Narrating Transformative Learning in Education

253 Pages·2008·1.062 MB·English

by  Morgan Gardner, Ursula A. Kelly (eds.)

Narrating Transformative
Learning in Education
Narrating Transformative
Learning in Education
Edited by Morgan Gardner and Ursula A. Kelly
narrating transformative learning in education
Copyright © Morgan Gardner and Ursula Kelly, eds., 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60050-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
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First published in 2008 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-37009-2 ISBN 978-0-230-61057-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230610576
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Narrating transformative learning in education / edited by Morgan Gardner and
Ursula Kelly.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Transformative learning. I. Gardner, Morgan. II. Kelly, Ursula Anne
Margaret, 1956-
LC1100.N37 2008
370.11’5—dc22 2007027708
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: February 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface Notes for a Transformative Education ix
Edmund O’Sullivan
Introduction Narrating Transformative Learning in Education 1
Morgan Gardner and Ursula A. Kelly
1 Transformative Learning as a Pedagogy of Movement 11
Morgan Gardner
2 Where Biography Meets Ecology:
Melancholy and Transformative Education 31
Ursula A. Kelly
3 Transformative Education: Grief and Growth 51
Sue L. T. McGregor
4 All-Stars and Discards: Schooling and the Rest of Our Lives 75
Rosonna Tite
5 Building a Transformational Vision of School 97
Anne Burke
6 Critical Autobiography for Transformative
Learning: Gaining a Perspective on Perspective 111
Connie Morrison
7 Pedagogical Crisis... Again:
Reflections on the Work of Learning to Teach 127
Kate Bride
8 Dancing Toward Transformation:
Mapping a Pedagogical Site 145
Clar Doyle
vi Contents
9 Examining Transformative Learning
Amidst the Challenges of Self-Reflection 157
Martha Traverso-Yépez
10 Coffee Room Talk: On Efficiency,
Conviviality, and Transformative Learning 173
Elizabeth Yeoman
11 Transformative Holistic Education:
Living in Terms of the Whole 185
Mary M. Cameron
12 Vagabonds in a Vanagon:
Transformation and the Loss of Innocence 197
Barrie Barrell
13 Art as Transformation 211
Kathy Browning
Epilogue A Journey of Transformation of a Vietnam War Resistor 223
John (Jack) P. Miller
Contributors 235
Index 239
Acknowledgments
We thank Edmund O’Sullivan, who is a professor emeritus at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and is the associate director of the
Transformative Learning Centre, and Alice Collins, dean of the Faculty of Education at
Memorial University of Newfoundland, for the support and encouragement they pro-
vided for this project in its stages of inception. We also want to thank contributors to this
volume who have worked diligently to meet editorial deadlines. We are truly appreciative
for their sincere commitment to this project. We are grateful to Shannon O’Dea for her
research support during the final stages of compiling this manuscript.
We would like to acknowledge that our professional activities do not occur without
many forms of support, care, and commitment from our families and friends—connec-
tions that deeply enhance our work. In particular, I (Morgan) would like to thank my
daughter Mikaela Clark Gardner who is a constant source of inspiration and joy. Heartfelt
thanks to my friends Sobia Shaikh, Michelle Meyer, and Catherine Rivers who support
me innumerable ways. I would also like to thank Alfred Dyck for his contributions to my
life and academic work. I (Ursula) would like to thank Pat Singer, partner, friend, first
reader, and source of immeasurable support and love.
Preface
Notes for a Transformative Education
Edmund O’Sullivan
This preface is an edited transcript of a talk given by Edmund O’Sullivan in November
2005 at the Faculty of Education at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s,
Newfoundland, Canada. O’Sullivan was invited by the editors of this collection to meet
with contributors and to engage our ideas for individual chapters. This public address
opened the book workshop and formed the basis of some of our subsequent discussions
together.
* * *
I would like to begin with a quote by E. F. Schumacher (1973), a philosopher, econo-
mist, and author of Small is Beautiful, whose thinking is still very appropriate to this pre-
sent time. Schumacher writes, “The volume of education continues to increase, yet so do
pollution and exhaustion of resources and the dangers of ecological capacity. If still more
education is to save us, it will have to be an education of a different kind, an education
that takes us to the depth of things.” I want to set my talk in a general historical context
as I reflect on an appropriate educational vision in the twenty-first century. That may seem
very ambitious, but everyone who is an educator has to have that ambition for this cen-
tury. Educators require a scope and a vision that is not so tunneled that we get preoccu-
pied only with—and caught in the inertia of—specificity and detail. Indeed, we must all
have a vision of a larger purpose; for we are living in a century that is demanding great
work and great efforts like at no other time in human history. We can all be part of that
great work in our own specific way. This is, in part, what it means to leave a legacy for
those we love so that they may flourish. Knowing what we want that legacy to be is part
of the formulation of that larger purpose.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams, a cultural historian, published a
series of essays entitled The Education of Henry Adams(1918). In the essay “The Dynamo
and the Virgin,” Adams contemplated the transitions taking place with the movement
into a new century and modern life. He used the virgin as a metaphor for the kind of seed
of energy and creativity of a premodern culture. He wrote nostalgically that this type of
energy was no longer going toward that kind of constellation of creativity. Instead, it was
being replaced by an energy found in the metaphor of the dynamo. The dynamo to which
x Preface
he referred was shown at the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris. There was talk, then, of
creating a perpetual motion machine that would work around the clock to produce and to
do things. This dynamo would never wind down. Adams suggested that the dynamo rep-
resented a movement away from a religious world view, represented in part by the
metaphor of the virgin, and a movement into secularism. He argued that with a move-
ment into the new century—the twentieth century—the secular was going to become
more and more important. A sense of optimism accompanied this change, in the context
of Western culture, based on an emerging belief that science and technology were going to
be the new religions of the future. It was believed that the more we knew about and could
