I pulled these four movements in transformative learning from from Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian. As someone who works in a school context, this was a good reminder that teaching is ultimately about action.
Before the four movements, I should mention two ways we can think about our understanding of a subject: Logical Consciousness and Mythical Consciousness. Logical Consciousness is an attempt to explain the world by how it works. There are theories, laws, concepts at play in our world, and this way of understanding focuses on these ideas. Much of western education is built on this framework. Mythical Consciousness is the unspoken, ‘Why?’ questions that challenge the way the world operates. What are the symbols, the myths, that we hold close and why are they important to us?
Transformative learning attempts to address both aspects of learning. We examine the way the world works and then question why it works that way, refusing to merely accept something because it exists.
Disorienting Dilemma – Transformative learning engages a student with an idea, a thought or position that drastically alters their perception of the world. This is different from creating an experience to elicit an emotion or a conversion. A disorienting dilemma is a paradigm shift, a call to re-examine our current actions and beliefs. Once this shift occurs, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to go back to seeing the world the way it was before the experience. Encountering this kind of information causes us to create new folders in our brains to hold this information.
Critical Self-Reflection – Spiritual Formation and the Ignatian prayer of examen are critical components necessary to understand the movement of self-reflection (Recall, Return, Reveal, Review, React and Respond). I heard this recently from a student who spoke in chapel about her experiences in Honduras and, when asked what she learned, she spoke on how God challenged her sense of entitlement. She was convicted of the fact that she was living her life in such a way that she believed she should automatically receive what she wanted. Seeing people living with great needs caused her to reflect critically on her own life and passover a need for more stuff.
Discourse – As students reflect, it is important to have a community to engage them in what they are thinking. This is why we had a special day in chapel for students to think out loud about their experiences. My hope is that other students would ask them about something that was said and the conversation might continue. This is the shaping and echoing of ideas. It could also be seen as a method of spreading ideas cultivated during a time of self-reflection.
Action – Transformative learning seeks an action. For a student who experiences as de-centering experience like a mission trip to Honduras and, after reflecting and talking with others she realizes her own sense of entitlement, a logical question should follow, what are you now going to do? Perhaps it’s sign up for the same trip next year, but it might be that she begins to de-clutter. Perhaps someone gives her a book on simplicity and continues to engage her on this path of discovery about letting go of her possessions as Jesus taught his followers.
I’ll let Deans’ own words wrap it up:
Like transformative learning, Christian teaching aims to enlarge consciousness – though the church credits expanded consciousness to the work of the Holy Spirit, not to teaching methodologies…Christian teaching seeks morphosis, an epistemological transformation so profound that it changes not just what the learner knows, it also changes the learner.
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