Reflections on Adult Learners of Language and Literacy English C0865

            Adult Learners of Language and Literacy provided the fourth cornerstone of my foundation in literacy and language studies. Most significantly, I now have a deeper respect for adult learners. Who knew there was even a word for their learning needs: androgogy? Still, I quibble a bit with some of the features that are said to distinguish adult learning from childhood learning, though, since I believe the best teaching of younger people also engages their need to know why they’re learning something, their capacity for self-direction, and their connections to the real world.

Reading Brief Guide for Teaching Adult Learners, Third Update on Adult Learning Theory, and Lives on the Boundary gave me a more well-rounded picture of who comes to education late and why. One of the more personally valuable discussions in class was whether teachers should call their adult students “kids,” even in private. I argued for, as a measure of affection. The general consensus was that it is disrespectful. Later, I connected the conversation to my relationship with my own children, now in their twenties. I am transitioning from seeing them as children to viewing them as adults, and saw this conversation as part of that process. Maybe soon I won’t even be tempted to think of them as “kids.”

I got fired up with all the discussion about community colleges and their burdens. I had always had this area of the academic world in my peripheral vision as a place where I might some day work, partly because I am moved by people who are working toward a better life, especially through education. Wynne Ferdinand’s visit and the readings she suggested, along with Mike Rose’s writings, were a wonderful introduction to some of the issues in this field. I do love a good fight and think I may someday join in the battle to strengthen schools like these.

I struggled with Paulo Freire, both because of the dense, philosophical language and thought of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but also because of some of his Marxist-influenced ideas. As I wrote somewhat in my blog, I have never been comfortable with orthodoxies of any kind, whether from the left or the right, and have personal experience with collective action that became oppressive. That said, I continuously see Freire’s ideas reflected in the collaborative structure of activity in every area of contemporary life, from schools to the workplace, even to family structure. Perhaps it is just the zeitgeist, but Freire’s ideas give it some philosophical heft. I would have liked to spend more time in class discussing these notions, though I can see that we had so much to cover it would have been very hard to do. I can see how a course could spend an entire class dealing with just a chapter or two in order to outline his global view and then chart its influence.

Similarly, I would have liked a deeper dive into transformative learning, specifically, what does it look like in practice and how do we know when it has occurred. Can you call learning transformative if only your meaning schemes or psychological self-understanding have changed but not your global perspective? In writing my essay, I came across one scholar who admitted that the latter happens rarely. So how do we measure the intervening steps.

Ways with Words was a gem, offering terrific insight into language in the classroom. The ethnographic lens through which Shirley Brice Heath viewed teachers and students offers important guidelines, especially in diverse communities.

Deborah Brandt’s Literacy in American Lives is the most important text I have read on literacy itself, and Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age added some additional understanding. Brandt’s style was more readable and made better connections to her subjects as characters. Selfe and Hawisher’s, as I wrote in my book review, offered a more derivative and redundant text, but it linked digital technology to literacy in important ways.

While I work in a team-based environment that often requires the skills of group therapy, my two group projects for this class were the first I have been involved with in a classroom. (I did one with a single partner in my other class this semester as well.) All of these projects made me nervous, but they got successively easier. I was very glad to have the opportunity to grapple with the Prezi for our final presentation, and feel it is one very concrete outcome of this class. I enjoy translating abstract ideas into more accessible formats, as one does in a live presentation (or a TV newscast for that matter) and feel it is an important contemporary skill. I look forward to taking Digital Literacy in the fall and possibly researching these ideas more. I’m particularly interested in reading more from Gunther Kress, a member of the New London Group, who wrote about what he calls the “turn to the visual.”

I am very glad to have taken this course and believe I grew a lot because of it. After two semesters of graduate study now, I am happy to say I can look back and see a solid foundation for moving ahead.

Review: Literate Lives in the Information Age

Karen Mooney

Professor Barbara Gleason

English C0865

March 20, 2014

Review: Literate Lives in the Information Age

Selfe, Cynthia L. and Gail E. Hawisher. Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of

            Literacy From the United States. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

“Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy From the United States,” by Cythia L. Selfe and Gail E. Hawisher sets out to “trace technological literacy as it emerged” during the watershed years between 1978 and 2003. Through the life histories of 20 people of various ages, the authors aim to capture how and why people acquired and developed--or failed to acquire and develop--the literacies of technology as personal computers made their way into the American mainstream. By the turn of the 21^st century, they note, “the ability to read, compose and communicate in computer environments…[had] acquired immense importance not only as a basic job skills, but also…as an essential component of literate activity” (1). And while that process had already been underway for some time, there was little documentation of people’s opportunities, motivations, or of the social forces that influenced this new form of literacy. The expansive research project reported in this book attempted to fill that gap before users’ memories faded and the technology became so common as to be invisible.

