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What is Transformative Learning

Higher Education Accessibility Behind and Beyond Prison Walls
An experience of learning in which previously held assumptions about the nature of reality and the situation of the self are challenged and changed.
Published in Chapter:
Fostering Change, Transforming Learning: Pedagogical Approaches to Carceral Education
Vicki L. Reitenauer (Portland State University, USA), Rhiannon M. Cates (Portland State University, USA), and Benjamin J. Hall (Portland State University, USA)
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 40
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-3056-6.ch010
Abstract
This is a chapter in which a currently incarcerated student/teaching assistant; a university staff member/former student/teaching assistant; and an instructor of women, gender, and sexuality studies collaboratively examine how the curricular approaches and pedagogical strategies utilized in the course “Writing as Activism,” taught inside a correctional facility, embody and enact the liberatory and transformative potential of prison-based teaching and learning. The authors review a selection of individual and collaborative assignments, activities, and writing exercises, as well as the faculty member's philosophy and practice of self-grading as a mechanism to relocate power and foster accountability. This chapter concludes with instructions for activities and accompanying materials used in this course, including the syllabus, for educators to refer to and adapt for their own use in (carceral) spaces of learning.
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Integrating Digital Photography into Adult Education
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Sustainability Education Beyond the Classroom: How the “Exploding University” Nurtures Collective Intelligence Across Local and Global Communities
An approach to education that invites us to consider who we are in relation to others and to pursue positive change on behalf of these known and unknown others. Focused on shared sense-making and practical action, it requires us to build relations of mutual trust, truth, values and understanding.
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Transformational Learning for Community Health: The Case of Physical Education Teacher Candidates
The process of affecting change in a frame of reference. Learning to make interpretations from the person’s own beliefs, judgments and feelings and consciously define the meaning of the experience ( Mezirow, 1997 ).
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Effective Implementation of Sustainability Education in Higher Education Settings via Transformative Learning Approach: Literature Review and Framework Proposal
The kind of learning which nurtures autonomous thinking by allowing individuals to construct knowledge through their experience in the world.
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The Online Adult Learner: Profiles and Practices
The process of becoming critically aware of our assumptions which may result in a change in perspective and acting upon these new understandings.
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Navigators on the Research Path: Teaching and Mentoring Student Qualitative Researchers
“The process by which people examine problematic frames of reference to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change” (Cranton, 2006, p. 36).
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Learning with a Curve: Young Women's “Depression” as Transformative Learning
Broadly defined as the process by which previous assumptions are brought to light and expanded/replaced in favor of new understandings ( Mezirow, 1991 ), “a deep, structural shift in basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions” ( O'Sullivan, 2003 , p.326), as well an examination of how “uncritically accepted and unjust dominant ideologies are embedded in everyday situations” ( Brookfield, 2000 , p. 36).
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The Impact of E-Learning on CTE from an Adult Education Perspective
A process of learning that creates a substantial or profound change in the habits, ideas and/or outlook of an individual.
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Teaching Critical Thinking and Team Based Concept Mapping
The process of using information received from a teacher and creating new knowledge by using higher order thinking skills.
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Flipping the Medical School Classroom
How learners comprehend, validate, reflect on, and reformulate the meaning of their experience.
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Decolonizing the African University Pedagogy Through Integrating African Indigenous Knowledge and Information Systems
It is a theory of learning that empowers learners to see the social world differently and through an ethical lens, so that they will challenge and change the status quo as agents of change.
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Adult Learning Theories and Principles
An adult learning theory that involves the learner experiencing a transformation in their perspective after integrating new information into their worldview.
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Fostering Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in Chinese Universities for a Creative Society
It refers to the process by which we transform our take-for-granted frames of reference (meaning perspectives, habits of mind, mind-sets), to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, emotionally capable of change, and reflective so that they may generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action. Through transformative learning, personality-integrated knowledge is developed on the basis of which associations can be freely made in all subjectively relevant contexts.
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Experiential Learning for Telehealth in Sports Science and Allied Health
Learning that requires going beyond information and knowledge and challenging the assumptions based on which knowledge is based leading to new perspectives and approaches.
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Game Design as a Compelling Experience
A process of getting beyond gaining factual knowledge alone to instead become changed by what one learns in some meaningful way. It involves questioning assumptions, beliefs and values, and considering multiple points of view, while always seeking to verify reasoning.8
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Learning Cities: Philosophy, History, and Experiences From Africa
Learning that challenges old views through a process of disorientation and self-examination which ultimately leads to a change in opinion or behavior.
