in Bildung Processes and Encounters with the Foreign: Contributions to a Theory of Transformative Bildung Processes], in Bildungsprozesse und Fremdheitserfahrung: Beiträge zu einer Theorie transformatorischer Bildung, ed. Hans-Christoph Koller, Winfried Marotzki, and Olaf Sanders (Weinheim, Germany: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 2007), 13–68. to describe their vision. Within this discussion one can find rich and compelling resources for how to conceive of the transformative process and how to turn the classroom into a space for transformation. The person looking for guidance on these matters will find a vast and growing literature on this important idea. At the same time, he or she will also find that the current discussion about transformation and its role in the educational process has been carried out largely within traditional disciplinary boundaries. Although the idea of transformation has been assayed from a multitude of disciplinary perspectives, attempts to account for the substantive and sometimes drastic differences in the aims, methods, and meanings that have been ascribed to transformative education are almost completely lacking. In one context, for example, transformative education is closely aligned with the project of eradicating oppression and injustice,1414 Elenes, “Transformando fronteras,” 341–353. while in another it is derived from a phenomenological account of experience and thus carries no particular implications for social justice.1515 English, Discontinuity in Learning. Sometimes transformative education refers to deep forms of learning in which students experience an expansion of value and meaning with respect to new science concepts,1616 Pugh, “Transformative Experience,” 107–121. and other times it concerns principally learning how to learn.1717 Slavich and Zimbardo, “Transformational Teaching,” 569–608. So what are the defining characteristics of a specifically transformative approach to education? What exactly is transformed in the process? How are we to think of the outcome of transformation? Is transformation always a desirable aim? What are the ethical risks involved? Are we comfortable granting teachers the power to transform? A birds-eye view of the literature reveals a deep dissensus about these questions. This lack of disciplinary crossover holds not only between the various disciplines of educational research, but also between (1) the Anglo-American and German educational research communities, and (2) educational research and philosophy proper. Concerning the former, exciting recent work on the notion of transformatorische Bildungsprozesse in the German context, in addition to the long phenomenological tradition centering around the concept of Horizontwandel (horizon transformation), have gone largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world. Concerning the latter, recent work in philosophy proper on “transformative experience”1818 Paul, Transformative Experience. and the special “agency of becoming”1919 Agnes Callard, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). that transformative experiences can encompass have yet to make it into the pages of educational research and philosophy of education. To our minds, the current discussion of transformation in education has thus come to a crossroads. If it were to proceed along the traditional disciplinary lines it has previously followed, it may suffer the fate of other central educational ideas such as “multicultural education” or “liberal education,” which are regularly appropriated to mean just about anything under the pedagogical sun. The problem with abiding contradictory proposals within the conceptual boundaries of important ideas is that they can thereby become mere rhetoric. In the absence of firm philosophical grounding, calling a method or educational experience “transformative” becomes a way of saying “I like this!” rather than referring to anything characteristically transformative about the proposal. The end result is that “transformative education” loses its capacity to pose an alternative to the educational status quo, further ossifying the place of mediocre and uninspired pedagogy in the day-to-day of teaching and learning. Instead of challenging the epistemic boundaries of students' understanding, transformative education is turned into an entertaining repackaging of the material needed for success on standardized tests. Instead of confronting students with compelling figures of integrity, courage, foresight, or compassion, transformative education is boxed into the paradigm of acquiring reflective competencies and critical thinking skills. And instead of encouraging students to inquire into their own frameworks of value to see whether they are coherent, empowering, and socially responsible, transformative education becomes a means of getting into a good college and finding a lucrative profession. There is worrying evidence that this appropriation is already occurring.2020 See, for example, David Burgess, Teach like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator (San Diego, CA: Dave Burgess Consulting, 2012), 60; and Finley, “4 Things Transformational Teachers Do.” The purpose of this symposium is therefore to provide further philosophical grounding for the idea of a transformative education. Simultaneously, it aims to open up an interdisciplinary discussion that includes some of the leading contributors to the discussion of transformative education to date. These contributors represent various fields of educational research and philosophy, both in the Anglo-American context and the German-speaking world. This symposium therefore constitutes one of the first truly interdisciplinary attempts to understand the complex phenomenon of transformative self-change and its role in the educational process. In what follows, we outline how each of the symposium contributors advances this purpose. Kevin Pugh, Dylan Kriescher, Simon Cropp, and Maaly Younis explore the philosophical groundings of an emerging perspective in educational psychology, transformative experience (TE) theory, which Pugh has developed over the last decade. TE theory has already proven to be a central contribution to empirical research on science education, and the authors show that it has its roots in Dewey's philosophy of experience. In the article, Pugh and his coauthors demonstrate how several crucial facets of transformative experience derive directly from some of the core concepts of Deweyan thought, specifically, the concepts of an experience, ideas, and educative experience, while at the same time pointing to some of the limitations and incompatibilities that emerge when TE theory is exclusively derived from Dewey. To address some of these shortcomings, the authors point to the philosophical perspectives dealing with the sublime and awe, Romantic science, critical theory, and transformative learning theory as potential resources for further developing the empirical construct of transformative experience. In their contribution, Laurie Paul and John Quiggin argue that institutions of higher education inevitably pursue a transformative educational project. The transformative experience that characteristically occurs in higher education involves the emergence of a form of criticality in students. In their view, colleges and universities can provide spaces for students to experience a Kuhnian scientific revolution in their thinking, with the effect that students can thereby become more critically minded individuals in many areas of their intellectual lives. In making this argument, Paul and Quiggin take up a position contrary to commentators on higher education such as Stanley Fish, who maintain that colleges and universities should focus only on the mastery of scholarly skills. Against this view, Paul and Quiggin argue that transformative epistemic and personal growth forms a core aim of higher education. In the final lines of the article, the authors point out that the recent shift to digital platforms in university teaching brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a test case for the transformative dimensions of higher education. In particular, we can begin to observe how much of the transformative effect of higher education is due exclusively to engagement with course content versus the role of students' wider experience of being on campus. In his contribution, Randall Curren discusses the role of transformative experiences in education, with a specific focus on valuing. Engaging with Laurie Paul's influential 2014 book Transformative Experience, Curren offers a holistic picture of transformative experience by putting the process in the wider context of what he calls a fully transformative package, which includes changes in values, capabilities, and understanding. Given this notion of transformation, he raises questions with important practical implications: Which ethical issues arise when we aim at orchestrating educational experiences that may prove to be transformative? What transformations are worth orchestrating in education? Curren argues from an Aristotelian perspective that the student's capacity to live well is at the center of these questions. When defining what qualifies as an ethically defensible transformative education, one needs to reflect on what count as necessary goods and desirable capabilities for students to acquire in the transformative process. In other words, Curren urges us to consider whether we can observe in the transformation a “fulfillment of in that is the of a life Randall “Transformative in this This us to that not of transformation is worth the or worth the student's in an educational In a to to some limitations and ethical of transformative education. 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