Selfe and Hawisher direct their attention specifically to what they call technological literacy (alternately electronic or digital literacy), “the practices involved in reading, writing and exchanging information in online environments, as well as the values associated with such practices—cultural, social, political, and educational” (2). They distinguish it from computer literacy, which they define as obtaining to the specific skills required to operate the machines.

The authors’ pursuit is consistent with the understanding of literacy, like Street, Gee, Graff, and Brandt, as a set of practices and values situated in a particular historical and socio-cultural context. Deborah Brandt was particularly influential both in focus and concern. In fact, it was a talk by Brandt about her oral-history literacy project in 1998 that inspired this work. Selfe and Hawisher recognized that technological literacy, like traditional literacy, is practiced in specific cultural, material, educational, and material contexts that vary by levels of social, economic, educational, and technological support for this new literacy. They call the inter-relatedness of all these factors the cultural ecology of literacy.

  Over the course of six years, Selfe and Hawisher generated case studies of more than 350 people, each subject participating in a lengthy interview and filling out an extensive technological literacy questionnaire. Their final selection for this volume included 20 people, aged 14 to 60 at the point of contact, of differing classes, races, genders, and educational achievement, and from various types of communities in different regions of the country.

Selfe and Hawisher clustered their subjects in groups of two to four, around themes that they present in seven chapters, and largely by birth cohort. Each chapter begins by situating the characters in their socio-historical context, the cultural ecology of their time, presenting them through oral history. The authors engaged in a collaborative telling with study participants, co-authoring the accounts where the subjects were willing, resulting in what they called “technological literacy autobiographies” (7).

Chapter 1, “Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology,” begins in the 1980’s with the emergence of the personal computer technology that would profoundly change literacy. The decade began with a stubborn recession and a Cold War polarity that spurred new investment in technology. President Reagan proposed the Star Wars defense system at the same time that universities and the military were collaborating to create ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. In 1981, IBM released its first PC, Time magazine named the Computer “Man of the Year,” and the first email rocketed into cyberspace. The Apple McIntosh followed in 1984. By the end of the decade, computers had made their way into many homes and classrooms.

The three people profiled in Chapter 1 were born in the late 1970’s and grew up in the 80’s. They were the first generation to encounter computers as children and to emerge as adults into a world that expected them to use them. Their lives, the authors say, “trace a period in which the definition of literacy changed significantly” (33). The case studies here include two suburban White women, one middle class, one upper middle class, and an African-American man from a struggling Detroit family. All three came from families that valued reading and literacy, and all three were first exposed to computers in elementary school where time on the machines was considered a privilege. As children, they enjoyed games and chat rooms and learned for the most part by experimentation and sharing. At the time the book was written, all three were studying Scientific and Technical Communications in college. The women seemed to be on a path to success. The young man, however, though already carving out a career in web design that began with his participation in an African American fraternity, was focusing on technological literacy practice at the expense of traditional skills. While he chose the communications field partly because its focus on language meshed with his love of rap music, his scholastic achievement faltered because he devalued the traditional literacy skills upon which academic success rest.

With these first three case studies, as in all of those in the book, Selfe and Hawisher reveal the often power but sometimes subtle influence of class, race, family, and opportunity in shaping each person’s acquisition and development of technological literacy. But they also reveal that the subjects were also shaping the literacy technology and practice that was growing up along with them, through their purchasing power and by their choice of study and profession. The authors stress that technological influence works in both directions.

Chapter Two, “Privileging—or Not—the Literacies of Technology,” traces three White women born in the late 60’s, at a time of great social change that included a second-wave of feminism. They reached their majority in the decade of the 1980’s, which was not only the first for the personal computer, but what the United Nations declared “The Decade of the Woman.” Ten years older than the group profiled in Chapter 1, school played virtually no part in these women’s acquisition of literacies of technology; schools in general were following, not leading, the movement. Computers entered their homes first through gaming, often playing with family members. While men were traditionally more likely to adopted new technologies, all three women developed exceptional competency, though gender did shape their attitudes about it in varying ways. One woman from an upper middle class family, the most traditionally privileged of the group, viewed computers primarily as an aid to traditional literacies; her class standing did, however, give her the confidence to master technologies when they were presented. A second woman, because she was from a more working-class background and had more freedom to experiment with social norms, developed an identity that prized using “boys’ toys.” The third woman grew up in a military environment where technology was a pervasive cultural value regardless of gender. All three women went on to work in university environments, two as writing instructors and the third in instructional technology, where they fully incorporated technology into their literacy practice. Their stories reveal how nuances of class and gender influenced that outcome.

