Chapter 6

An overview on
transformative learning
Jack Mezirow

The concept of ‘transformative learning’ was launched in 1978 by Jack Mezirow,

Professor of Adult Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. For
many years he had been an adult education consultant in various developing countries,
inspired by Brazilian Paulo Freire and German Jürgen Habermas, among others. But
it was in connection with women’s adult education in the US that he discovered a wide-
ranging kind of learning, reaching right into changes of the identity. Later, Mezirow
elaborated on the concept of transformative learning in several writings and worked
with it in practice, not least in the reputed Adult Education Guided Independent Study
(AEGIS) doctoral programme. In the following chapter, which was first published in
2006 in Peter Sutherland and Jim Crowther (eds.) Lifelong Learning: Concepts
and Contexts, Mezirow recapitulates the history and main features of the concept of
transformative learning and discusses various points of critique and suggestions for
extension that have been put forward over the years. In this way, the chapter can be
regarded as a final summing-up of his work.

Introduction
The concept of transformative learning was introduced in the field of adult
education in 1978 in an article that I entitled ‘Perspective Transformation’,
published in the American journal Adult Education Quarterly. The article urged
the recognition of a critical dimension of learning in adulthood that enables us
to recognize and reassess the structure of assumptions and expectations which
frame our thinking, feeling and acting. These structures of meaning constitute
a ‘meaning perspective’ or frame of reference.
Influences in the development of this concept included Freire’s ‘consci-
entization’, Kuhn’s ‘paradigms’, the concept of ‘consciousness raising’ in the
women’s movement, the writings and practice of psychiatrist Roger Gould,
philosophers Jurgen Habermas, Harvey Siegal and Herbert Fingerette and my
observation of the transformative experience of my wife, Edee, as an adult returning
to complete her undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
The research base for the concept evolved out of a comprehensive national
study of women returning to community colleges in the United States (Mezirow
 An overview on transformative learning 91

1978). The study used grounded theory methodology to conduct intensive field
study of students in 12 diverse college programmes, comprehensive analytical
descriptions of an additional 24 programmes and responses to a mail inquiry
by another 314.
A transformative learning movement subsequently developed in North
American adult education, involving five international conferences, featuring
over 300 paper presentations, the publication of many journal articles, over
a dozen books and an estimated 150 doctoral dissertations on transformative
learning in the fields of adult education, health and social welfare.

Foundations
Habermas (1981) makes a critically important distinction between instrumental
and communicative learning. Instrumental learning pertains to learning
involved in controlling or manipulating the environment, in improving
performance or prediction. We validate by empirically testing contested beliefs
regarding the truth of an assertion – that something is as it is purported to
be. Instrumental learning is involved in learning to design automobiles, build
bridges, diagnose diseases, fill teeth, forecast the weather and do accounting,
and in scientific and mathematical inquiry. The developmental logic of
instrumental learning is hypothetical-deductive.
Communicative learning pertains to understanding what someone means
when they communicate with you – in conversation, or through a book, a
poem, an artwork or a dance performance. To validate an understanding in
communicative learning, one must assess not only the accuracy or truth of what
is being communicated, but also the intent, qualifications, truthfulness and
authenticity of the one communicating. Telling someone that you love them
can have many meanings. We feel safer when a person prescribing medicine
for us has training as a physician or pharmacist.
The purpose of communicative discourse is to arrive at the best judgement,
not to assess a truth claim, as in instrumental learning. To do so one must access
and understand, intellectually and empathetically, the frame of reference of the
other and seek common ground with the widest range of relevant experience
and points of view possible. Our effort must be directed at seeking a consensus
among informed adults communicating, when this is possible, but, at least,
to clearly understand the context of the assumptions of those disagreeing. The
developmental logic of communicative learning is analogical-abductive.
For Habermas, discourse leading to a consensus can establish the validity
of a belief. This is why our conclusions are always tentative: we may always
encounter others with new evidence, arguments or perspectives. Thus diversity
of experience and inclusion are essential to our understanding. It is important
to recognize that the only alternatives to this dialectical method of inquiry
for understanding the meaning of our experience is to rely on tradition, an
authority or force.
92 Jack Mezirow

In suggesting specific ideal conditions for human discourse, Habermas has

provided us with an epistemological foundation defining optimal conditions
for adult learning and education. The conditions also provide a foundation for
a social commitment by adult educators to work toward a society that fosters
these ideals. To freely and fully participate in discourse, learners must:

• have accurate and complete information;

• be free from coercion, distorting self-deception or immobilizing anxiety;
• be open to alternative points of view – empathic, caring about how others
think and feel, withholding judgement;
• be able to understand, to weigh evidence and to assess arguments objec-
tively;
• be able to become aware of the context of ideas and critically reflect on
assumptions, including their own;
• have equal opportunity to participate in the various roles of discourse;
• have a test of validity until new perspectives, evidence or arguments
are encountered and validated through discourse as yielding a better
judgement.

