TRANSFORMATIVE EDUCATION FOR HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
These perceptions together formed a vision of transformative education that is consolidated into the following interwoven aspects:
Transformation is to be, explicitly, the goal and the process of all educative encounters
Based on our understanding of what transformation means and encompasses, it was identified that transformation should be the guiding principle that underpins all educational endeavour. Government, educational institutions and organisations should make learners’ transformation the explicit goal of all educational programmes and encounters.
We believe that education is essentially about the promotion of personhood and the development of full human potential. While we are confronted by the challenges of different social and educational systems, transformative education may play a big part in helping individuals to become truly human beings. By this, we also mean individuals’ development as whole-persons - the development in all aspects of a human being, including the physical, moral, creative, emotional, intellectual and spiritual; as well as the expression of their potential.
The transformative process requires that educational programmes explicitly address critical and analytical skills. It also integrates an active search for meaning as an instrument to transformed understanding of learning experience. Meaning is essential to transforming perspectives and worldviews.
According to our transformative learning model (Fig 1), part of the process of transformative education is exposure to diverse experiences, as well as the experience of discomfort, tension and chaos. As one group explained, ‘It is important to allow ‘anguish moments’ to arise, in order to incorporate fear and anguish positively.’
For transformation to be the goal, it involves the intention from both policy and institutional level as well as the intentional efforts from the individuals themselves. Learners need to show willingness to embrace the challenges throughout the process of change. Several groups highlighted the importance of learners’ open-mindedness and their courage to take risk and to change, the readiness to unlearn, and self-motivation and self-confidence to make decisions and take responsibility.
Transformative education entails a safe, supportive and sustainable environment and allows an organic and nurturing process
For education to be transformative, there needs a safe and supportive environment in which a learning space can be created to enable learners to confront chaos, pain, fears and bewilderedness. Within a safe environment, learners are free from judgement, bullying, negative conflicts and intimidation, so that they can be courageous enough to be pushed to the boundaries of their realities. Hence learners are more likely to discover all aspects of themselves and develop as whole-persons.
Sustaining a learning space is crucial in facilitating transformative education. It has been identified by the participants that a sustainable learning environment involves the following:
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Sufficient finances for the physical environment. Often schools and colleges and universities are left to their own means to struggle in providing an adequate physical environment and resources for all learners to engage in good-quality learning activities. This could mean textbooks, tables and chairs, a roof overhead in a village school in the less developed world, or IT equipment and lab facilities in an urban school/institution in a western country. Regardless of the differences in social and economic contexts, it is generally recognised that sufficient finances are the critical element for education to be sustainable and transformative.
- Effective training for all educational staff. The conference recognised that in most parts of the world, teachers often do not have access to training that would enable them to help provide transformative learning experiences to students. To help effect growth and positive change in themselves and the world around, teachers would have a key role to play. Therefore, training for teachers would aim at helping cultivate their integrity and authenticity, develop a clear vision for and real understanding of transformative education. Most importantly, it must aim at the growth of the teacher.
- Human relations to underlie the whole educational process. When human relationship penetrates the learning environment, which is often defined as a learning community, learning is more likely to become transformative. Instead of hierarchical and top-down institutional structures, learning communities instil reciprocal human relationship. This may involve empathy and compassion, caring and loving, respect and trust towards each other. When learning organisations and institutions act as learning communities, there is a dialogic and democratic approach to decision making. The voices of learners/students play a big part in shaping their own learning experience.
- Human-scale. Participants from diverse backgrounds all recognised that for education to be transformative, it is important for it to be human-scale – in class size and overall learner-educator ratio. During the conference, we heard stories that closely resembled the one told by Katherine Marshall told. One participant from Europe was concerned that in his university, seminars often exceeded 15 students; in the same group, a lecturer from Africa was deeply anxious about the quality of students’ learning because he often has to lecture to 500 students and the university merely has enough chairs for a couple of hundred students.
The term ‘human-scale’ by no means suggests that all schools and universities only have a handful of students in each class. Human-scale really encapsulates the importance of having human contacts and human relations in the educational process. This could mean that teachers break large classes into smaller groups and allow peer tutoring and collaborative learning to take place. When a learning environment is human-scale, teachers could be more sensitive to learners’ diverse learning and other needs and the learning environment is more supportive in nurturing and catering for learners’ interests and growth.
Furthermore, the environment and contexts for learning have been defined as being of a wide variety, including classrooms, clubs, societies, practical activities, families and communities. In this sense, learning is not limited to the learner him/herself; it is about our place in the community, society and the world. Therefore learners need to be exposed to as wide a range of contexts as possible. Diversity, such as multiple cultures, inter-religious encounter and generally international environments have been acknowledged to be desirable in helping learners to develop understanding of self and others and become fully integrated human beings and global citizens.