Chapter Three, “Complicating Access: Gateways to the Literacies of Technology,” introduces the notion of technological gateways as sites and occasions for digital literacy, but it concludes that the conditions of access at those gateways play a determining role. Schools, workplaces, communities, and homes are the primary gateways, but contact with computers there is not sufficient to becoming digitally literate. Among the limiting conditions are timing, motivation, fit, safety, resources, and the appropriateness of equipment.

The two people profiled in this chapter to illustrate this conclusion were both born in 1955. One White man from an educated middle class family was first exposed to computers as a college engineering major. However, the scientific and data-oriented orientation of the technology did not suit his learning style, educational values, or learning goals. When he switched to a communications major and started writing for the school newspaper, however, he used computers in a way that came alive for him. He went on to build a career in professional communications, leading his institution in its adoption of word processing, desktop publishing, and Internet applications. Later, as a member of his local school board, he saw that having computers in the classrooms did not guarantee their use for literacy purposes; teachers had to know how to implement the technology and be enthusiastic about doing so.

In this chapter, the authors also profile a woman who grew up in poverty on a Native American reservation. After completing a nursing program at a community college, she found that her workplace required only low-level technology skills, such as entering data into monitoring devices, rather than literacy applications. Technical support there was also very limited. Eventually, she became the Native American Outreach coordinator for a local university, where she employed a full range of technology literacies and enabled others in her community to do the same.

Both people profiled in this chapter also established computer gateways in their homes for their children and family members, attending to the comfort and safety of the environment in which they were used, two additional conditions of access that affect developing literacy.

Chapter Four, “Shaping Cultures: Prizing the Literacies of Technology,” introduces two people born in the last year of the baby boom, 1964, one a Latino male, the other an African-American woman. Each of them was influenced by the values of their class, race, and ethnicity in their approach to digital literacy, more acutely so perhaps because of the social activism in their communities during the era in which they grew up. At the time they were interviewed, both were college-level writing instructors but they differed in their enthusiasm about computers. The Mexican-American man, who hailed from the Los Angeles area, accessed literacy and developed an interest in college through the sports culture that was pervasive in his environment. Although not an especially academic culture, good athletes often play in college and this observation spurred him to achieve. But because he had a high need for physical movement, he did not like sitting at a desk looking at a screen. More importantly, though, he felt that working at a computer denied him the personal interaction and connection he craved and that he believed was part of his Latino culture. As a result, he used computers only when he had to. The African-American woman profiled here disagreed on every score. Hailing from a military family that prized technology, she and her family embraced computers in their home. The many “firsts” that Blacks achieved as she grew up gave her the confidence to pursue her interests, including technology. And as a Black woman who was excluded from racially dominant expectations of femininity, she had a certain freedom to experiment with traditional gender definitions that might otherwise have limited her technological prowess. But unlike the Mexican-American man, computer technology and the Internet in particular were sources of community and engagement, not isolation, for her. She connected with affinity networks online, and createed literacy opportunities for her students using new media tools. The authors conclude again here, that both people in this chapter borrowed from the various cultures of which they are a part to shape their practice of literacy, and in turn influenced the way in which it was practiced in their cultures.

Chapter 5, “Those Who Share: Three Generations of Black Women,” “looks at the roles families play in changing and sustaining generational patterns of literacy practices and values” (133). The authors profile three generations of African-Women women from one family in South Carolina. Though they all valued and engaged in literate practices, their mastery of them was frequently compromised by other social influences, including economic stress, impoverished schools, and peer pressure.

The first generation family member, born in 1942, was forced to drop out of high school to help support the family after both of her parents died. Without that education, her work opportunities were limited. She had no opportunity to develop technological literacy, and found that she rarely had the luxury of time for the poetry she had once loved to write. Her niece, born in 1971, was more fortunate: her mother had completed an associate’s degree, bought an early home computer, and enrolled her in a summer computer course. She went on to complete a Masters Degree in Professional Communication. Her niece, born in 1987, had few of those advantages. While she, too, valued literacy and saw her own mother reading, they did not have a home computer, teachers at her school were not able to use effectively the few computers they had, and her group of friends did not value traditional literacies. The middle-generation family member here, who had achieved so much, worked to connect the generations to technological literacy with some success, but the family’s experience also reveals that the promise of computers is still dimmed by the traditional axes of race, class, and poverty.

