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ABSTRACT
It has become commonplace within the educational research community to invoke the transformative power of education. The call to adopt a ‘transformative’ approach to teaching and learning can be heard in fields as different as adult education and school leadership and as estranged as social justice education and educational psychology. While there is undoubtedly great promise in the idea of transformative education, the fact that it involves deep psychological restructuring on the part of the student requires ethical justification. In this article, I analyze the three most pressing ethical problems that arise within a transformative educational environment: the problems of transformative consent, controversial direction and transformative trauma. In the concluding section, I argue that this ethical analysis urges us to adopt an approach to transformative education as a process of initiation.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Although, according to this branch of social justice education, personally transformative experiences are necessary precursors to larger social transformation, not every instance of the term ‘transformation’ in social justice education assumes this causal relation.
2. To reiterate: this is not necessarily the case. Negative experience need not possess a phenomenologically negative quality. This is often assumed, given the rapidity of change that must occur in transformative education, but it does not follow from the hermeneutical theory that is its source (e.g., Buck, Citation1981). Nevertheless, the negativity of transformative education will almost inevitably be, if not phenomenologically negative, then at the very least demanding, as I put it in the following paragraph. For an account of how transformative education can initiate negative experience without falling into negative phenomenology, see the Conclusion.
3. Although one finds these four qualities of transformative experience again and again in the literature on transformative education, they are seldom explicitly articulated. In presenting them here, I do not mean to suggest that all proponents of transformative education would necessarily agree with the list I have provided. Though I have taken inspiration from this literature, the four qualities listed here are supposed to represent the phenomenological characteristics of any experience initiated by an educator with the dramatic self-change of her students as its goal.
4. To imagine what this might look like in educational practice, the social justice education literature is rich with examples. One hears about the importance of questioning students’ faulty assumptions about race and ethnicity, of providing texts and videos that convince students of the omnipresence of systemic injustice, or of critically inspecting various (beloved) media for embedded ideology.
5. One of the problems with prior treatments of the ‘negative’ and ‘transformative’ quality of learning is precisely that the definitions offered for these terms run together experiences of profound change with more mundane occurrences in the classroom such as correcting one’s mistakes in mathematics. For a clear example of this, compare English Citation2014, p. 135 and p. 127. Also, compare Pugh’s (Citation2002) narrow definition of transformative experience as ‘expansion of perception and value’ resulting from the acquisition of a new concept in a science class to the more expansive definitions to be found in social justice education (Elenes, Citation2013).
6. Harman (Citation2015) does not consider the problem to be quite as acute as Paul. See especially p. 328f. for a defense of the usefulness of testimony across a transformative discontinuity.
7. Thank you to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this important distinction.
8. This term is famously coined by Erik Erikson (Citation1985) in his analysis of adolescent ego development, but Taylor’s usage implies that such crises are a constant threat to the integrity of the self in the modern world.
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Notes on contributors
Douglas W. Yacek
Douglas W. Yacek, PhD is currently a postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer at the Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, where he has a dual appointment in the Leibniz School of Education and Institute for Special Education. His research interests include educational ethics, philosophy of education and the history of educational thought.