Transformative learning theory

Transformative learning is defined as the process by which we transform prob-
lematic frames of reference (mindsets, habits of mind, meaning perspectives)
– sets of assumption and expectation – to make them more inclusive, discrimi-
nating, open, reflective and emotionally able to change. Such frames are better
because they are more likely to generate beliefs and opinions that will prove
more true or justified to guide action.
Frames of reference are the structures of culture and language through
which we construe meaning by attributing coherence and significance to our
experience. They selectively shape and delimit our perception, cognition and
feelings by predisposing our intentions, beliefs, expectations and purposes.
These preconceptions set our ‘line of action’. Once set or programmed, we
automatically move from one specific mental or behavioural activity to
another, and we have a strong tendency to reject ideas that fail to fit our pre-
conceptions.
A frame of reference encompasses cognitive, conative and affective components,
may operate within or outside awareness and is composed of two dimensions:
a habit of mind and resulting points of view. Habits of mind are broad,
abstract, orienting, habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting, influenced
by assumptions that constitute a set of codes. These codes or canon may be
cultural, social, linguistic, educational, economic, political, psychological,
religious, aesthetic and others. Habits of mind become articulated in a specific
point of view – the constellation of belief, memory, value judgement, attitude
and feeling that shapes a particular interpretation. Points of view are more
 An overview on transformative learning 93

accessible to awareness, to feedback from others. An example of a habit of mind

is ethnocentrism, the predisposition to regard others outside one’s own group as
inferior, untrustworthy or otherwise less acceptable. A resulting point of view
is the complex of negative feelings, beliefs, judgements and attitudes we may
have regarding specific individuals or groups with characteristics different than
our own. Having a positive experience with one of these groups may change
an ethnocentric point of view but not necessarily one’s ethnocentric habit of
mind regarding other groups.
Transformative learning may occur in instrumental learning. This usually
involves task-oriented learning. In communicative learning, as in the
ethnocentric example, transformative learning usually involves critical self-
reflection. However, elements of both task-oriented learning and critical
self-reflection may be found in either type of learning. Habits of mind involve
how one categorizes experience, beliefs, people, events and oneself. They
may involve the structures, rules, criteria, codes, schemata, standards, values,
personality traits and dispositions upon which our thoughts, feelings and
action are based.
Meaning perspectives or habits of mind include the:

• sociolinguistic – involving cultural canon, social norms, customs, ideologies,

paradigms, linguistic frames, language games, political orientations and
secondary socialization (thinking like a teacher, doctor, policeman or an
administrator), occupational or organizational cultures’ habits of mind;
• moral-ethical – involving conscience, moral norms and values;
• learning styles – sensory preferences, focus on wholes or parts or on the
concrete or abstract, working alone or together;
• religious – commitment to doctrine, spiritual or transcendental world
views;
• psychological – theories, schema, scripts, self-concept, personality traits
or types, repressed parental prohibitions, emotional response patterns,
dispositions;
• health – ways of interpreting health problems, rehabilitation, near-death
experience;
• aesthetic – values, taste, attitude, standards, judgements about beauty and
the insight and authenticity of aesthetic expressions, such as the sublime,
the ugly, the tragic, the humorous, the drab.

Transformative learning theory, as I have interpreted it, is a metacognitive

epistemology of evidential (instrumental) and dialogical (communicative)
reasoning. Reasoning is understood as the process of advancing and assessing
a belief. Transformative learning is an adult dimension of reason assessment
involving the validation and reformulation of meaning structures.
The process of transformative learning involves:
94 Jack Mezirow

• reflecting critically on the source, nature and consequences of relevant

assumptions – our own and those of others;
• in instrumental learning, determining that something is true (is as it is
purported to be) by using empirical research methods;
• in communicative learning, arriving at more justified beliefs by partici-
pating freely and fully in an informed continuing discourse;
• taking action on our transformed perspective – we make a decision and
live what we have come to believe until we encounter new evidence,
argument or a perspective that renders this orientation problematic and
requires reassessment;
• acquiring a disposition – to become more critically reflective of our own
assumptions and those of others, to seek validation of our transformative
insights through more freely and fully participating in discourse and to
follow through on our decision to act upon a transformed insight.