Chapter 6, “Inspiring Women: Social Movements and the Literacies of Technology,” follows three White women, born in the early 50’s, each of whom followed unconventional paths toward digital literacy. They, like other women of their generation, had new choices open to them as they became adults, including, with the emergence of reliable birth control, when to have children. None of the three women completed a college degree directly out of high school but neither did they settle immediately into the traditional female roles of wife and mother.

Selfe and Hawisher introduce the concept of benefactor in this chapter. None of these women had powerful technological literacy sponsors, as Brandt would define them--agents who provided literacy skills for the benefit of the agent--but each had an important benefactor or supporter who opened doors. One woman was given a computer by her mother-in-law who encouraged her, another benefitted from her husband’s experience establishing a computer lab at the school where he taught, and the third was encouraged by her bosses who recognized her literacy skills and by a friend who helped her build a computer when she couldn’t afford to buy one. The women’s resulting expertise opened new paths to professional success and allowed them to take advantage of emerging opportunities. The authors conclude then, that while gender and age can limit technological literacy acquisition, some people can find ways to develop and support their skills even when their circumstances aren’t ideal. They also suggest that societal shifts, such as the women’s movement, can create new opportunities that those less fixed in traditional hierarchies may be in a better position to seize.

In Chapter 7, “The Future of Literacy,” Selfe and Hawisher show the new literacy skills in action. All four people profiled here blend words with a new digital language that includes visual, kinesthetic, mapping, navigating, and interactive skills.

            Two of the chapter’s subjects were born in 1973, part of the first computer literate generation, but both pushed the boundaries of how the technology can be used to communicate.

One subject, a White woman, was directed toward conventional academic pursuits by her mother, but turned toward gaming as a powerful outlet for creativity and communication. Comic books were an early portal for a White man from a large Mormon family. He went on to blend what he learned from his art teacher father with some preliminary study in engineering into a career in communications and graphic design. He used web-based digital tools to experiment with predominantly visual “arguments.”

The two youngest members profiled here, born in 1985 and 1986, were still in high school when they were interviewed. Each of them had learned to use computers at about the same time that they learned to read. One of the subjects, a young White woman with six older siblings, remembered playing with computers at age 5. By high school, she saw that the visual composition of the websites she designed influenced her message. The other subject here, a Mixed-Race young man, knew that he was more likely to be successful in the digital world if he had strong traditional literacy skills. He keenly observed the connections between the two arenas, seeing that the online games for which he had a passion have genres, grammars, rules, and rhetoric, just like literature. He envisioned a curriculum of the future that would focus on developing both visual and alphabetic literacies.

The four young people presented in Chapter 7 practiced technological literacy skills that were largely self-taught and for the most part invisible to their teachers. In fact, they often shared their skills “upstream” to their families and teachers, too. The new paradigm reflects a profound social shift that is transforming all institutions, including education. As Selfe and Hawisher write, “Young people no longer have the luxury of relying solely on the information provided by their elders to equip them for a changing world” (205). Teachers must become guides and mediators, working collaboratively with their students.

Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher’s Literate Lives in the Information Age is an ambitious documentation of the merging of computers with literacy practices as the new technology appeared in the world. The scholarly framework within which they construct and analyze the project--their understanding of literacy and their collaborative life-history methodology--is extremely thorough. They have successfully woven the historical, social, and historical forces of the final years of the twentieth century into a tapestry that includes the threads of their case histories as well. But their most outstanding contribution may be that they captured this information when they did because, as they explain, “Most technologies become so enmeshed in daily experience that they disappear” (7). The statement triggers self-reflection: When did I send that first email and to whom? How did we write and communicate at work before computers? How and why am I adopting new technologies today?

The chief weaknesses in Literate Lives in the Information Age, however, are its choice of subjects and its failure to animate their lives more fully. A sample of 20 case studies that includes 15 women, ten of them White and middle class, does not seem a balanced portrait of literacy in the United States. The characters are so similar at times that it becomes impossible to distinguish them. Admittedly, the decades they examined were transformational for most women. The authors also concede that they chose stories because “they resonate with parts of our own stories” (5). But the choice of a selection that is differentiated by subtle nuances detracts from the work’s lessons and scholarship. Similarly, the preponderance of subjects who went on to work in university environments, many in writing instruction in particular, limits its breadth. The authors have paid must less attention to the second half of their inquiry, why people failed to acquire digital literacies and how they may have lagged behind as a result.

