‘Transforming the learner’ versus ‘passing the exam’: Understanding the gap between academic and student definitions of quality
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Pressures to enhance the quality of university teaching have led to increased emphasis on recognising and rewarding good teaching practice in England. Institutional awards for teaching excellence have grown in response to this agenda. This paper is based on a project that investigates the teaching experience of Teaching Excellence Award winners at a post‐1992 university in England. It draws predominantly on interviews with these Award winners and their students, exploring their varied conceptions of 'quality' and 'quality enhancement'. The research reveals that most of the Award winners associated the concept of quality with transformative learning. However, students, while recognising the concept, defined quality in more instrumental terms. They tended to relate quality to academic teaching practice and its impact on their learning outcomes, rather than their own learning experience.Keywords:
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Transformative Learning
Global sustainability targets demand transformative changes. Nature-based solutions (NbS) are gaining traction in science and policy, but their potential for transformative change remains unexplored. We provide a framework to evaluate how NbS contribute to transformative change and apply it to 93 NbS from mountain social-ecological systems (SES). The framework serves to assess what elements may catalyze transformative change, how transformative change occurs, and what its outcomes are. Our results show that NbS are as much “people based” as “nature based.” Most NbS are based on four elements with transformation potential: nature's values, knowledge types, community engagement, and nature management practices. Our results confirm the potential of NbS for transformative change, observed through changes in non-sustainable trajectories of SES. We illustrate the components of our framework through a novel classification of NbS. The framework provides key components for assessing the effectiveness of NbS and allows tracking long-term transformative change processes.
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Abstract On the standard Paulian definition of epistemically transformative experiences (ETE), we can’t know what an ETE is like before we have it. ETEs are new kinds of experiences and, importantly, can’t be imagined—this is why they have a unique ability to teach us what a particular experience is like. Contra Paul, some philosophers (Sharadin, 2015; Wilkenfeld, 2016; Ismael, 2019; Kind, 2020; Daoust, 2021; Cath, 2022) have argued that transformative experiences can be imagined. A neglected consequence of this argument is that if transformative experiences can in fact be imagined, then it is unclear how they could be epistemically transformative. What do they teach us if we can imagine what they’re like in advance? I will argue not only that imaginable experiences can be transformative, but that experiences of a kind which an agent is experientially acquainted with can also be transformative. This latter kind of transformative experiences, which I will call familiar transformative experiences, are transformative not because the agent learns what a new kind of experience is like—by definition, they are not new kinds of experiences—but because the transformativeness of the experience is brought out by features of the agent experiencing them. Epistemic transformation in these cases may be explained by facts about the agent’s perspective and social environment, which allow them to appreciate elements of the experience they did not previously.
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Abstract In this essay, Randall Curren addresses four basic questions about transformative experiences in education: Is education necessarily transformative? What must education provide for it to be personally transformative? What standard should educators use in determining whether engaging students in potentially transformative experiences is beneficial or justified? How should schools and educators orchestrate opportunities for beneficial transformative experiences? The focus is on transformative valuing, but also on the importance of a fully transformative nexus of personal attributes and social pathways to living a transformed life. Curren argues that educational decisions on behalf of students can be justified on the basis of necessary goods that persist through transformative changes in what is contingently good for them, and that schools' efforts to orchestrate opportunities for transformative experiences should engage students in activities that can be eudaimonic for them.
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The article intents to present, to some extent, if the transformative learning, which has a powerful influence on promoting critical reflection on assumptions and interpretations to engage not just the intellect but affect, identity, worldview, beliefs and values (Mezirow, 2000; Sterling 2011), has certain contributions to students’ transformative capabilities. Transformative capability, related to transformative learning, implies the capacity to learn, innovate and bring about appropriate change and it is connected with the „learning outcomes”, seeded by the Universities in order to be similar with the „competences” required by the labour market.
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Background: The standard of clinical teaching is acknowledged by undergraduate medical students and their clinical teachers as being variable.1 Furthermore, there is very little recognition by medical schools of the teaching expertise and efforts of clinical teachers.2 Innovation: In response to these issues, a group of medical students at the University of Birmingham’s Medical School have established an awards scheme called Recognising Excellence in Medical Education (REME). This is a student-led award scheme that is supported by the Dean and other senior medical school staff, and by the students’ medical society. Method: This research used two focus groups, one comprising REME award winners and one comprising students who voted in the scheme, to discuss opinions regarding the awards, reasons why the students voted, and how clinical teachers feel about receiving the awards. Discussion: The focus groups revealed that both students and their clinical teachers were very positive about the award scheme and the impact it has had, both personally and within the hospitals or Trusts of the award winners. The REME awards were viewed as motivating and encouraging for clinical teachers, and were particularly prized as teachers were nominated by their students.
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The purpose of this article is to explore the potential for fostering transformative learning in an online environment. It provides an overview of transformative learning theory, including the variety of perspectives on the theory that have evolved as the theory matured. Strategies and practices for fostering transformative learning are described, followed by a description of the online environment and how strategies for encouraging transformative learning might be carried into that environment. Students' voices are brought in to corroborate and, as it turns out to question the importance of these strategies. The article concludes with a focus building transformative relationships in the online environment.
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<em>Research in transformative learning has flourished in educational research in the latest decades. Among the research on transformative learning, the specific topic of how to develop instruction based on transformative learning is still very rarely found. The purpose of this study w</em><em>as</em><em> to review the epistemology of transformative learning by introducing a systematic ID framework for transformative learning. </em><em>The method of this study w</em><em>as</em><em> the systematic literature review with three review stages: planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting the review. The review was focused on the academic paper in the research scope of transformative learning. As the result, we concluded the 3 main components of designing a transformative learning model: (1) transformative outcomes, (2) transformative scaffolding, and (3) transformative learning experience. The study also proposed 7 stages of systematic ID framework in designing transformative learning.</em>
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Transformative learning has been important in the development of adult education since Jack Mezirow proposed it more than 35 years ago as a theoretical description of the steps learners undergo in changing their worldviews. However, despite much qualitative research, little quantitative study has been made of the incidence of transformative learning or the 10 steps predicted by Mezirow to precede it. This study of 256 undergraduate business school students reports the incidence of transformative learning and each of the 10 precursor steps. The more steps respondents remembered experiencing, the more they also reported transformative learning. The highest incidence of reporting transformative learning was associated with the precursor step of critical reflection, followed by the steps of disorienting dilemmas and trying on new roles. Implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed.
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Facilitating transformative learning is a praiseworthy goal among educators who want to make a significant impact on the lives of their students. Transformative learning is typically defined as involving a fundamental shift in students’ worldviews and/or identity. While we agree that teachers should retain such important goals, we argue that facilitating transformative learning is difficult for many reasons. We then suggest that a more manageable task is to use existing instructional techniques to generate small-scale transformation in the form of transformative experience (TE). Specifically, TE can be used to create micro changes in student perspectives. Transformative experiences are more manageable in the typical classroom and an accumulation of small changes can lead to the type of transformative learning that influences student identity.
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