Transformations may be epochal – sudden major reorientations in habit of

mind, often associated with significant life crises – or cumulative, a progressive
sequence of insights resulting in changes in point of view and leading to a
transformation in habit of mind. Most transformative learning takes place
outside of awareness; intuition substitutes for critical reflection of assumptions.
Educators assist learners to bring this process into awareness and to improve
the learner’s ability and inclination to engage in transformative learning.
In our study of women returning to college, transformations often follow
the following phases of meaning, becoming clarified:

• a disorienting dilemma;
• self-examination with feelings of fear, anger, guilt or shame;
• a critical assessment of assumptions;
• recognition that one’s discontent and the process of transformation are shared;
• exploration of options for new roles, relationships and action;
• planning a course of action;
• acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing one’s plans;
• provisional trying of new roles;
• building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships;
• a reintegration into one’s life on the basis of conditions dictated by one’s new
perspective.

The two major elements of transformative learning are first, critical reflection
or critical self-reflection on assumptions – critical assessment of the sources,
nature and consequences of our habits of mind – and second, participating
fully and freely in dialectical discourse to validate a best reflective judgement
– what King and Kitchener define as that judgement involving ‘the process an
individual evokes to monitor the epistemic nature of problems and the truth
value of alternative solutions’ (1994: 12).
 An overview on transformative learning 95

Issues
Emotion, intuition, imagination
Important questions have been raised by adult educators concerning trans-
formation theory. One has to do with the need for more clarification and
emphasis on the role played by emotions, intuition and imagination in the
process of transformation. This criticism of the theory is justified. The process
by which we tacitly construe our beliefs may involve taken-for-granted values,
stereotyping, highly selective attention, limited comprehension, projection,
rationalization, minimizing or denial. That is why we need to be able to
critically assess and validate assumptions supporting our own beliefs and
expectations and those of others.
Our experiences of persons, things and events become realities as we typify
them. This process has much to do with how we come to associate them
with our personal need for justification, validity and a convincing, real sense
of self. Expectations may be of events or of beliefs pertaining to one’s own
involuntary reactions to events – how one subjectively expects to be able to
cope. Our expectations powerfully affect how we construe experience; they
tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. We have a proclivity for categorical
judgement.
Imagination of how things could be otherwise is central to the initiation of
the transformative process. As the process of transformation is often a difficult,
highly emotional passage, a great deal of additional insight into the role of
imagination is needed and overdue. As many transformative experiences occur
outside of awareness, I have suggested that, in these situations, intuition sub-
stitutes for critical self-reflection. This is another judgement that needs further
conceptual development.
I have attempted to differentiate between the adult educator’s role in working
with learners who are attempting to cope with transformations and that of the
psychotherapist by suggesting that the difference in function pertains to the
degree of anxiety generated by the transformative experience. More insight into
the process of transformative learning that takes place outside of awareness is
also in need of development.

Decontextualized learning
Another major criticism cites my emphasis on a concept of rationality that is
considered an ahistorical and universal model leading to a ‘decontextualized’
view of learning – one that fails to deal directly with considerations and questions
of context – ideology, culture, power and race-class-gender differences.
An epistemology of evidential and discursive rationality involves reasoning –
advancing and assessing reasons for making a judgement. Central to this process
is critical self-reflection on assumptions and critical–dialectical discourse. Of
course, influences like power, ideology, race, class and gender differences
96 Jack Mezirow

and other interests often pertain and are important factors. However, these
influences may be rationally assessed and social action taken appropriately
when warranted.
Siegal (1988) explains that rationality is embodied in evolving traditions.
As the tradition evolves, so do principles that define and assess reasons.
Principles that define reasons and determine their force may change, but
rationality remains the same: judgement and action in accord with reason.
A critical thinker is one who is appropriately moved by reasons. Admittedly,
this is an unfamiliar orientation. There are those who have always argued with
great conviction that education – and indeed the very nature of learning and
rationality itself – is and must be the handmaiden of a particular ideology,
religion, psychological theory, system of power and influence, social action,
culture, a form of government or economic system.
This familiar habit of mind dictates that learning, adult education and
rationality must, by definition, be servants to these masters. A rational
epistemology of adult learning holds the promise of saving adult education
from becoming, like religion, prejudice and politics, the rationalization of
a vested interest to give it the appearance of cause. Transformative learning
is essentially a metacognitive process of reassessing reasons supporting our
problematic meaning perspectives.

