Abstract

College classrooms can be ideal environments for seeking change by challenging these emotional and intellectual commitments. Creating a safe place to engage in critical self-reflection as students consider where their views may have originated is a basic condition for transformative learning (McGonigal, 2005). It may be even more fundamental to provide opportunities for students to become aware that they make assumptions and that they are constrained by them. While providing an activating event, or a way to stimulate students to examine their culturally determined beliefs and to consider the limitations of those beliefs, teachers can provide the support to encourage transformative learning. The horizon of learning, and, ultimately, of acting can be expanded by encouraging students to take risks in an environment that is both challenging and friendly. This article presents ideas about how transformative learning can take place in two distinct institutions and content areas. Different pedagogical practices, appropriate to different kinds of courses, can be informed by the principles and goals of transformative learning. One author teaches future teachers in a Department of Educational Psychology at a large, public university. The other author teaches a required core curriculum course for sophomore students on Global and Historical Studies at a small, private, comprehensive university. Both have encountered obstacles and opportunities in their efforts to understand and implement transformative or transformational learning. Both are committed to a learning process that features experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying both new information and new ways of coming to know.