Selfe and Hawisher would have done better to choose fewer characters. But they would certainly have made them more distinguishable had they presented their stories more fully and made them appear more real. It may have been a matter of spending more time with each, but they might also have attended to the affective influences on their adoption of new literacy skills. The questionnaire subjects filled out, presented as an appendix in the book, does ask them to tell the story of their first contact with computers and first learning how to use them, but without any prompts as to what might make those stories come to life. The questionnaire mainly probes for facts and asks subjects what they think, not how they feel. What about the wonder, excitement, intimidation or even dread with which one might approach a new technology? There is substantial evidence both that the affective domain influences learning in general (Hilgard) and that wonder and curiosity aid learning new technologies in particular, while fear inhibits it (Mordini).

Despite its flaws, Literate Lives in the Information Age is a significant contribution to the documentation of both literacy and technology practices in America, adding a specific new dimension to Deborah Brandt’s literacy study. It will be fascinating to see what researchers find when they look back and closely examine today’s technological literacy, including shorthand communications like texting and twitter, multi-modal ones like Facebook and Instagram, and the resources of the interactive Internet, so many of them being developed beyond the traditional gateways of literacy. Selfe and Hawisher have constructed a solid foundation upon which that future research may be built.

Works Cited

Hilgard, E. “Motivation in Learning Theory.” Psychology: A Study of Science. (Volume 5).

 Ed. S. Koch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. 267. Print.

Mordini, Emilio. “Technology and Fear: Is Wonder the Key?” Trends in Biotechnology 25:12 (2007): 544-546. Online.

"Tracing the Threads of Paulo Freire's Philosophy in the Fabric of Transformative Learning"

Karen Mooney

Professor Barbara Gleason

English C0865

April 29, 2014

Tracing the Threads of Paulo Freire’s Philosophy

in the Fabric of Transformative Learning

Paulo Freire created and shared a vision of a just world in which education held a central place. For him, learning was emancipatory for the individual and the society at the same time, and he reimagined education in a way that could transform both. Freire’s experience and theories helped spark what would become Transformative Learning, though none of its proponents have developed systems that are as comprehensive or ambitious. Yet an examination of some of the leading strains of Transformative Learning reveals that, although a kind of ideological splintering has occurred, all of Freire’s ideas remain alive in the aggregate.

Paulo Freire’s life work was, above all else, the articulation of a theory of human nature. Humankind, he felt, has the unique ability to plan and shape the world, but this agency is under constant threat from a multitude of dehumanizing forces. Freier’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, begins there, stating that a person must be or become Subject, rather than Object. He explains that the individual must be an actor or agent, rather than a recipient of action  (67).

For Freire, education held a singular role in the ongoing process of becoming more human and of preserving human dignity. In a more formal educational setting, the learner must not see him or herself as the object of a teacher’s action in a “banking” transaction, that is, a process in which a teacher deposits information into an empty shell where it resides until the student can regurgitate and employ it in a social system that is static, oppressive, and dehumanizing (Pedagogy 72). Instead, teachers and students must become partners in a process in which knowledge is neither given nor transferred, but created. The first task of their horizontally-arranged interaction is for each participant to become conscious of the ways in which they are oppressed (consciousness raising, or conscientizacao ) (Pedagogy 67) and then to act upon those observations; this dynamic interaction of reflection and action Freire called praxis (Pedagogy 51). Together the learner and facilitator engage in a problem-posing dialogue about the “problems of human beings in their relations with the world” (Pedagogy 79). This process de-mythicizes reality, that is, it reveals the social conditions in which the person lives as they truly are, not as they are portrayed by those who hold self-serving power. This liberatory educational process, whether practiced in a formal or informal setting, is the foundation of freedom and indeed, is its practice: to be free one must be learning, and to learn one must be free (Pedagogy 81).

Freire insists that “the pursuit of full humanity cannot be carried out in isolation or through individualism but only in fellowship and solidarity” (Pedagogy 85). Dialogue is the method. Freire disapproves of social liberalism and of liberal democracies that place a high value on an individual’s freedom to act as he or she wishes, and that see their full expression in competitive, market economies. For Freire, the goal of learning was not just individual freedom but social change as well, and therefore it is innately political. But his aim was higher still: ultimately, he was convinced his approach could create “a world in which it was easier to love” (Pedagogy 40).

