Presentation Sessions

Transformative learning is 'an approach to teaching based on promoting change, where educators challenge learners to critically question and assess the integrity of their deeply held assumptions about how they relate to the world around them' (Mezirow & Taylor, 2009,...

Bringing the Ego to the Fore: Addressing the Form that Trans-forms

The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan responded to an essential and unanswered question within transformative learning: “What form transforms?” (2000, p. 35), highlighting, “The form that is undergoing transformation needs to be better understood; if there is no...

Can Parents’-Teachers Partnership transform? An Action Research

Research seems to be explicit on children’s benefit from parents’-school partnership and enhanced relationship. The ways in which parents can be better involved, however, are not yet apparent even though a variety of educational approaches and programs are studied...

Change agents at Univeristy of Padua: A transformative experience in Teaching and Learning

The university of Padua has embarked on a faculty development program that uses change agents (CA) within a faculty learning community as trained faculty who promote innovation in teaching and learning within departments. Their transformative learning experience is...

Co-Creating Sacred Classroom Space for Transformative Learning

Ritual, and repetition of ritual, in the classroom brings familiarity and comfort, and thus a sense of safety, ownership and belonging, for participants. In this session we will elaborate upon a specific routine that is utilized in our classroom spaces, how we elevate...

Community Transformation: Asian American Community Leaders

This paper is a study on transformation and how one particular minority group, the Asian Americans, have collectively transformed itself politically and socio-economically. Asian Americans are a highly diverse population segment due to the various ethnic groups within...

Confucianism and its Transformative Power in a Human-centered Era

Confucianism is one of the most influential learning philosophies of East Asian countries. It is concerned with inner virtue, morality, and respect for the community and its values. Many scholars have studied and categorized Confucianism as a system of social and...

Creating Dissonance: Transformative Learning Through the Provocative Arts

This session focuses on the role of the arts to disturb or disrupt the status quo, waking us up to what is wrong in the world and calling us to action to right the wrong. Transformative learning often occurs when our normal everyday way of viewing the world no longer...

Creative Listening Workshop: Exploring the Potential for Transformational Learning

The Creative Listening Workshop (CLW) utilizes movement, breath, and visual dialogue to prepare the participant for foundational transformative listening. CLW aims to promote transformative learning by shifting perceptions and cultural and psychic assumptions relating...

Crisis and Experience: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy of Crisis

Crises in our society – climate, covid-19 and mass migration – seem to define not only the experience of learning but the experience of living and surviving that have implications for adult learning. We explore the concept of experience and examine its role in...

Crisis and Experience: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy of Crisis

Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning: A transformative perspective

The paper focuses on the Italian higher education context, where the number of minority students has significantly increased in the last decades. As reported in scientific literature, attending multicultural campuses can be associated with richer educational...

Enhancing the Transformative Potential of Scholarly-Practice Doctorateness: Cultural-Historical Considerations on the Doctoral Ecosystem

The COVID-19 pandemic epitomizes how quickly and dramatically our lives can permanently change. The sobering finding that the pandemic affected historically disadvantaged groups in greater measure calls for the consideration of underlying cultural-historical factors...

Experiences of applying for promotion as counter-cultural transformative learning

In this paper we use the methodology of self-study to explore our experiences as academics applying for promotion. We use Mezirow's transformative learning theory and the African philosophy of Ubuntu to frame the study. Through narrative inquiry, we document our...

Exploring Visceral Experiences of Physiology: The Role of Embodied Cognition in Fostering Transformative Learning

Barriers to embodied cognition—or integrated emotional and cognitive brain functions—interrupt the transformative learning process, which is vital to healthy adult development, and decrease the potential for a self-authoring, transcendent, and humanistic society. This...

Faculty Feedback as an Enabler of Transformative Learning

Transformation does not occur in isolation. To move beyond “becom(ing) critically aware of the… assumptions that have influenced the way we see ourselves and our relationships” (Mezirow, 1978, p. 101) towards “perspectives which are more inclusive, discriminating and...

Following up an experience of a transformational learning community for teachers as adult learners during the pandemic

This paper presents the design and implementation of an online distance learning professional development course that took place during the Covid 19 pandemic and aimed to transform teachers' attitudes towards the use of digital education content and Open Educational...

