Education for transformative leadership in Southern Africa

This article argues that education for transformative leadership in a southern African context needs to nurture an understanding of the relationship between spirituality and charisma. This argument is based on a review of some literature pertaining to transformative learning, transformative leadership, and African value systems. The article explores the relationship between transformative leadership and transformative learning and education theories, and relates them to a specific southern African context. It proposes three arguments. First, transformative education may facilitate the transformative leadership development process. Second, transformative education and transformative leadership, although offering features that are sympathetic to African indigenous values, must also take account of particular African contexts. The article does not claim to be reporting from empirical research on this issue but, to support its position, draws on recent literature from an ongoing southern Africa leadership development project and some early empirical data from a small, related study in one southern African country. Third, the article suggests that a key difference between transformative learning and transformative leadership perspectives is the transformative leadership focus on charismatic qualities that inspire motivation to change. However, a defining conceptual thread of spirituality runs through the transformative learning and leadership literature that resonates with southern African core value systems. It is this thread that provides the overall conceptual link between the different strands of thought

Preparing Teacher Candidates to Serve Students From Diverse Backgrounds: Triggering Transformative Learning Through Short-Term Cultural Immersion

This study followed 24 teacher candidates in a short-term cultural immersion field experience designed to help them reflect on their assumptions and perspectives in order to better understand the culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students they will teach. Qualitative methods were informed by a phenomenological research approach to examine candidates’ transformative learning experiences in a cultural immersion context. The findings are discussed within a three-stage framework of transformative learning: triggering experiences, frame of reference examination, and transformative change

Transformative Learning Through Cultural Immersion

This qualitative study explored avenues to increase students’ intercultural competence through transformative learning. School of Education graduate students and faculty from a small, private university traveled to Ecuador to participate in a cultural immersion practicum. In addition to these primary goals, the trip was designed to facilitate transformative learning about cultural conceptions, diversity, and the dynamics of student differences with the goal of understanding one’s own cultural framework and adapting to another culture to develop empathy towards culturally and linguistically diverse students in the United States

The Epistemology of Transformative Learning: A Systematic Instructional Design Framework Model in Transformative Learning

Research in transformative learning has flourished in educational research in the latest decades. Among the research on transformative learning, the specific topic of how to develop instruction based on transformative learning is still very rarely found. The purpose of this study was to review the epistemology of transformative learning by introducing a systematic ID framework for transformative learning. The method of this study was the systematic literature review with three review stages: planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting the review. The review was focused on the academic paper in the research scope of transformative learning. As the result, we concluded the 3 main components of designing a transformative learning model: (1) transformative outcomes, (2) transformative scaffolding, and (3) transformative learning experience. The study also proposed 7 stages of systematic ID framework in designing transformative learning

An Honors Student Walks into a Classroom: Inviting the Whole Student into our Classes

This paper explores the risky proposition of encouraging students to question deeply held values and beliefs. After connecting honors pedagogy with transformative learning theory, the author encourages faculty who are willing to take this risk to consider involving the whole student and not simply their cognitive aspects. The author then explores whole student pedagogy and transformative learning, positing how these can be present in the honors classroom. Finally, the use of critical reflection as a tool that facilitates interaction with the whole student is discussed, with suggestions as to how it might most effectively be incorporated into the honors classroom

An appreciative inquiry into the transformative learning experiences of students in a family literacy project

Educational discourse has often struggled to genuinely move beyond deficit-based language. Even action research, a predominant model for teacher development, starts with the identification of a problem (Cardno 2003). It would appear that the vocabulary for a hope-filled discourse which captures the imagination and infiuences our future educational activity seems to have escaped us. Moreover, we seem bereft of educational contexts where the experience for students is holistic and transformative

An Integrative Model for Transformative Learning

Transformative learning is a growing focus of study with input from many areas of adult education. This paper presents a model of transformative learning that integrates key scholarly contributions to transformative learning theory, providing a common framework and language for analyzing the transformative learning process

Assessing transformative learning in teacher education

This paper formed one element of the roundtable presentation Service learning as community engagement: Exploration of academic staff skills for assessment of learning (with Avril Bellinger, University of Plymouth; Gail Goulet (University of Glasgow, Chair); Janet Strivens, University of Liverpool). It outlines some of the key issues in assessing transformation in student learning in a professional studies element of a teacher education course

Transformative pedagogy and language learning in Maori and Irish contexts

Establishing positive learning communities in classrooms where pedagogies are socially and culturally responsive and centred on shared life experiences is critical for the revitalisation of minoritised languages such as Irish and Māori, which lack the dominance and power of the wider languages of government and communication. Transformative pedagogy and pedagogical re-positioning of teachers are essential to legitimising and affirming minoritised languages in the classroom. Three small-scale New Zealand studies of emerging literacy in Māori are introduced, exemplifying a responsive and transformative pedagogy that enables teachers to position themselves as socially and culturally responsive participants within classroom contexts. These studies offer strategies that might facilitate the development of similar transformative pedagogy in Irish contexts also