            Freire gave life to his thought with a particular method of teaching illiterate adults how to read. Based on his experience in rural Brazil in the 1960’s, he devised a three-stage system in which a team of educators first spent time with adults in their community discovering the words that had practical and emotional meaning to them, words that he called generative. Second, the team selected the most powerful of those words and used them as the foundation of a literacy program, breaking them down into syllables as the building blocks of reading. (Education for Critical Consciousness 44) Third, a parallel effort involved the development of critical consciousness through dialogue around a series of images that Freire called “codifications.” These images, like the generative words, are derived from what is meaningful in the lives of the learners. They portray various scenarios of people in relation to their world in order to reveal the notion of culture, that is, the distinction between nature and the world of people. Problem-posing discussion about these codifications encouraged the learners to see themselves as distinct from the natural world, as makers of culture, and as agents in the world (Education for Critical Consciousness 47). The codifications also reveal themes of “limit situations” in the people’s lives, situations that limit their full expression as free humans, and in so doing foreground the powers that keep them from becoming fully human. In this way, the learners’ social consciousness and ultimately political consciousness is raised (Pedagogy 99).

Freire’s literacy pedagogy can and has been applied by others to teach a variety of academic content while raising consciousness, too. In 1979, Nan Elsasser worked with women in a writing course at a junior college in the Bahamas, helping them to choose a generative theme (marriage) that focused their literacy work and inspired social observation, too (Fiore and Elsasser). K.O. Ojokheta reports on a less successful endeavor to use Freire’s three-stage process to teach Nigerian adults to read. In this instance, students withdrew before the final stage--actually learning to read. In Ojokheta’s observation, however, the students did succeed in probing generative words about government corruption and mismanagement of the nation’s resources to raise their consciousness about the social issues that framed their lives.  

Scholars have come to describe Freire’s approach to learning as social-emancipatory. He was a philosopher whose sweeping view of the world led him to see a dual mission in education, not just individual transformation but social transformation as well. His prolific thought and writing helped radically alter the conventional notions of student, teacher, and of education itself. While these ideas have subsequently influenced all of education, they have been particularly significant for the field of adult education. Freire inspired many leaders in this field, most notably Jack Mezirow.

Transformative Learning

If Paulo Freire’s approach to learning was social-emancipatory, Jack Mezirow’s  approach is deemed psycho-critical. But he, too, begins with a broad notion of human purpose and the role of education in fulfilling it.

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience. For some, any uncritically assimilated explanation by an authority figure will suffice. But in contemporary societies we must learn to make our own interpretations rather than act on the purposes, beliefs, judgments, and feelings of others. Facilitating such understanding is the cardinal goal of adult education. Transformative learning develops autonomous thinking. (Mezirow, Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice 5)

In this passage, one can see Mezirow’s debt to Paulo Freire, including critical reflection, informed action, and the notion of adult education as facilitating rather than directive. For Mezirow, “Transformative learning is the process of effecting change in a frame of reference,” (Transformative Learning: Theory to Practice 5) those frames of reference defined as the broad structure of assumptions through which a person understands his or her experience.  Critical reflection and critical self-reflection, primarily rational acts, are the key to transforming these assumptive frames. Mezirow approached this process through the lens of cognitive and developmental psychology.

Mezirow came to his theory of transformative learning in the 1970’s while conducting a qualitative study of women returning to postsecondary study or the workforce after an extended absence. He sought to identify factors that helped or hurt their learning (Kitchenham 5). This early experience lead him to believe that adults need to become aware that they are caught in their own history, that is, to see the cultural and psychological assumptions, what he called “meaning perspectives,” that keep adults from growing. The path of maturity is “a developmental process of movement…toward meaning perspectives that are progressively more inclusive, discriminating and more integrative of experience” (Perspective Transformation 106).

Whereas Freire created a groundbreaking new view of teaching with which Mezirow concurred, one that was based on meaningfulness and a discursive model, Mezirow focused his attentions on the nature of learning itself. He built on Habermas’s distinction between two types of learning: instrumental, how to do or perform something in accommodation to the world as it is; and communicative, which he found to be of much greater significance to adults (How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning 4). Mezirow describes this type of learning as the process of “understanding the meaning of what others communicate, concerning values, ideals, feelings, moral decisions, and such concepts as freedom, justice, love, labour, autonomy, commitment, and democracy” (How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning 5). Because this type of learning seeks meaning, it is the domain of adults. Meaning becomes learning when it is used to make decisions or to act (How Critical Reflection Triggers Transformative Learning 1). In this, one can hear an echo of Freire’s notion of praxis.

In fact, Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning shares four pillars with Friere: the centrality of the learner’s experience, critical reflection, discourse, and perspective transformation. In this process, the learner, grounded in his or her own experience, examines unquestioned beliefs and assumptions, reflects critically upon them through discourse, and undergoes a perspective change that yields a new understanding of the self and world. For Mezirow, transformation is not necessarily sparked by a teacher or mentor, but rather by a series of incremental changes in the adult’s perspective or as a result of a personal or social crisis (Merriam 6). Although discourse with peers or teachers is part of his schema, Mezirow’s focus remains directly on the individual; transformation can occur one person at a time and without any corresponding examination or demand for change in the society at large. This absence is a significant departure from Freire’s philosophy.