Social action
A major emphasis of critics of transformation theory, as I have conceptualized
it, has been its de-emphasis of social action. Adult education holds that an
important goal is to effect social change. Transformation theory also contends
that adult education must be dedicated to effecting social change, to modifying
oppressive practices, norms, institutions and socio-economic structures to
allow everyone to participate more fully and freely in reflective discourse and
to acquiring a critical disposition and reflective judgement. Transformative
learning focuses on creating the foundation in insight and understanding
essential for learning how to take effective social action in a democracy.
As Dana Villa notes in Socratic Citizenship (2001), one of our habitual frames
of reference is to be disposed to view anything that is either cause-based, group-
related or service-oriented as the core of ‘good citizenship’ and anything which
simply dissents or says ‘no’ as of little value. Socrates’ original contribution
was the introduction of critical self-reflection and individualism as essential
standards of justice and civic obligation in a democracy. Socrates undermined
fellow citizens’ taken-for-granted habits of mind pertaining to what justice and
virtue require. He sought to distance thinking and moral reflection from the
restraints of arbitrary political judgement and action – to move to a disposition
of critical reflection on assumptions and the citizen’s own moral self-formation
as a condition of public life.
Habermas (1981) suggests that critical reflection on assumptions and critical
 An overview on transformative learning 97

discourse based on reflective judgement – the key dimensions of transformative

learning – are characteristics of the highest level of adult morality.

Ideology critique
Adult educator Stephen Brookfield (1991) has challenged the breadth of
transformative learning as I have conceptualized it. He writes:

For something to count as a example of critical learning, critical analysis

or critical reflection, I believe that the persons concerned must engage
in some sort of power analysis of the situation or context in which the
learning is happening. They must also try to identify assumptions they
hold dear that are actually destroying their sense of well being and serving
the interests of others: that is, hegemonic assumptions.
(1991: 126)

For Brookfield, ideologies are pejorative ‘sets of values, beliefs, myths,

explanations and justifications that appear self-evidently true and are morally
desirable’ (1991: 129).
Brookfield is not suggesting a critique of all relevant ideologies, the point
of view of transformation theory in adult education. He is quite specific that
critical reflection as ideology critique ‘focuses on helping people come to
an awareness of how capitalism shapes belief systems and assumptions (i.e.
ideologies) that justify and maintain economic and political inequity’ (1991:
341). Issues raised here are echoed in critical pedagogy.

Critical pedagogy
Critical pedagogy, and its current form of popular education in Latin America,
is an adult education programme evolving from the village-based literacy work
of Paulo Freire that assigns priority to a guided analysis of how ideology, power
and influence specifically impact upon and disadvantage the immediate lives of
illiterate learners. The educator assists them to learn to read in the process of
planning and taking an active role in collective social action to effect change.
There is a praxis of transformative study and action.
For critical pedagogy, the critical learner, prototypically an illiterate rural
peasant, not only comes to recognize injustice but, upon this recognition,
is expected to actively participate in the specific political or social action
required to change it. The process and problems involved in taking informed,
collective, political action in a functioning democracy are seldom addressed in
the literature of critical pedagogy.
Burbules and Burk (1999) note that in critical pedagogy everything is open
to critical reflection except the premises and categories of critical pedagogy
itself and comment that ‘there is a givenness of what a “critical” understanding
98 Jack Mezirow

should look like that threatens to become its own kind of constraint’ (1999: 54).
‘From the perspective of critical thinking, critical pedagogy crosses a threshold
between teaching critically and indoctrinating’ (1999: 55). Transformation
theory in adult education, on the other hand, involves how to think critically
about one’s assumptions supporting perspectives and to develop reflective
judgement in discourse regarding beliefs, values, feelings and self-concept. It
is not primarily to think politically; for ideology critique and critical pedagogy,
this is a false assumption.

