Chapter 11

Challenges of transformative learning through creative life writing

The challenges of transformative learning for both students and tutors are well recognised in the literature. Mezirow says that:

Transformative learning, especially when it involves subjective reframing, is often an intensely threatening emotional experience in which we have to become aware of both the assumptions undergirding our ideas and those supporting our emotional responses to the need to change.

(Mezirow, 2000: 6–7)

As usual, Mezirow makes ‘subjective reframing’ too conscious and rational, but the description of it as ‘an intensely threatening emotional experience’ certainly resonates with some of the examples in my study. Boyd and Myers's description of the transformative process of ‘discernment’ as involving a period of ‘grieving’ in response to the ‘involuntary disruption of order [and collapse of] previous assurances and predictable ways of interpreting reality and of making meaning’ (Boyd and Myers, 1988: 276–8), also echoes the experience of some CWPD students. Their suggestion, however, that mourning is a necessary part of transformative change is not borne out by my study.

The challenges involved in students' emotional opening-up – for the students themselves, for the tutor team, and for the university – have become more visible through the research, as have the challenges of combining personal development with the development of an arts-specific skill. In this chapter I discuss these various challenges, drawing out what might be important for others to bear in mind when pursuing similar approaches.

Challenges for students of opening-up emotionally

CWPD students' reactions to the experience of greater emotional openness vary considerably. Whilst for some there are transitory moments of sadness or distress, as in Simon's tearfulness when he is unable to imagine a reader in his writing process in Course 1, this is sometimes just a small part of a larger experience of excitement, even exhilaration, at what they are learning about themselves.¹ However, for others increased emotional openness triggers longer periods of distress or depression, as is the case for Maria during Courses 1 and 2, because of having to ‘[go] back to a place where I wasn't held’ and the mourning this involves. The dismantling of Stella's familiar sense of identity leaves her, at the end of Year 1, feeling ‘more deconstructed and insecure now than I have for years’ and on one occasion she has ‘suicidal thoughts’. However, she finds it difficult to separate the effects of her studies from those resulting from her relationship break-up. Jill's relinquishing of her dominant sense of identity also leads to a period of insecurity early on in the programme: ‘The fragile container, the identity I have manufactured, I now see is cracked into many shards, yet I still fear to move away from playing parts I know by heart’. If identity is a cognitive-emotional container that provides familiarity and safety, even though potentially constraining, then relinquishing it at the start of a two-year programme of study requires being able to tolerate a more vulnerable state for quite a long period. For some people, as we have seen, it also involves being able to tolerate the emergence of challenging dimensions of the personality. This necessitates having a safe-enough holding environment to bridge the gap before a more grounded, embodied sense of agency develops.

Whilst the different opportunities for ‘holding’ in the learning environment can be seen to sustain many Group 2 students, the research highlights some significant gaps. For example, the summer vacation between the two years of study is particularly difficult for some people, not surprisingly perhaps in view of the three-month period at a distance from the programme and its community of learners. This is the case for two of the three students who take the craft-based Writing Practice in the summer term rather than Writing and Groups. Lucy, for example, feels adrift during the vacation with an angry sense that none of the option courses for the start of Year 2 is right for her. The dismantling of her familiar sense of identity means that her reasons for taking the MA are no longer relevant, and she does not know what she should do next. Serendipitously the first research interview late in the vacation provides an opportunity for her to explore this. Together we determine that undertaking, for Projects: Practical and Theoretical, a text-based research project on the personal development potential of science fiction will enable her to build on her experience of using this genre to explore her dominant theme of absent males in Writing Practice. Normally this opportunity to discuss Year 2 would not have been available unless she had specifically requested it,² and this highlights the need for on-going support for transformative learning students across the longer gaps in their studies. This might be achieved, for example, via a scheduled meeting with the convener for all students during the summer vacation to reflect on their experience of Year 1 and prepare for Year 2. Online contact between students as a group or in supportive pairs would also be useful here.³