Mezirow further delineates the psychological and cognitive characteristics of the learning process, describing ten phases of the transformative learning experience, beginning with a disorienting dilemma, moving through re-examination, and resulting in a new orientation and a new understanding (Transformative Learning in Practice 19). The stages of critical reflection involve personal examination of feelings of guilt and shame, and a “critical assessment of epistemic, sociocultural, or psychic assumptions” (Kitchenham 105) through rational discourse. Like Freire, Mezirow believes dialogue plays an essential role in communicative learning. Because learners benefit from assistance in this critical examination and in developing habits of reflection, Mezirow sees learning as a social process (Transformative Learning in Practice 10), but one that is finite, concluding with reintegration after the original crisis is resolved.

Although perspective transformation can be initiated by an individual alone and remains focused on the individual, Mezirow sees discourse as an essential part of the process and details the role of the teacher or learning facilitator in it. In his view, the teacher’s responsibility is to create an environment in which effective discourse, and therefore the transformative experience, can occur. That environment would ideally provide a sense of safety, openness and trust; accurate and complete information; be student-centered; and use problem-solving activities and critical reflection (Transformative Learning in Practice 10). The adult educator should also set standards that “significantly reduce the influence of power, the deficit model associated with instrumental learning, and win-lose discourse” (Taylor 12).           

While Freire saw education as transforming both the individual and the society, Mezirow does not link them so purposefully. He writes, “Perspective transformation can be individual, as in psychotherapy; group as in Freire’s ‘learning circles’ (1970) or in ‘popular education’ in Latin America; or collective, as in the Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, or Women’s Movements” (The Theory and Practice of Transformative Learning 9). In fact, the women’s movement was one of his inspirations: it was both a frame of reference and a source of funding for his original study of women returning to the workplace (Transformative Learning in Practice 19). But in Mezirow’s schema, it is not essential to question the social conditions themselves--the circumstances into which the learner is integrating--and no process for collective social action against structural inequalities. In a fundamental departure from Freire’s philosophy, a basic examination of power in society is not part of Mezirow’s system (Tennant 34).

Since his orientation was toward psychology and not pedagogy, Mezirow did not focus on curricula. He did, however, devise a schema of strategies for the classroom, and he gathered studies of transformative learning in practice in some of his writings, including in the workplace, church settings, Alcoholics Anonymous postpartum classes, and other settings (Dirkx 4). Although the transformative learning approach was embraced by many adult educators, it wasn’t until 2009 that Mezirow and Taylor wrote and compiled Transformative Learning in Practice: Insights from Community, Workplace, and Higher Education, a book which gathers in one place a useful selection of writings on practice.

One criticism that has been leveled against Mezirow is that he underrated the impact of the emotional, spiritual, and extra-rational dimensions of human behavior and the affective realm as a source of deriving meaning (Drikx 5). Unlike Freire, who devoted significant attention to fear, hate, love, and the role of emotion, aspiration, and spirituality in the learner’s experience, Mezirow emphasized the rational and scientific. His approach, though rooted in human psychology, rarely goes beyond the rational. However, many scholars have since taken his transformative learning theories into a broader and more holistic sphere.

Psycho-developmental, Cultural-Spiritual, and Race-Central Views

It is in embracing the affective domain and a deeper psychology that some of the more interesting developments in transformative learning have come, restoring some of the spirit of Freire’s worldview. The psycho-developmental view, as described in the works of Boyd and Meyers, Cranton, and Dirkx uses the lens of psychology, as Mezirow does, but also countenances the role of relationships, contextual influences, and a broader, holistic way of knowing beyond the purely psychological (Merriam 7).

Particularly as developed by Boyd, this variant of transformative learning draws upon the depth psychology of Carl Jung, focusing on the lifelong journey of individuation and the process of tapping into deeper psychic structures and the collective unconscious (Taylor 20). Transformative learning here is not triggered as much by a single event or focused on a single goal. It relies much less on discourse and rational reflection, in fact, language is not the only path toward understanding: “Self-knowledge, or knowledge of ourselves and the world, is mediated largely through symbols rather than directly through language” (Dirkx 7). Dreams and art processes are explored as a path toward meaning-making and bringing to consciousness deeply seated drives and processes. The dialogue involved is intrapersonal, more than interpersonal, even when its goal is a deeper understanding of particular subject matter, but certainly when it is focused on understanding one’s relation to the world.

