To adapt to medical school, students need to change their approaches to learning and study. Transformative learning through critical reflection on disorienting learning experiences supports perspective change to direct new activity. We explored how portfolio meetings support changes in students' perspectives towards learning and study during the…

In academic environments ruled by managerialist philosophies, learning as doing, as outcomes, prevails. This work complicates the equation by taking up learning as becoming. Through the prism of learning metaphors, which apart from construction and transmission have not been fully explored in our discipline, especially the potential of Bildung, we…

We are interested in the transformative potentials of intersubjectivity as it is enacted through second-person contemplative approaches. Our work here focuses on contemplative practice as a pedagogy that reveals and enacts intersubjectivity within postsecondary education. How might contemplative higher education practice as a pedagogy enable…

In participatory action research (PAR), university-based researchers often take foundational concepts such as transformation, empowerment, critical consciousness, and mutual understanding for granted as desirable or necessary outcomes or achievements. We discuss the danger of this and suggest that researchers recognize these as processes that…

Teachers in public schools regularly face labor oppression. Despite this reality, in research and practice, "social justice teacher preparation" has largely neglected the topic of "labor struggle." We offer this community auto-ethnography as a collective reflection on how we came to our own understandings around these issues…

Both "Bildung" and transformative learning theory focus on the transformative nature of education. Even though they have been developed in different continents and fairly independently of each other, they intersect, and at face value, they might appear to be very similar to each other. Both notions, though are perceived differently by…

The aim of this paper is to understand "whiteness" as a political category which organizes ordinary experience. I will use a phenomenological framework in order to denaturalize the white experience and make it a possible object of transformation and education. A description of "whiteness" as a category of experience has…

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…

Transformational learning theory is a cornerstone within the field of adult education. However, are all learners ready for their disorienting dilemma which instigates transformational learning? To answer this question, this autoethnographic paper unpacks an adult learner's personal journey on a research expedition to Antarctica. Using Antarctica…

This article shares the findings of a study examining the use of dialectical journals as liminal spaces for the development of critical reflection in practicing teachers. In an online graduate course on critical teacher inquiry designed to foster teachers as antiracist multicultural educators, teachers engaged in dialogue with themselves as they…

Emerging from faculty collaboration across disciplines, the four-stage Field Immersion Framework (FIF) marries place-based experiential learning with civic engagement to promote important transformative learning outcomes such as shifts in Worldview, Self, Epistemology, Ontology, Behavior, and Capacity. To support those outcomes, we developed this…

While many scholars have examined transformative learning in different prison education programs, the field has only recently reached Latin America. This article presents a participatory action research project which has been operating in a prison for men accused of organized crime in Jalisco, Mexico, since 2018. The analysis is based on…

Reflective practice is a complex concept to adequately describe, communicate about and, ultimately, teach. Unrelieved tensions about the concept persist within the health professions education (HPE) literature owing to reflection's diverse theoretical history. Tensions extend from the most basic, e.g., what is reflection and what are its contents,…

This study used a qualitative action research approach to engage a group of secondary English teachers in a collective inquiry to determine the best model for transformative teacher reflexivity and dialogue. Through solution-focused conversation, the goal was to design a sustainable framework for professional development that fosters creative,…

Reflection is fundamental in experiential pedagogies, and many studies have been carried out to investigate its impact and benefits on student learning outcomes. However, the concept of reflection is not well understood. In this study, we focus on the concept of reflection and ensuing approaches to it in service-learning, an experiential pedagogy…