Stories of Transformative Learning

Stories of Transformative Learning is intended to encourage people to explore the potential for transformative learning in their lives, practices, and communities. This book illustrates the transformative learning process through ten stories of individuals from both inside and outside of the classroom. Adult educators and adult learners will find the book to be personally insightful and professionally useful.

There have been many accounts of transformative learning experiences, but it is not often that we have the opportunity to hear first-hand personal stories of transformative learning. Here, ten stories are told directly by the people who experienced them, with additional commentary from the authors. These stories are intended to resonate with readers and to inspire people to create the conditions where transformative learning can occur in their lives and professional practice.

Storytelling is one way in which both educators and learners can understand the process of transformative learning. Telling stories, reading others’stories, and contemplating our own stories all help us to become aware of alternative perspectives, a process that is at the heart of critical reflection and critical self-reflection, which is, in turn, central to transformative learning.

We hope to increase readers’sense of agency and more self-directed, self-fulfilling lives. By demonstrating how others have examined and reconsidered otherwise hidden assumptions that constrained the quality and potential of their lives, we show readers how they may do the same.