Fooling around on the web this morning, I discovered a PDF titled, "Transformative Education in the Jesuit Tradition." Earlier this month I had ordered a book from Amazon.com titled, An Ignatian Spirituality Reader, edited by George Traub, a Jesuit Professor of Theology at Xavier University. This PDF provides what is essentially an overview to the philosophical orientation at Loyola University in Chicago. However, there is a section within this document that describes what is called the "Ignatian Methodology." Here transformative education is described as a method that aims at fostering a series of "internal transformations" on the part of the students and "how the go about understanding themselves vis-a-vis their own inclinations, passions, biases, and spontaneous reactions." The emphasis is on discernment.

The method stresses self-transcendence as an "antidote to self-immersion." Four steps are outlined: 1) Become attentive to what one is experiencing; 2) Reflect back on one's experiences and what has been evoked by way of questions that comes out of that experience' 3) Make a judgment as to what is or what one has come to know or not know; and 4) Determine the course of action called for by this judgment.

As I read this overview, it strikes me there is much overlap between what is discussed here in terms of the approach to learning and what is discussed as transformative learning in higher and adult education. It has the cognitive flavor and quality that is present in Mezirow's approach to transformative learning but the goal of self-knowing and self-transcendence that is more characteristic of Jung's approach to transformation.