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Transformative Learning in the Workplace
A deep shift in perspective that leads to a more open, better justified, and more discriminating frame of reference.
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Online Instructional Strategies for Enhancing Teachers' TPACK: Experiences, Discourse, and Critical Reflection
The process of effecting change in a frame of reference by critically reflecting on assumptions and beliefs and consciously making and implementing plans that bring about new ways of thinking.
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Reflection and SoTL: Putting Reflection (Back) on Faculty Radar
The slow and infrequent process of changing one’s assumptions or beliefs.
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An Examination of Educators' and Learners' Experiences with Technology from Both Sides of the Learning Landscape: An Autoethnographic Exploration
Learning that reshapes one’s outlook, and one’s approach to future situations, particularly from instances that are disorienting within an academic or professional environment – leading to a paradigmatic shift in beliefs, behaviors and goals.
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A Design Thinking Odyssey: Measuring and Documenting Graduate Learning Outcomes in the Co-Curricular Space
The process of deep, constructive learning in which learners consciously make meaning of one’s experiences to construe new perspectives and/or understandings that guide future undertakings.
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A Teacher Educator's Meaning-Making From a Hybrid “Online Teaching Fellows” Professional Learning Experience: Toward Literacy Practices for Teaching and Learning in Multimodal Contexts
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Laptops and Teacher Transformation
A process of examining, questioning, validating, and revising perceptions which is based on constructivist assumptions of adult learning. According to Mezirow (2003, p. 58) it “is learning that transforms problematic frames of reference—sets of fixed assumptions and expectations (habits of mind, meaning perspectives, mindsets)—to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change”.
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The Role of Information Communication Technologies in Enriching Adult Education Theory Building
The process of becoming critically aware of our assumptions which may result in a change in perspective and acting upon these new understandings
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Building Interaction Online: Reflective Blog Journals to link University Learning to Real World Practice
This is when an individual becomes aware of having limitations in their views so through self-examination and critical reflection they explore alternatives and through this process they change their perspective and find new meaning. Reflective writing is a critical part of the process of transformative learning. It has been argued by Lang (2009) that ‘transformative learning’ should aim to explore different perspectives in a non-challenging and accessible manner.
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Reflective Learning in the Digital Age: Insights from Confucius and Mezirow
Transformative learning is essentially about an individual changing some aspect of their perspective. The change is usually a result of a process in which the individual has identified their belief or perception to be erroneous and needs to be corrected. To better understand Mezirow’s theory, Confucius needs to be brought to light. Confucius’s humanistic assertions regarding learning and reflection have inspired generations of teachers and learners, while the theory of transformative learning is relatively new.
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Exploring the Impact of Online Teaching on Academic Identities: The Emerging Complexities of Workplace Learning
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Graduate Study Abroad: Student Learning, Pedagogy, and Outcomes
Transformative learning is a process of enhancing consciousness through transformation of frames of reference or basic world views and awareness and understanding of one’s self. This process is fostered by consciously directed processes such as working imaginatively with symbolic content received from the unconscious and critically analyzing underling premises and assumptions about one’s self and one’s being in the world.
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Change Agency in Global Higher Education: Operationalising Inclusion and Diversity Through Strategic Curriculum Development
Is the process of constructive and deep learning which moves beyond straightforward knowledge acquisition to critically impact on how learners make conscious meaning of their lives and decision-making processes.
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Reframing as Defining in Student Affairs: Co-Curricular Learning Through a Different Lens
The process of effecting change in a frame of reference or the structure of assumptions and belief systems through which meaning is made from experience ( Mezirow, 1997 ).
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Developing Educators' Global Leadership Competencies through Intercultural Immersion Experiences: Theory and Practice
The process of effecting change in a frame of reference. Frames of references are the structures of assumptions through which we understand our experiences.
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Digital Storytelling
This type of learning is when a person is changed in some way as the result of the learning.