Ruth, who similarly takes Writing Practice, also runs into difficulties at this time, although this only comes to a head at the start of Year 2 when she undertakes, for Projects: Practical and Theoretical, an extremely challenging but ultimately beneficial exploration of the value of Gendlin's ‘felt sense’ technique for engaging with her painful feelings about her father. In this instance additional support via the University's counselling services is necessary to help contain her distress, which highlights the importance of having this available as back-up when required. At Sussex, as will be the case elsewhere, students can refer themselves to these services without going via the convener, but it is also useful for the convener to suggest to students in distress that they might benefit from some counselling sessions. In fact, from a certain point we recommended in our publicity that students might wish to consider having therapeutic support in place for the period of their studies, and some 50 per cent of Group 2 students were in counselling or therapy either throughout or for some of the time (see Chapter 12).

The experience of Lucy and Ruth indicates that, paradoxically, what we were calling the ‘creative writing and personal development’ route through the MA involving Writing Practice and Projects: Practical and Theoretical was, at that time at least, less ‘holding’ than the ‘professional development’ route involving Writing and Groups and Contexts for Practice. A big factor in this was that the option courses in the former route were structured that year⁴ as independent study, with one-to-one supervision and monthly tutor-led reading groups for sharing work-in-progress. In view of the depth of some students' self-explorations in these courses, this was clearly a mistake, and the following year they were brought into line with the standard pattern of fortnightly tutor-led meetings. It is worth noting, though, that all three Group 2 students who took this route – Lucy, Ruth, and Simon – did benefit in personal development terms from undertaking the craft-focused creative writing and the small research project, as we saw particularly in Simon's story (Chapter 3). This indicates that this route is potentially as beneficial from a transformative learning point of view as the professional development route, but ‘holding’ needs to be more significantly in place than it was at the time of the research.

Another significant gap in ‘holding’ is in the two terms of Independent Study at the conclusion of the MA. For many years – and the research material reflects this – students were saying that the monthly gaps between the tutor-led group meetings during Independent Study were too long, causing them to lose connection with the programme. My response was always that individual supervision plus three half-day tutor-led feedback sessions was all we could provide per term, particularly as for most other MAs at the University independent study meant individual supervision only. However, the research leads me to the view that, if we are expecting students to engage in deep emotional learning of the kind under discussion here, providing ‘holding’ across the two years needs to involve more frequent support during the final stages when consolidation is usually taking place.

Challenges for students of the failure of
transformative learning

Of course there are also people for whom the CWPD programme was not trans-formative, or opened them up but did not enable them to consolidate their learning. One woman from Group 1 who dropped out after Course 2 says: ‘I felt I lacked inner creativity, and floundered between depression at the blankness inside my head and irritation at the self-indulgence of it all’. It sounds from this as if she experienced a degree of opening-up but the psychic state that resulted was too difficult to manage. She also indicates difficulties fitting her studies into her busy life: ‘I lacked the necessary ruthlessness to complete [the coursework requirements] in the context of my own circumstances’. ‘Undertaking the course’, she says, ‘was a poor decision on my part. Failing to complete it undermined my self-esteem’ and ‘had a very negative effect on [my sense of self as a learner]’.

There are several different things happening here. She is clearly trying to juggle a demanding programme of study with a demanding home life – a fulltime caring role, if I remember correctly – but her reference to the ‘self-indulgence’ of the learning process hints at a strong reluctance to reflect on herself, which is in tension with her decision to join a personal development programme. Her mention of lacking creativity is also in tension with the gently lyrical creative writing she produced in Course 1, which hints at a strong tendency to self-criticism. It may be that, like some Group 2 students I have discussed, what she was actually able to achieve as a learner and writer in the short time she was with us compared unfavourably with her expectations, and that engaging with this was too difficult in the context of her busy life beyond her studies.

Another woman who dropped out after Course 2 also indicates that this was, in part, because her writing did not live up to her expectations. ‘I have not made the transition from being “a dabbler” to being “a writer”’, she says, which, combined with ill health and her struggle with the academic work, undermined her ‘confidence in [her] abilities to learn’. That something similar happened again in a subsequent writing course indicates an ingrained difficulty with learning, and the respondent acknowledges this when, in reply to a question about what she learned from the programme, says: ‘there are areas of personal development for me to pursue – to increase my confidence and commitment as a writer – to believe that the small talent I have is worthwhile pursuing’.