For education to be transformative, there should be a transformed view of the relationship between the learners, teachers and institutions.
…For those who pursue it seriously, teaching is a calling, a summons from within; it is among life’s noblest and most responsible activities – an activity in which we have all engaged at one time or another, as parents, workers and friends. (Banner & Cannon, 1997: ix)
We offer a different view on the relationship between teachers and students as well as the institutions. It was acknowledged that for education to be transformative, teachers could be perceived as role models, facilitators and mentors, co-inquirers and critical friends, experienced co-learners, respectful guides and compassionate helpers in the educational process.
This view highlights once again the importance of reciprocal human relations in the educational context. It assumes that learning is in itself a journey of inquiry for all, and that the teachers’ role is, in effect, to accompany the learners’ journeys and help them overcome life’s challenges. Above all, in this process, teachers will learn and grow.
Furthermore, this view reinforces the need for the nature of educational institutions to centre on learners’ growth and transformation. Therefore, the notion of institutions as learning communities is fundamental in constructing a new relationship between the learner, the teacher and the institution. One participant pointed out that such a relationship promotes leadership rather than management, and calls for full constituency dialogue rather than hierarchy and bureaucracy.
What can be learned and how to go about learning must be negotiated through dialogue
There has been plenty of criticism about education that aims at an end product, rather than focusing on the learning process. The lack of a priority of experience and access to different areas of learning was also mentioned.
Our conclusion is that to determine what to learn and how to learn requires a dialogue among all those who are involved in the educational process. Stakeholders, policy makers, institutional leaders, teachers, parents and students should ideally all be given the opportunities to be engaged in this process.
A number of pressing issues were raised here:
- Relevance. It has been argued that education can only be transformative when the learning experience is relevant to the learners culturally, temporally and contextually. Making education real and integrated creates an opportunity for learning that is meaningful to individuals’ lives and helps provide sustainable livelihood.
- Integrated programme rather than prescriptive curriculum. A dialogic approach to discussing what to learn and how to learn emphasises the educational programme as formative rather than prescriptive. Criticisms were heard from many participants about uniformed national curricula (in many cultures) as being over-prescriptive, curricula that totally underestimate the different capacities and paces of learners of all ages. A formative curriculum implies an ongoing dialogue and communication between the teacher and the learners; this makes learning a collaborative endeavour.
- Narratives to be integrated in the learning process. The significance of narratives of human experience has been recognised as one of the key influences to what we learn and how we approach learning. Human experiences are so rich and so diverse. Whether these experiences are told by the elders in our community or family, or whether they are shared among learners themselves, they provide rich contexts for meaning.
- Achieving individuals’ full potential. The vision of transformative education regards each individual learner as unique, someone who has their own talent and capacity to contribute to their own learning and the wellbeing of society at large. The exploration of what to learn and how to learn will focus on enabling the development and fulfilment of individuals’ full potential. Transformative education is therefore a holistic endeavour that has embraces the goal of developing the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social and interpersonal and many other qualities of the learner. Therefore, changes will take place in many different aspects of the learner’s being and hence facilitates their ultimate flourishing as human beings.
Individual transformation can have a significant effect on overall human development as well as social transformation
Despite the fact that our main analysis focused on individual transformation and personal growth, the real underlying discussion was on a larger scale of transformation – social transformation and ultimately building a better world.
In today’s world, when we are constantly confronted by social injustice and inequality, the unbalanced distribution of material resources and, above all, political power residing in the hands of a few, transformative educational vision has an important role to play in making a difference in the world situation.
First, it was pointed out that to effect transformation on a larger scale, it is imperative that there is equal access to education for all.
Second, transformative education might help expose the truth about political regimes based on power relationships.
Third, transformative education helps individuals become agents of change – someone who can act rather than react and be acted upon. It provides the opportunity a learner to transcend the limitations of one’s self and maximise change on a much larger scale.
Fourth, establishing international network is important for individuals to feel connected and to reach out for help and support to advocate change. Transformative education emphasises the significance of engaging with diverse perspectives and worldviews. Being embedded in an international community may help develop creative ideas and better understanding of culture and political issues and that which hinders change in our existing systems.
Despite the fact that ‘the system’ is always an obstacle to personal and social transformation, individuals do have a crucial role to play in any ‘systems’. One participant said that ‘There’s no ‘them’ – it’s me!’, which suggested that systems are always re-structurable as long as individuals have the willingness for change. It is to repeat the words of Mahatma Gandhi: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’