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Transformative Learning
It often refers to the theory of reflectivity as it is currently used in Europe. The key concept in transformative learning is critical reflection. According to its chief proponent, Jack Mezirow, individuals’ meaning perspectives are transformed through a process of construing and appropriating new or revised interpretations of the meaning of an experience as a guide to awareness, feeling, and action. Transformative learning can simply be explained as learners making sense or meaning of their experiences. Both inner experience and external situations are important to critical reflection. However, the chief proponent of this theory was primarily interested in perspective transformation, which may lead to change in cognitive domain, affective domain, and psychomotor domain of learning. Transformative learning became popular in North America since its inception in the early 1980s. More and more universities in North America offer a course in this area. It is said that the theory has been applied to various groups of learners although it has been criticized for lack of social attention. Transformative learning was later expanded by scholars such as Patricia Cranton in Canada and Kathleen P. King in the United States. Finally, Wang and King (2006 , 2007 ) made a connection between Mezirow’s transformative learning and Confucianism by publishing a journal article and a book chapter. Despite criticisms, the theory of transformative learning has remained a useful and powerful theory in the field of adult learning and it does help explain how learners achieve perspective transformation via its three types and seven levels of reflectivity. The three types and seven levels of reflectivity do not deviate very far from Confucianism, which emphasizes silent reflection and the rectification of the mind in order to reach sagehood.
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Transforming From the Classroom to an Online Nursing Educator: A Transformative Learning Experience for New Online Nursing Faculty
Process for assessing meaning of new information in a relevant and rational manner and subsequently developing a plan of action.
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Transforming Teachers Through Professional Development Distance Learning Programs
is the process by which people transform their views, perceptions, and beliefs when faced with a disorienting dilemma.
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Synthesis and Application of Transformative Learning in Nonprofit Management
A constructivist theory of learning in which an individual deeply explores their assumptions and perspectives to meaningfully change to their frames of reference.
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Transformative and Innovative Pedagogies in Education
Involves a shift from the basic traditional learning style to digitized learning that incorporates three dimensions: psychological, convictional, and behavioral, aimed at increasing the depth of learning.
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If at First You Don’t Succeed, Become a Lifelong Learner: Gaining Capital through Online Higher Education Environments
Based on Jack Mezirow’s work (1979, 1990), this adult learning theory explains and describes how adults navigate the 10 stages which progress from disorienting dilemma to perspective transformation. For those who work with adult learners this theory provides insight into their coping strategies and needs.
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One to One Computing and Teacher Transformation
A process of examining, questioning, validating, and revising perceptions which is based on constructivist assumptions of adult learning. According to (Mezirow, 2003, p. 58) it “is learning that transforms problematic frames of reference—sets of fixed assumptions and expectations (habits of mind, meaning perspectives, mindsets)—to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change”.
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Interdisciplinary Professional Doctoral Education: Translational Research for Allied Health Professionals
A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.
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Distributed Cognition: Teachers' Perceptions and Implications for Learning Outcomes and Instructional Technology
An adult learning theory that details the transformative changes in the learner especially experiences which shape the learner and produce a significant impact, or paradigm shift ( Mezirow, 1981 ).
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Examining Adult Learning Assumptions and Theories in Technology-Infused Communities and Professions
The Western Governors University blog states that transformative learning is one theory of learning that particularly focuses on adult education. Transformative learning focuses on the idea that learners can adjust their thinking based on new information.
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Cross-Cultural Learning and Intercultural Competence
In literature, transformative or transformational learning is interchangeable. It is about change in the way that the learners see themselves and the world in which they live. Mezirow (1994) has defined “The social process of constructing and appropriating a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one’s experience as a guide to action” (p. 222-3).
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Using Critical Reflection to Deepen and Assess Graduate Student Learning
Deep, foundational modifications or restructuring of how one views themselves, others, and the world around them ( Merriam & Baumgartner, 2020 )
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Making Lemonade From the Lemon of Cultural Taxation: Developing Global Citizens Who Think Critically and Who Promote Diversity and Social Justice
The process of effecting change in a frame of reference; a rational and analytical process that helps in the expansion of consciousness through the transformation of basic worldview and specific capabilities of the self.
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Instructional Design for Adult and Continuing Higher Education: Theoretical and Practical Considerations
An individual may experience a “transformational process” while learning which may lead to individual change. It emphasizes that adults confront their own beliefs and myths through learning and this leads them to engage in problem-solving efforts, which become a critical component of adult learning.
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Reflection as a Process From Theory to Practice
Learning that brings about a change of perspective in the learner.
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Cognitive Development: The Learning Path of Community Development Practitioners
A process in which the taken-for-granted frames of reference have been reconstructed, modified, or evolved with newly acquired meaning from one’s experience.
