Theorising Transformative Learning

Theorising Transformative Learning

Educational reality is weaved within stories, poems, and dialogues, as the author demonstrates his becoming of a transformative educator. Transformative learning is important for teachers to think about their practices, change their thinking, and share the stories of their experience for learners’ empowerment. This is an autoethnographic account of the author's experience as a transformative and transforming educator that unfolds the ways he has used ethical dilemma story pedagogy to explore interpretative and creative spaces for transformative learning, both personally and with a group of trainee teachers who take the responsibility to facilitate students’ learning into a purposeful path. The ethical dilemma story pedagogy provides relatable scenarios to challenge and unsettle learners’ thought processes leading to acknowledgment of multiple viewpoints. Theorising Transformative Learning serves to help educators utilise the sociocultural contexts connected to students’ lives and experiences.

Re-theorising the Recognition of Prior Learning

The recognition of prior learning (RPL) is an educational response to the need to widen participation in education and training for economic advancement and social inclusion. The social meanings of RPL have different configurations depending on historical, cultural, economic and political forces in different places. One constant is the reliance on the widely pervasive educational philosophies of experiential learning: constructivism and progressivism. This book challenges the orthodoxy of experiential learning and the particular readings of knowledge, pedagogy, learning, identity and power which it privileges. It does this by introducing different theoretical resources to RPL and drawing on experiences of RPL in the UK, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Sweden. The book provides a range of re-conceptualisations of the relational terrain between adult experience and learning on the one hand, and specialist or academic knowledge on the other.

Curriculum Theorising