Future of Work: A Solicitation for Critical-Ecological Perspective of Transformative Learning

This paper aims to seek the position of transformative learning theory in the future of work context which requires the individuals to critically examine the neoliberal logic embedded in the technological affordances. In the backdrop of the critical inquiry around the...

Leveraging Action Research for Transformative Learning in a School-University Partnership

In the context of increasingly complex challenges facing 21st century school systems, action research has incredible potential to generate transformative learning for educators who engage in the collaborative process. The authors of this paper, a doctoral candidate...

Mentoring toward Equity: How a Praxis of Repair Can Inform Transformative Learning

The interlocking challenges of racial injustice, economic disparities, and global pandemics brings renewed attention to the need for educators to scaffold effective responses to these crises with students. This paper moves away from examining how Transformative...

Opening brave spaces through practices of connectedness: Embodied and experiential experiences from the ‘collective enacting’ of four doctoral students learning in crisis

Building upon Buechner et al.’s (2020) “From Liminality to Communitas: The Collective Dimensions of Transformative Learning”, a group of four doctoral students offer an account of their own liminal experience that fostered transformation in a dynamic, collective...

Practices of an International Virtual Learning Community: A Story of Holistic Authentic Connection

In this session, we model a virtual learning community that emerged from a 2017 planning committee for the 2018 International Transformative Learning Conference. With listening at the center, we suggest that community can be created and nurtured across differences,...

Strengthening inner knowing for resilient leadership

The past two years have reiterated to the whole world that we are living in increasingly unpredictable and complex times. To respond wisely, we would benefit from nurturing the skills, confidence for, and ways of being, individually and collectively as resilient...

Transformative Learning Experience of Self-Awareness and Empowerment

Often, we have a mind-body-spirit disconnect—to ourselves and others—that can impede transformative learning. The transformative learning activities introduced in this experiential session will be mindfulness activities aimed at examining our deeper selves and...

Unpacking transformation: Getting personal, confronting otherness, living resistance

How do we meaningfully speak of transformation? Transformative learning maybe a perspective on how a person transforms mental models through critical discourse and contemplation. And/or there are more relational, embodied, embedded, existential, emotional, aesthetic,...

We Build the World with Transformative Learning: Regenerating Transformational Commons as a Resource for Collective Leadership

When we learn together, we then have the potential to lead together. When we learn together, as distinct from one-directional informing and teaching, a shared space of not-knowing emerges, a collective beginner’s mind. Dialogue, as distinct from discussion, debate,...

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Spiritual Growth and Transformation: Some Insights from Indian Spirituality Educators

This paper presents insights collected from spirituality educators belonging to five contemporary Indian spiritual movements regarding the journeys of Indian spirituality seekers. It uses a qualitative approach involving a multi-dimensional lens to examine and compile...

Stupidity or what? The tenacious transformative learner grappling with the neoliberal world

In this paper I build upon my thirty years of turning experience into learning by applying the theory and practice of transformative learning in the context of international development practice in Nepal. I revisit a particular epistemological tension that opened up...

The Road Less Traveled: Phenomenology as Transformative Practice for exploring Lifeworlds and Deathworlds

Phenomenology can be seen as an abstract or philosophical discipline, encapsulated in relatively dense texts and interpreted within a mostly academic context. Alfred Schutz, progenitor of social (“lifeworld”) phenomenology had a more pragmatic view in mind, as...

Transformative Learning for Transformative Leadership Development

In 2017, EY released Aspire, an internal, cohort model, three-year transformative leadership development program that eventually inspired a firmwide transformative leadership model. Aspire uses a virtual delivery method and a personalized digital dashboard for...

Transformative Learning in Women’s Leadership Development

This work-in-progress paper presents a preliminary literature review in order to understand the factors that impact the journey of women who are aspiring to be leaders. Preliminary findings show that the double bind, gendered structures that arise from "contradictory...

Transforming the Role of Women in Faith Based Adult Educational Leadership

Women in faith-based educational institutions are transforming the world and communities they serve. These women are changing the view and importance of female religious leadership, especially in adult religious educational institutions. The importance of women in...

Understanding the role of transformative learning in native English-speaking teachers’ identity formation and professional confidence development

As more and more western teachers come to work in China's higher education, their professional development has become essential for formulating relevant organizational policies and employee retention in transnational universities. This study wants to understand how...

Unexpected Growth in The Path of Uncertainty: Psychotherapy as a Case Example