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Learning through Teaching: A Narrative Analysis
Is a deep shift in perspective that leads to more open, more permeable, better justified, and discriminating meaning perspectives.
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The Evolution of Consumerism in the Marketing Education: A Critical Discussion Based on Mezirow's Critical Reflection
Is the process by which we transform problematic frames of reference (mindsets, habits of mind, meaning perspectives) – sets of assumption and expectation – to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change. Such frames are better because they are more likely to generate beliefs and opinions that will prove truer or justified to guide action. Frames of reference are the structures of culture and language through which the individuals construe meaning by attributing coherence and significance to our experience. Individuals selectively shape and delimit their perception, cognition and feelings by predisposing their intentions, beliefs, expectations and purposes. These preconceptions set individuals’ ‘line of action’. Once set or programmed, individuals automatically move from one specific mental or behavioural activity to another, and have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit their preconceptions. A frame of reference encompasses cognitive, conative and affective components, may operate within or outside awareness and is composed of two dimensions: a habit of mind and resulting points of view (e.g., Mezirow, 2009 ). In simple words, transformative learning is about the critical and reflective learning for living.
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Emphasizing Diversity through 3D Multi-User Virtual Worlds
Through transformative learning a student becomes increasingly aware of the information that surrounds them. Students explore this information, test assumptions and expectations, and beginning to think critically about this new information in order to make a tacit change in behavior or action.
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Collective Transformation of Three Generations of Chinese Adult Learners in K-20 Education
It is a newer theory in adult education as popularized by Jack Mezirow through his cutting edge publications in North America. The theory itself has inspired numerous journal articles and dissertations. It is still being widely critiqued, analyzed, and applied in different fields.
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Leveraging Virtual Professional Development Experiences to Prepare to Teach Young Children Online
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Educational Gaming Avatars
is learning that engages students to question their own assumptions, beliefs, feelings, and perspectives in order to develop personally and intellectually (Boyd & Meyers, 1988).
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Using Cyberspace to Promote Transformative Learning Experiences and Consequently Democracy in the Workplace
This involves a re-framing of assumptions that provide a different perspective on the world. As such, transformative learning leads to “respect for others, self-respect, willingness to accept responsibility for the common good, willingness to welcome diversity and to approach others with openness” ( Mezirow, 2001 , p. 14). It should be noted that this concept of transformative learning assumes that the aforementioned characteristics are positive, but the pronouncement that these are positive characteristics is a social construct.
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Access, Opportunity, and Curriculum Making Through Multimodal Meaning-Making and Technology Integration in Teacher Education
A revision of conceptions or assumptions and includes a process by which individual learners construct knowledge through critical reflection.
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Tales of the Unexpected: Post-Crisis Transformational Leadership
A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.
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Challenging Traditional Programs for Providing International Educational Opportunities in Higher Education
A style of pedagogy in which a student’s current paradigm is challenged by an event or experience in which the existing paradigm is no longer valid, thus causing the student to alter or change paradigms accordingly.
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Sustainable Development in the Context of Higher Education: Approaches for Achieving Transformation
Learning that uses techniques that can bring about a change in perspectives, values, and behaviour of learners.
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Digital Storytelling
Learning characterized by a shift in the identity or self-concept of the learner, in contrast to processes in which the learner becomes more proficient or knowledgeable but does not undergo a shift in identity.
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The Predictive and the Inferential: Contexts of Unknown Future Workforce Leadership
A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.
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Steering Transformative Workforce Leadership in Times of Crisis: The Case for Doctoral Education
A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.
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Creating Sustainable Communities: Adult and Leadership Theories and Principles in Practice
A theory developed by Mezirow (1990 AU53: The in-text citation "Mezirow (1990" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. , 1991, 2000) which gives an account of how learners change their meaning and frames of reference. Learners use critical reflection to examine their beliefs and assumptions; typically involves a “disorienting dilemma” or major transition.
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Adult Learners, E-Learning, and Success: Critical Issues and Challenges in an Adult Hybrid Distance Learning Program
The process by which newly gained (or changed) perspectives provide better insight and understanding.
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Interdisciplinary Doctoral Education and Strategic Management in Crises: Harnessing Agency With Praxis
A process of individually or collectively changing perspectives, which has three distinguishable dimensions of psychological response, convictional attitude, and behavioural change.
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