Transformative Inquiry in teacher education: evoking the soul of what matters

Abstract

Teaching requires the navigation of an intricate terrain of complex and often overlapping issues, many of which extend beyond the classroom setting. Teachers are uniquely placed to influence large numbers of learners beyond the delivery of prescribed curriculum, and therefore need to be particularly careful and aware of their professional ways of being~doing~knowing. Transformative Inquiry (TI) is a specific approach offered to pre-service teachers that responds to complexity by embracing personal, social and environmental change. Through vignettes of her own teaching and learning, the contributor describes how the TI approach developed over her own professional career. These vignettes align with pre-service teachers’ experience of the process and evoke the soul of what matters for educators who strive towards deep transformation in their practice of teaching and schooling. Significant elements discussed include: thinking partners; emotional engagement; learner autonomy; disrupting binaries; generous listening; relational accountability; accessing other ways of knowing; and reflexivity.

Keywords:

• Transformative Inquiry
• transformative learning
• teacher education
• teacher development
• teacher as researcher

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 167272]. I am grateful for their support as well as that of my research team.