Part II

Understanding mechanisms of change in transformative learning

There are two main strands of thinking in the attempt to understand the nature of deep individual change taking place in transformative learning: the original one deriving from Jack Mezirow and the early response to this by Robert Boyd and colleagues. For Mezirow, transformative learning:

transforms problematic frames of reference – sets of fixed assumptions and expectations (habits of mind, meaning perspectives, mind-sets) – to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open, reflective, and emotionally able to change. Such frames of reference are better than others because they are more likely to generate beliefs and opinions that will prove more true or justified to guide action.

(Mezirow, 2003: 58)

Achieving transformation involves ‘critical reflection’, both on the views of others that make up one's own ‘frame of reference’ (‘objective reframing’), and on one's own views (‘subjective reframing’) (Mezirow, 1998). With the emphasis on assumptions that form the way we see ourselves and the world, this theory primarily focuses on cognitive constructions rather than psychodynamic processes, and on consciously intentional and rational methods of liberating oneself from them. Mezirow does, however, acknowledge the role of the emotions in this process, suggesting that ‘subjective reframing’ can be ‘an intensely threatening emotional experience’ (Mezirow, 2000: 6–7).

For Jungians Boyd and Myers, ‘transformative education’ involves liberating oneself from ‘old patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting’ resulting from upbringing, which ‘[prevent] growth’ (Boyd and Myers, 1988: 279). Rather than critical reflection, they see emotional release or ‘discernment’ as the key mechanism of transformation. This consists of three stages: ‘receptivity’ or ‘assum[ing] the posture of listener, open to receive the symbols, images, and alternative expressions of meaning that surface from the [unconscious]’; ‘recognition’ or confronting authentic thoughts and feelings that become available through increased receptivity; and ‘grieving’ in response to the ‘involuntary disruption of order [and collapse of] previous assurances and predictable ways of interpreting reality and of making meaning’, that can be ‘poignant and painful’. The consequence of discernment is ‘an expansion of consciousness’ that:

moves the person to psychic integration and active realization of their true being. In such transformations the individual reveals critical insights, develops fundamental understandings and acts with integrity.

(ibid.: 262)

As in Mezirow's theory there is a shift to a more agentic way of being, here indicated by the development of a more critical stance and the ability to act with integrity, but the shift is more embodied and less consciously intentional or rational. John Dirkx provides a more recent Jungian rendering of this expansion of consciousness:

[The] paradigm shift [in transformative learning] involves decentering the ego and ego consciousness in the learning process and allowing our inner selves greater expression and voice, allowing for a deeper and more meaningful presence of the imagination and the spontaneous and semi-autonomous forces of the unconscious to which it is giving voice. This paradigm shift requires a reconnection, an ongoing dialogue of the ego with these deeper, unconscious, and extrarational aspects of the human psyche, both individually and collectively.

(Dirkx, 2012: 127)

Both the Mezirowian and Jungian understandings of the shift in transformative learning are helpful in my attempts to understand CWPD students' experience of change, but they also have their limitations. Mezirow's idea of liberating oneself from ‘frames of reference’ that have become fixed resonates with the idea I discuss in Chapter 7 that social self-concepts containing a narrative of how one should be in the world can become rigid identities and that transformative learning involves their dismantling. However, his exclusive focus on the constructed nature of meaning-making gives a one-sided picture of mechanisms of transformation, as does his privileging of highly intentional, conscious processes over the less conscious and embodied. This latter has, in fact, become a major theme in recent thinking in the field (Taylor, 2001). Boyd's idea that change involves an ‘expansion of consciousness’ resonates with what I have called the expansion of the psyche, but his reliance on the exploration of Jungian archetypes in the collective unconscious for understanding this is limiting. Dirkx's understanding of the ‘paradigm shift’ as involving the ‘decentering of the ego and ego consciousness’ which facilitates a ‘reconnection’ with deeper and less conscious dimensions of the psyche, is similarly helpful. However, there is scope for unpacking terms such as ‘ego’ or ‘ego-consciousness’ and for understanding more deeply how the ego can be ‘decentered’ or engage in a ‘dialogue’ with other aspects of the psyche. Some of Dirkx's terms could also usefully be reconsidered in light of the cognitive neuroscience of self and consciousness: for example, his distinction between conscious processes that are rational and unconscious processes that are extrarational. In the thinking of Damasio and others, rationality is both conscious and unconscious (cf. Taylor, 2001).

Thus in the two chapters of Part II I attempt to open up some of the meanings inherent in these two main theories of individual change in transformative learning and, working within a bio-psycho-social conceptual framework, to understand in greater depth the psychic shift that transformative learning brings about, as well as what necessitates it in the first place.