Neither Boyd nor other proponents of this psycho-developmental view have addressed themselves to pedagogy, though it has inspired many classroom teachers. While this version of a transformative learning experience would be firmly centered in the individual’s experience, it would look toward symbolic forms in daily life: “These forms include story, myths, rituals, dance, poetry, music, metaphor, images, fantasy, and dreams” (Dirkx 8). 

Another variant of transformational learning is the cultural-spiritual orientation. Like the psycho-developmental approach, it looks deeply within the individual toward what may broadly be called the life force within every person for the source of meaning and learning, but it sees a connection between that spirituality and the individual’s social context.  One’s spiritual wellspring, however defined, connects the person to his or her culture and identity, helps mediate among multiple identities, and may become a driver of group social transformation (Tisdell and Tolliver 372). The cultural-spiritual orientation restores to the practice of transformative learning the deep spirituality that infused Paulo Friere’s own philosophy.

Particularly prominent in the works of Brooks and Tisdell, the cultural-spiritual approach focuses on the “connections between individuals and social structures...and notions of intersecting positionalities” (Merriam 8). It is a “culturally relevant and spiritually grounded” approach that encourages group inquiry and narrative reasoning. Its recognition of storytelling and narrative development harks back to Freire’s codifications, and the combination of social context with a spiritual dimension embraces his original sweeping view as well. Departing from Mezirow’s view, the cultural-spiritual orientation downplays the role of the rational and of critical reflection, seeing transformation, in fact, as an extra-rational process in which knowledge arrives through symbols (Baumgartner 18).

The race-centric approach to transformative learning is perhaps closest to Freire’s in its view that social change must take place alongside the individual’s transformation. As presented by Williams, Sheared, Johnson-Bailey, and Alfred, the race-centric approach puts the experience of those of African descent in the foreground of the learning experience. This view is “culturally bounded, oppositional, and non-individualistic” (Merriam 9). Like Freire and Mezirow, the race-centric approach values and engages the student’s lived experience but does so within a particular sociocultural, political, and historical context. It is not so much about self-actualization, as is the psycho-development view, but about belonging, inclusion, and parity. For some, the race-centric approach embraces a spiritual one as well because “African American social change movements have often rested on a strong religious or spiritual foundation” (Tisdell and Tolliver 373).

Tisdell and Tolliver write of transformational learning classroom practices that reflect a spiritual and at times racial character. Derise Tolliver views her classroom as a “sacred space where the learners’ more authentic selves…can show up and be honored” (386). She creates it as such by embracing her own identity--dressing colorfully, dancing if she feels moved to, quoting proverbs from her African heritage--and inviting others to celebrate their spiritual and cultural selves as well. She begins class with a centering exercise; employs food, decorations, and symbols; and engages in rituals of celebration (386). Libby Tisdell begins her classes with a short activity that invites students to check-in their learning joys and difficulties since the last class meeting. She employs symbols of the elements of the world in her classroom to remind her students of their connections to the world, and she encourages them to write their own cultural stories. Each semester ends with a ritual that includes song, poetry, dance, art, and ideas, during which all participants suggest their next steps of action on their path of change (387).

Conclusion

With his sweeping philosophy of the world and of education, Paulo Friere reoriented the view of adult education away from the mere acquisition of skills and toward a model of human authenticity that involved both individual and social emancipation. Jack Mezirow looked to Freire in developing his theory of adult transformative learning, but was guided by development psychology and remained focused on the individual in a primarily rational process. Boyd, Dirkx and the others who have embraced the psycho-developmental model of transformative learning look deeper into the psyche for the wellspring of imagination and creativity and see intrapersonal dialogue as a driver of that process. Those, like Brooks, Tolliver, and Tisdell, who espouse a cultural-spiritual model, also look deep within the person but toward a spiritual rather than a psychological construct. They see this deep resource and the artifacts it produces as both a product of identity and a mechanism that links with the community. A more recent model of transformative learning looks toward race and other contested views of identity for the spur to personal and social transformation and sees those two domains as operating hand-in-hand.

Freire’s worldview and writings influenced and embraced all of these various notions of transformative learning and each of them keeps a part of his philosophy alive. What unites all of these theorists, as well as those involved in transformative learning whether as learner or facilitator, is a deeply-held drive to effect change toward authenticity and dignity, whether it be in one individual or in society as a whole. Intentionally or not, those who engage in this transformative enterprise take part in the noble act, as the saying goes, of bending the arc of history toward justice.

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