Cosmology
Cosmology is the study of the universe as a rational and orderly system. In
the book Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning (2002), Edmund
O’Sullivan and his colleagues at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
at the University of Toronto move far beyond critical pedagogy’s sole concern
with the political and social dimensions of capitalism to include environmental,
spiritual and self-concept issues in what they call ‘integral transformative
learning’:

Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep structural shift in the

basic premises of thought, feeling and action. It is a shift of consciousness
that dramatically and permanently alters our being in the world. Such a
shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our
relationships with other humans and the natural world; our understanding
of the relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race and gender;
our body awareness; our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our
sense of the possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy.
(2002: 11)

‘Transformative criticism’, as conceptualized from this perspective, posits a

critique of the dominant culture’s ‘formative appropriateness’ and provides
a vision of an alternative form of culture and concrete indications of how to
abandon inappropriate elements and to create more appropriate new cultural
forms. They suggest that these elements should form a new type of integral
education.
O’Sullivan et al.’s identification of transformative learning with movement
toward the realization of a bold conception of a new cosmology moves well
beyond the political focus of critical pedagogy. However, it shares the same
limitation of not presenting or inviting a critical assessment of its core
assumptions and categories. Such an assessment should consider the definition
and validity of each of the five components designated in their definition of
transformation, the assumptions regarding the role of education and adult
education as the principal vehicle for effecting the broad multidimensional
transformation they envision and how we are to understand the epistemology
 An overview on transformative learning 99

of transformative learning in adulthood, particularly the role of rationality,

critical reflection on epistemic assumptions, and of discourse in the context
of this theory.

Perspectives on transformative learning

Constructivist development
Constructivist developmental psychologists believe that development involves
movement through a predictable sequence of ‘forms’ (frames of reference or
meaning systems) culminating in the development of the adult capacity, and in
some adult learners, the ability and disposition to engage in the transformative
processes of critical self-reflection and reflective judgement through discourse.
Robert Kegan (2000) identifies five forms of meaning-making through the
lifespan. These forms of mind include the perceptual/impulsive, the concrete/
opinionated, the socialized, the self-authoring and the self-transforming mind
that includes the capacity for self-reflection. He delineates the capabilities of
adulthood: able to think abstractly, construct values and ideals, introspect,
subordinate short-term interests to the welfare of a relationship and orient
to and identify with expectations of groups and individual relationships of
which one wishes to feel a part. It ordinarily takes two decades to develop these
capacities and longer for some.
Mary Belenky and her associates (1986) identified six forms of knowing:
silenced, received, subjective, separate, connected and constructed. The
connected knower enters into the perspective of another and tries to see the world
through his/her eyes. This is an essential dimension of transformative learning.
King and Kitchener (1994) have considerable evidence to support the
assertion that it is only in adulthood that epistemic assumptions allow for
true reflective thinking in a seven-stage movement. Stage seven involves
understanding abstract concepts of knowledge as a system; knowledge is the
outcome of the process of reasonable inquiry for constructing an informed
understanding. This stage is comparable to the adult capacity to effectively
participate in discourse in transformation theory.

Psychic distortion
Psychiatrist Roger Gould’s ‘epigenetic’ theory of adult development (1978)
holds that traumatic events in childhood may produce prohibitions that,
though submerged from consciousness in adulthood, continue to generate
anxiety feelings that inhibit adult action when there is a risk of violating them.
This dynamic results in a lost function – the ability to take risks, feel sexual,
finish a job – that must be regained if one is to become a fully functioning
adult. The most significant adult learning occurs in connection with life
transitions. As adulthood is a time for regaining lost functions, the learner
100 Jack Mezirow

should be assisted to identify the specific blocked action and the source and
nature of stress in deciding to take action. The learner is helped to differentiate
between the anxiety that is a function of the childhood trauma and the anxiety
warranted by his or her immediate adult life situation.
Gould feels that learning to cope with ordinary existential psychological
distortions can be facilitated by knowledgeable adult educators and adult
counsellors as well as by therapists. He has developed an interactive, comput-
erized programme of guided self-study for adult learners coping with life
transitions. Educators and counsellors provide emotional support and help the
learner think through the choices posed by the programme.