control the natural world, the more we were able to use technology to advance all sorts of
miracles—to bring peace, to end hunger, and so on.
Well, we have added science and technology to our lives in ways perhaps unimaginable
by Adams and his contemporaries, and their effects have been felt world wide. But one of
the things that is clear is that the promise of the twentieth century—to eradicate war, dis-
ease, and poverty—has not been fulfilled at all. We have not solved hunger issues. We have
not solved issues of war and violence. In fact, coming into this twenty-first century, we
find ourselves in a very deep order of difficulties. There are truly monumental complexi-
ties facing twenty-first-century education, and a context is necessary for them so that we
reflect and develop insight about the effects of our actions. One of the problems with the
development of modern science and technology is that it moves toward innovation with-
out necessarily having a deep order of reflection about the broader implications of inno-
vations. The twentieth century is considered by many to be the high point of Western
culture in the sense that we believed we could actually control the natural world. But if we
go back a number of centuries, around the time of the Black Death, we see a context in
which religion was believed to be the source of salvation from disease. Proven wrong, sec-
ularism grew at this time. The Black Death would come to be seen not as something that
was visited by God, but as something that actually arose through natural causes that could
be controlled through scientific techniques. This shift marks what Thomas Berry (1999)
calls the development of a kind of rage against the natural world. Humans were now seen
to be in an adversarial relationship to the natural world, and as a foe of humanity, the nat-
ural world had to be conquered.
What epitomized the development and synthesis of this world view was a particular
conception of science and nature in which we extricate ourselves from the natural world
to be above it and to control it and our surroundings. This new world view was enmeshed
in an enormous cosmology that we call mechanistic. The secular world of science operated
from the assumption that the world was a kind of a machine with constituent parts that
could be separated and understood. Along with this view was the development, certainly
in a Western context, of an enormous cultural hubris. (One has to understand that these
developments have taken place over a period of only about five hundred years. So we must
remind ourselves, if we have thought that way for only for a period of five hundred years
or so, we could think differently now, if we have reason to do so.) Part of the hubris to
which I refer is a belief that Western culture was the high point of the human world and
the high point of the evolutionary process. This belief has set in motion, certainly in the
twentieth century, an enormously deleterious and dangerous conception of mind: that
some people are “developed” and other people are “underdeveloped.” This conception of
Preface xi
mind assumes a certain hierarchy that some people are “better than others,” and even if it
had a more cordial interpretation, it still operates on the assumption that in some way one
particular order is of a higher nature that the others. This view, not only over this century
but the previous century as well, set in motion an elaborate procedure of cultural arro-
gance called colonization, a process that involved not only creating actually physical
colonies, but also taking over or erasing the true uniqueness and diversity of the multi-
plicity of cultures that existed in these so-called colonies throughout the world.
This kind of colonization reached a high point during the postwar period. During this
period, the economy in postwar Europe and North America—an economy that I was
raised in until I was about eight years old—was one in which people were encouraged to
conserve. The current emphasis on consumption was not part of my childhood experi-
ence. But the postwar economic period, as it turns out, would not remain this way.
Among other things, it would create, through whole systems of economic manipulation
and the creation of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, a kind of economy that would make Western nations superior to all other parts of
the world in terms of economic resources. In that sense, there was enormous exploitation
of cultures all over the world. By the time television came around, I was learning, as a
child, that my job was to become a consumer, not a citizen. That is to say, consumption—
the idea of being able to waste, to have an economy that actually uses resources and that
depends on consuming, extracting and depleting resources—was borne. How are we con-
vinced to maintain such an economy? Well, you make the waste world a “wonder world.”
That is what modern advertising is—the waste world made into wonder world. So you
learn to want things. You learn to be a consumer. In fact, it is a message drummed into
your head in every context. This market vision is sustained, in part, through global media,
which is largely American owned, the result being that the most widely developed culture
controls massive amounts of media, with most countries in the world having anywhere
from one third to one half of American television programming, for example.
We let the “bytesphere” overcome the biosphere. We began in the 1970s to learn that
this type of extractive economy has its limits, something that was not realized in the early
postwar period because of a lack of reflection of the shadow side of the idea of a con-
sumption-based economy. We know today that the carrying capacities of the earth—the
very planet itself—have been so taxed in the last fifty years that there is a point of possibly
in this century of extinguishing ourselves and any other species around us. And it is only
approximately fifteen percent of the world’s population that is taxing the carrying capac-
ity of the earth, and this small percentage does not live in the majority world, that is,
where the majority of the world’s population lives. It is a small percentage of human life
that is, in large part, responsible for creating such colossal devastation. While unpleasant,
this is a reality we must consider because we have choices in this. The carrying capacities of
the earth, through the extraction of resources and the kind of technologies that we can use,
can be eliminated. I am saying that the technologies we now use are very strong, but they
are unreflective. These technologies used in the development of resources around food,
agriculture, oil, and water were done in an unreflective manner so that the carrying capac-
ities of the earth have had a greater impact in the last fifty years than in all previous history.
The repercussions are monumental. For example, there is a great sadness about what has
happened here in Newfoundland and Labrador with the closure of the cod fishery, the