What is Transformative experience

This chapter is the story of the authors' journey using community mapping in graduate coursework to make visible the assets in local communities through experiential learning. Community mapping is an experiential, inquiry-based ethnographic research method that can be utilized by various community members to understand a community better. In this case, teachers uncovered language and literacy present in the communities and created contextualized learning experiences by connecting students' lived realities to school instruction. The authors began with discussions around community and ethnographic projects to understand what was present in the community. This evolved to include some form of action, primarily in the form of curricular reform and critical literacy projects and/or culturally sustaining pedagogies.