Schema therapy
As described by Bennett-Goleman (2001), schema therapy is an adaptation
of cognitive psychotherapy that focuses on repairing emotional frames of
reference, like maladaptive emotional habits, relentless perfectionism or the
sense of emotional deprivation. Mindfulness, a Buddhist concept, defined
here as a refined, meditative awareness, is combined by Bennett-Goleman
with insights from cognitive neuroscience. Mindfulness may be applied by
individuals to understand their patterns of emotional reactivity in workshops.
Major schemas include:

… unloveability, the fear that people would reject us if they truly knew us;
mistrust, the constant suspicion that those close to us will betray us; social
exclusion, the feeling we don’t belong; failure, the sense that we cannot
succeed at what we do; subjugation, always giving in to other people’s
wants and demands; and entitlement, the sense that one is somehow special
and so beyond ordinary rules and limits.
(2001: 11)

Mindfulness allows one to separate specific experience from the overlay of

mental and emotional reaction to it. In that space there is room to examine
whether we harbour distorted assumptions, ungrounded beliefs, or warped
perceptions. We can see the ways our thoughts and feelings define us as
they come and go – we can see our habitual lenses themselves
(2001: 53)

As frames of reference, schemas are the way the mind organizes, retains and
acts on a particular task, but they also selectively determine to what we will
attend and what they deem irrelevant. When emotions intervene, schemas can
determine what is admitted to awareness and can provide a plan of action in
response. Schemas are mental models of experience.
Bennett-Goleman (2001) describes the process involved in challenging and
changing schema thoughts:
 An overview on transformative learning 101

• Become mindful of the feeling or typical thoughts associated with the

schema. Focus on your thoughts, emotions and body sensations all – all
due to which the schema has become activated. Test whether you are
overreacting.
• Become aware of your schema thoughts as such and recognize they may
be distortions.
• Challenge those thoughts. Recognize how you have learned through
critical self-reflection that they embody false assumptions. Validate your
transformative insights by getting involved in a discourse with another
who has a more realistic understanding of the subject.
• Use empathic reframing to acknowledge the schema reality while you put
into words a more accurate picture of things.

Individuation – Jungian psychology

Patricia Cranton (1994) interprets Jung’s theory of psychological type to
integrate his concepts with those of transformative learning theory in adult
education. Learners’ psychological predispositions form one kind of habit of
mind. This involves two interrelated processes: to become more aware and to
understand our own nature while, at the same time, individuating ourselves
from the rest of humanity as we learn who we are.
Jung describes a continuum on which one may differentiate two ways of
relating to the world and of making judgements: introverted and extraverted.
We make judgements either logically or analytically – to assess a problem,
weigh alternatives and make a decision – or rely upon deep-seated reactions of
acceptance or rejection in which logic plays no part. This differentiation between
perception and judgement is close to transformation theory’s differentiation
between learning outside awareness through intuition and learning within
awareness through critical reflection on assumptions. Psychological preferences
(thinking and feeling or sensing and intuition) are habits of mind.
John Dirkx (1997) also identifies the goal of Jung’s concept of individuation
as the development of an individual’s personality. This development involves
a dialogue between ego consciousness and the content of the unconscious.
Transformation involves participating in dialogue with the unconscious aspects
of the psyche. This frees one from obsessions, compulsions and complexes
that can shape and distort our frame of reference. The symbolic process of
individuation is expressed in the form of images. Through a dialogue between
the conscious and unconscious, mediated through symbols and images, learners
gain insight into aspects of themselves that are outside conscious awareness but
influence their sense of self as well as their interpretations and actions. These
symbols and images express emotions and feelings that arise in the learning
process. ‘Behind every emotion there is an image’ (Dirkx 1997: 249).
The content or process of formal learning evokes images realized through
dialogue. In the course of this interaction, ‘both content and ourselves are
102 Jack Mezirow

potentially transformed. Individuation is an ongoing psychic process. When

entered into consciously and imaginatively, it provides for a deepening of
awareness of the self, an expansion of one’s consciousness, and engendering of
soul. We become more fully who we are and we are more fully able to enter into
a community of humans. In Jungian terms, this is transformation – emergence
of the self’ (Dirkx 1997: 251).
Dean Elias (1997) has expanded the definition of transformative learning to
explicitly include the unconscious: transformative learning is the expansion
of consciousness through the transformation of basic world views and specific
capacities of the self; transformative learning is facilitated through consciously
directed processes such as appreciatively accessing and receiving the symbolic
contents of the unconscious and critically analyzing underlying premises.
For additional insight into Jungian interpretations of transformative learning
in the context of adult learning, see Robert Boyd (1991).

