You are always asking very good but difficult questions. They force me to think through these matters more. I appreciate that. One could write an entire paper or perhaps even a book on this question. But let me try to address it in the context of your class and your learning in the program.
1. Transformative learning, as a concept, signifies a particular kind of learning that sets it apart even from learning that is personally meaningful. In education we hope and strive for all student learning to be personally meaningful. But that doesn't mean it is also transformative. Rather, personally meaningful learning can help add to our sense of self. It can result in learning that expands our current ways of seeing and understanding ourselves and our being in the world but doesn't fundamentally change it. Transformative learning implies a fundamental change in form, in the way or ways in which perceive, apprehend, and come to understand some aspect of our lives.
2. Mezirow initially conceptualized this process largely as a rational and reflective process, focused primarily around the experience of a disorienting dilemma, using critical reflection to sort through the assumptions that surface through this experience about how we see ourselves, our culture, and the nature of how we know. Critical reflection can result in the reworking of these assumptions, which can then lead to different ways of perceiving, apprehending, and understanding some aspect of ourselves or our world. A substantial reworking of these assumptions can result in a change in our frame of reference, habit of mind, or meaning perspective, and he refers to this process as transformative learning.
3. Research over the last 30 or so years has demonstrated that transformative learning is a complex process. This research has elaborated the importance of the social, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of transformative learning. Fostered in large part by the work of Robert Boyd at the University of Wisconsin, research into the emotional aspects of transformative learning have demonstrated an important role in the extra rational or the unconscious in transformative learning. Boyd referred to experiences which foster transformative learning as psychic dilemmas. That is, we experience emotionally that something is not right, an emotional tension around some aspect of our lives. This experience may be similar to Mezirow's notion of a disorienting dilemma but the psychic dilemma has the quality of being relatively autonomous, that is, it is experienced as a force within our lives that seems apart from our rational, ego-based awareness. It seems to have a life of its own and occupies a powerful role in our consciousness.
4. Boyd, myself, and others have argued that psychic dilemmas are not open to critical reflection and analysis. Rather, working with them requires imaginative processes. I have referred to one of these processes as the imaginal method. You work with the emotion-laden images that seem to be central to the experience. This might resemble reflection, because it involves becoming aware of certain images we hold in consciousness, writing about them, telling stories about them. But, in contrast to critical reflection, in this method we are seeking to have the images speak for themselves, to allow them a voice in our consciousness. This does not involve asking critical questions about our assumptions and our premises. Rather, it simply means providing the space and the means for these powerful images and experiences to further tell or elaborate their story.
5. This approach to transformative learning fosters or contributes to a deeper understanding our the self, of the different aspects of the self, of the powerful forces and dynamics that make up who we are. This is what is referred to as individuation, a further differentiation and integration of the different selves that make up who we are.
6. In reality, then, transformative learning reflects a combination of rational, reflective processes and extra-rational, emotion-based, and imaginative processes. In both cases it seems to be the focus is on how we think about ourselves and our being in the world. But a rational perspective assumes ego consciousness to be primarily in charge of this process. The extra-rational perspective credits the ego with being an important player but not the driver or the captain of the process. The driver of the transformative process rests within our unconscious and shares both personal and collective dimensions. These elements are autonomous elements within our psyche and are the primary shapers of how and what we experience as meaningful in our lives.
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