What we see in both these instances is the coming together of difficult external factors (heavy family commitments, ill health) with the challenge of opening-up to painful insights about problems with learning or creativity. In both instances failure to complete the programme undermines what in all likelihood is an already shaky confidence. This is not to suggest that there were not shortcomings in the programme in their year that contributed to their difficulties. Some of the responses from Group 1 indicate that our ability to provide a safe-enough environment for this work was not as well developed in the Diploma period as it was later, with one person referring to the personal development work in Course 1 as ‘badly boundaried’ in her year. Also quite a few Group 2 respondents found the reading for Course 2 both too much and too diverse. But implicit in both of the above instances is the challenge of opening-up to problems with learning and creativity in a context where there is also an emphasis on developing creative writing skills. As another Group 1 respondent says when reflecting on why she stopped writing creatively after the Diploma: ‘I wonder if exposure to more able/creative writers did affect my confidence in some way. I think I had a sense of my writing being rather “ordinary”’. Of course, feeling overshadowed by others with more experience can be a problem in any creative writing course – indeed in any group learning – but it is likely to be particularly acute in a personal development context where novice and more experienced writers are working alongside each other, and where there may well be a greater proportion of students who lack confidence as learners. One way to address this would be for tutors to be more aware that it is a possibility and to bring it into the open for discussion. There were opportunities for students to reflect on the operation of their small groups in plenary discussions, but more could be done to draw out issues that are known to arise for some learners.

The above highlights the problem of undertaking creative writing for personal development alongside the development of creative writing skills, which I explore in more detail in the next section. But it also highlights the importance of ensuring that students are aware of the personal challenges of transformative learning. At Sussex this usually occurred at interview, where the convener's task was to try and get a sense of applicants' level of self-awareness, so that she could make a judgement about their suitability for the programme. In the first of the two examples discussed above this process does not seem to have been successful. Of course, an interview is not a perfect vehicle for this, as people can appear to be robust and self-reflective at first and then turn out to be less so. But the point remains that with a programme of study that attracts people who have difficulties with learning and whose level of self-confidence may already be shaky, every effort should be made to help them decide whether or not exploring these difficulties in an educational context is appropriate for them. Inevitably, all programmes of study lose students and, to my recollection, the CWPD programme did not lose more than was average in the department. But as tutor Sarah points out, because of the nature of the CWPD programme it is easier for tutors to feel that they are to blame, and it is important to be aware that there are often other factors at work in students' departures not connected with the programme. In a transformative learning context an exit interview can be beneficial, although in my experience students are not always willing or able to talk about their reasons for leaving.

Challenges for tutors of students'
emotional learning

As we have seen in Chapter 9, the main challenge for tutors is how to ‘hold’ the students whilst also helping them to keep the dynamic system of the psyche or of the group open and in process, which implies the ability to be more personally present – more ‘real’, as tutor Cheryl puts it – to students. This echoes Boyd and Myers's view that tutors need to be ‘actively involved in the inner dialogue of their own personal journeys. They must have travelled a similar road and speak from their own experience’ (Boyd and Myers, 1988: 282).

One of the consequences of being more present and real to the students is that the transference, which is of course present in all learning situations, can be more intense. For tutor Cheryl the relationships students form with the tutors in the CWPD programme is a key part of their emotional learning. As the programme progresses, she says, they will have ‘both negative and positive encounters’ with different tutors, which will evoke previous experiences of ‘good parenting or bad parenting or something in the middle’, and she suggests that students' negotiation of that can lead them, when it works well, ‘to a place where they can become utterly themselves’. Thus students may become ‘attached and dependent on a tutor’ and want to please them, which may create tensions for them in getting their learning needs met, as we have seen in Harriet's experience; or they may take ‘a particular dislike to a tutor’ or their teaching approach, but find that not only can they ‘voice their criticism’, but they can also ‘have it listened to’, as Claudia found. Becoming more aware of tension in the relationship with the tutor and being required to reflect on it, in Writing and Groups for example, opens it up for students to explore, so that they can carry forward the resulting learning into their lives beyond the programme. Horney's suggestion that transference is a defence against anxiety rather than a repetition of infantile patterns offers another way of thinking about students' attachment to tutors, and of their hostility towards them when these defences are challenged (Horney, 1939a: 154–67). This is not to suggest, however, that students cannot have legitimate affection for, or anger at, tutors.