Facilitating transformation learning in graduate adult

education
The first graduate programme in adult education designed to foster and
facilitate the concept of transformative learning was established two decades
ago at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York. A highly selective
doctoral programme, Adult Education Guided Independent Study, was
designed for professionals with at least five years of experience in this field
of practice. Students came on campus one weekend a month and attended
intensive three-week summer sessions to satisfy course requirements in two
years. Dialogue continued through the Internet. To practice and analyze the
process of discourse, students collaborated on most problems with colleagues
around tables of six. A major emphasis was placed on the creation of effective
learning communities for collaborative inquiry.
Applicants were required to write a paper that described an issue in the field,
present arguments on both sides, describe the point of view each represented
and describe their own point of view and analyze their own assumptions. Faculty
members, who placed emphasis on identifying additional missing assumptions,
carefully reviewed the papers. Extensive revisions were requested. Revisions
were often returned to the applicant with a faculty analysis of additional missed
assumptions, and second and often third revisions were required. These exchanges
were designed to force the applicants to critically examine their own habits of
taken-for-granted ways of thinking and introduce the students to assumption
analysis. Grading was limited to pass or incomplete. Academic standards
were high. Three incompletes required that a student leave the programme.
Courses included assumption analysis, involving articles authored by
adult educators, and life histories, involving comparative assessment of key
turning points in the lives of students meeting in groups of three, designed
to encourage them to recognize that there are alternative ways of interpreting
 An overview on transformative learning 103

common experience, as well as courses in ideologies, media analysis, the work

of Paulo Freire and transformations through art and literature. Other courses,
added over the years, focused on adult learning, research methods, adult
literacy, community development and organizational development.
Methods found useful in fostering critical self-reflection of assumptions
and discourse include using critical incidents, life histories, journal writing,
media analysis, repertory grids, metaphor analysis, conceptual mapping, action
learning, collaborative learning and John Peters’ ‘Action-Reason-Thematic
Technique’ – all described in Mezirow and Associates (1990).

Universal dimensions of adult knowing

There is a current debate over whether a learning theory must be dictated
exclusively by contextual interests, as suggested by Brookfield, followers of
critical pedagogy, other post-Marxist theorists and many postmodern critics.
Transformative learning theory, as I have conceptualized it, holds that
cultures enable or inhibit the realization of common human interests – the
ways adults realize common learning capabilities. Who learns what and
the when, where and how of education are clearly functions of the culture.
Transformative learning is a rational, metacognitive process of reassessing
reasons that support problematic meaning perspectives or frames of reference,
including those representing such contextual cultural factors as ideology,
religion, politics, class, race, gender and others. It is the process by which
adults learn how to think critically for themselves rather than take assumptions
supporting a point of view for granted.
Universal dimensions of rationality and adult understanding upon which
cultural or contextual influences impact – and may distort – include the following:

Adults
• seek the meaning of their experience – both mundane and transcendent;
• have a sense of self and others as agents capable of thoughtful and respon-
sible action;
• engage in mindful efforts to learn;
• learn to become rational by advancing and assessing reasons;
• make meaning of their experience – both within and outside awareness –
through acquired frames of reference – sets of orienting assumptions and
expectations with cognitive, affective and conative dimensions that shape,
delimit and sometimes distort their understanding;
• accept some others as agents with interpretations of their experience that
may prove true or justified;
• rely upon beliefs and understandings that produce interpretations and
opinions that will prove more true or justified than those based upon other
beliefs and understandings;
104 Jack Mezirow

• engage in reflective discourse to assess the reasons and assumptions

supporting a belief to be able to arrive at a tentative best judgement – as
a sometime alternative or supplement to resorting to traditional authority
or force to validate a judgement;
• understand the meaning of what is communicated to them by taking
into account the assumptions (intent, truthfulness, qualifications) of the
person communicating as well as the truth, justification, appropriateness
and authenticity of what is being communicated;
• imagine how things could be different;
• learn to transform their frames of reference through critical reflection on
assumptions, self-reflection on assumptions and dialogic reasoning when
the beliefs and understandings they generate become problematic.

These are generic dimensions of adult understanding that may be deliberately

or unconsciously enhanced or discouraged through the process of adult
education. Limiting the development of these qualitative dimensions of adult
learning by exclusively focusing adult education on immediate contextual
issues is self-defeating. It brings to mind the old Chinese saying, ‘Give a man a
fish and he can eat for a day; teach him to fish and he can eat for his lifetime’.

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 An overview on transformative learning 105

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