Teachers are often portrayed in Hollywood films as superhuman. While these types of films may perpetuate certain stereotypes of teachers, they can also have a great influence. Based on their own teaching experiences, and having viewed and re-viewed the films "Dangerous Minds" (Bruckheimer, Simpson, & Smith, 1995) and "The…

Transformation has been the fundamental basis upon which education has always stood, as without transformation in mind, education would seem purposeless and undirected. This would imply that the objective of providing information in education is not just to gain knowledge but to achieve the desired transformation in character or behaviour by…

Noting that teens are disengaged in school and increasingly dispirited by social problems, the authors argue that these students need learning environments that foster engagement, connection, and a greater sense of purpose. They make the case for deep learning--learning that helps students "make connections to the world, to think critically,…

How might literature be shared with students for transformative purposes? Literature has the power to shape students' worldviews through the exploration of diverse human experiences, but how students engage with diverse characters is important to reaching transformative goals. The author identified teachers' pedagogical moves within a preschool…

Functions form a central part of the U.S. mathematics curriculum. A large body of research shows that students at all levels, including preservice secondary mathematics teachers, have difficulties with defining function as a correspondence between two sets with a univalence condition. Those difficulties include privileging algebraic…

Philip Jackson's "The Mimetic and the Transformative: Alternative Outlooks on Teaching" is widely read both inside and outside of philosophy of education circles and courses, and is best known for sketching out the long-standing difference between the mimetic and transformative traditions in teaching. In this paper, I argue that we need…

Mezirow's (1978) transformative learning was influenced by Kuhn's (1962) paradigm and Freire's (1970) emancipatory learning. In this paper, the author provides readers a clear guide about the main components of transformative learning: Experience, critical reflection, and rational discourse. The author emphasizes that experience in transformative…

We take the reception of Wolfgang Klafki's didactics in Russia as our example for the difficult relations between knowledge transfer and knowledge transformation. We start with a description, analysis and evaluation of Klafki's two didactical models, categorical didactics and critical-constructive didactics, and then describe and evaluate their…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences and responses of ten adult literacy organisers (ALOs) from Dublin, Wicklow and Kildare to the growing influence of neoliberalism and the commodification of adult literacy as a skill and function of the economy. The research argues for a greater focus on literacy as a social practice…

Higher education as a personal, intellectual and moral cultivation is a longstanding ideal that is constantly challenged by the view that education is merely the development of specific skills for vocational and personal success. Much research argues that the latter understanding makes education a technical affair that creates an egocentric…

This paper describes a teaching method that enables students to design efficient and effective algorithms for reporting information systems applications. Adopting the general principles of transformative learning, students are immersed in a series of activities and interventions to enable learning. The activities provided opportunities for…

Through the exercise of collaborative autoethnography, we propose intentional and purposeful dialogue can act as a pathway for transformative learning. We seek to first deepen our understandings of transformative learning, particularly for underserved students in higher education and second to advance autoethnographic methods, a method that…

Catholic colleges and universities seek to transform the students who attend them. As the subtitle of this article indicates, this aspiration prompts some difficult questions. For example, just what is the warrant for an institution of higher learning to trifle, as one might put it provocatively, with people's hearts? After clarifying terms, the…

Transformative learning approaches in social work education emphasize the importance of bringing together experience, critical reflection, and dialogue to promote individual and social change. An experiential learning assignment, Social Work Week, was designed to sharpen undergraduate students' group practice skills and introduce them to the range…

The concept of action learning looks at how people learn, which is using gained knowledge to create needful and beneficial change. As a result, real problems and concerns are the contexts for which programmed knowledge and questioning insights are set to allow for unlearning and learning. Using Reg Revans theory which assumes action learning as…