Transformative Experience: An Integrative Construct in the Spirit of Deweyan Pragmatism

Abstract

A sentiment held by Dewey and shared by other educators is that learning should enrich and expand everyday experience. However, this goal has not been a focus of research. In this article, I propose transformative experience as a construct capable of reflecting this goal and functioning as an empirical research construct. I discuss the theoretical grounding for this construct in the work of Dewey and define it in terms of three characteristics: (a) motivated use, (b) expansion of perception, and (c) experiential value. In doing so, I describe how transformative experience integrates current research constructs such as transfer, conceptual change, and task value in a holistic way. I then provide illustrations of transformative experiences and review the existing research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank David Bergin, David Wong, and the reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this article. I also thank Gale Sinatra for her editorial support.

Notes

¹Prior work has provided initial conceptualizations of transformative experience (see Pugh, 2002, 2004; Pugh, Linnenbrink-Garcia, Koskey, Stewart, & Manzey, 2010a). This article synthesizes prior work and provides a more extensive philosophical grounding and theoretical analysis of the construct.

²The construct of an idea is found throughout Dewey's (1933) work but most prominently in his description of reflective thinking in the revised version of How We Think (Dewey, 1933). Dewey drew on Peirce's concept of abduction in developing the construct (Prawat, 1999a).

³According to Prawat (1998), Dewey proposed that the responsibility for testing the validity of ideas lies with the individual. However, the social context is vital to the authoring of ideas, situating them in the context of other ideas, and constituting the nature of experience itself (see also, Prawat, 1999a).

⁴This intentional transfer parallels intentional conceptual change (see Sinatra & Pintrich, 2003). The spontaneous transfer process is representative of forward-reaching transfer (see Salomon & Perkins, 1989).

⁵Genuine conceptual change is typically viewed as involving a universal change in perception. For example, if a student has an impetus theory of motion and genuinely transforms this theory into a theory based on Newton's Laws, we would expect this student to use the new theory whenever she explains the motion of an object. However, as the case of Sarah illustrates, she may not care about explaining the motion of objects at all. Consequently, her perception of events of motion in everyday experience may remain unchanged even though her theory of motion did change.

⁶Girod and colleagues (Girod, Rau, & Schepige, 2003; Girod & Wong, 2002) have used the term aesthetic understanding in place of transformative experience. However, the constructs are similar. For a discussion, see Pugh and Girod (2007).

⁷The Rasch Model is a psychometric model used to create measures. It is beneficial for research involving integrative constructs, because it has tools to test whether items function as a unified construct and, if so, provides composite scores representing levels of performance for this construct.

⁸Specifically, a measure of task-based transfer (Pugh & Bergin, 2005) was used. Thus, the researchers investigated whether students who willfully applied learning in free-choice transfer contexts as part of a transformative experience would be more successful at applying such learning when required to do so by an assessment task. According to the Barnett and Ceci (2002) transfer taxonomy, the transfer items used represented far transfer in terms of the knowledge domain.