In light of her experience of Writing and Groups, Christine thinks that all tutors teaching CWPD need a better understanding of how negative and positive transferences impact the tutor–student relationship, so that they know how to respond to groups or individuals when difficulties arise. Tutors also need to be able to share with the tutor group when this is happening, so that they can learn from each other and feel supported. Of course, tutors also need to understand the phenomenon of countertransference which, in a Horneyan sense, could also be a defence against anxiety. Needing students to like us, for example, may be a way of defending ourselves against less worthy traits, such as destructive competitiveness or self-glorifying tendencies. Or it may protect us against a sense of not being good enough or not knowing enough about our topics. Interestingly, Sarah notices that: ‘We've all been really open to learning more about what we're doing and changing’. This connects for her with being open to not knowing all the answers as teachers, which supports the idea that a greater degree of openness is a necessary characteristic of tutors who engage in this kind of work. Cheryl concurs:

I've drawn a lot of support from that sense that we're all finding things out as we go, and it's that process of discovery that has felt very supportive and enabling because it means that our role as tutors is to enable that process to continue in the best possible way, but not necessarily to be doling out some-thing that we should have rehearsed very well and have all packaged up.

What the tutors are saying here is that teaching on this programme requires them to be in process in a similar way to the students, and certainly my own experience of it over many years has been a sense of constantly having to open-up to new – and sometimes quite painful – learning about myself. Cheryl's view is that in work of this kind tutors ideally need to be:

required to be in some kind of facilitated group … where we are modelling for ourselves, and having modelled for us by a facilitator, some of that holding [that we provide for students], and that we have a shared experience of each other in our more vulnerable states as well as in our more strengthened ones.

In such a setting tutors could explore both transference and countertransference issues, not only those at work in their relations with students, but also with each other. This kind of support is difficult in a context where, as was the case at Sussex, the teaching was primarily carried out by associate, hourly-paid teaching staff and where resources were always an issue. What was possible was a termly tutor group meeting to discuss administrative matters and the development of courses. Tutors teaching Writing and Groups also acted as mentors to each other, which some found invaluable, whilst others needed to find support beyond the tutor team. Because the bulk of teaching took place on the same Saturday once a fortnight tutors were also able to support each other informally during breaks. But more formal support is needed for tutors engaged in transformative learning of this kind, and higher education institutions offering it need to recognise that.

Another challenge highlighted by tutors is the necessity of having not only the expertise to hold students in their emotional learning, but also the relevant academic expertise. Cheryl says:

I think the major breakthroughs that are made in the students' development happen when they have an experience of themselves and of their writing that doesn't fit neatly into an academic framework. I think there are also academic breakthroughs that they make …, but I think it's when the two come together that the most significant changes [occur]. That's the single most exciting thing about the course, and I do think that presents a huge challenge to the tutors individually and as a tutor group as to how you hold both those areas of expertise in balance and whether or not we come necessarily with both ….

Having two tutors teaching alongside each other, which was possible in some courses over the years, was a very effective means of developing their expertise across the different aspects of the programme. Occasionally tutors also sat in on a course as a participant–observer, but both these options have significant resource implications, for the institution and for tutors. Apart from appropriate academic and personal development skills, tutors also need, of course, to be experienced creative writers and teachers of writing, so in all they need three different areas of expertise, and it was challenging over the years to find tutors with all of these. Ideally, tutors wishing to teach CWPD in higher education need to have a Master's degree in a relevant subject and some kind of basic therapeutic training, as recommended by Lapidus for people wishing to work with creative writing in health and social care, in addition to writing and teaching experience.

Challenges arising from the hybrid nature of the
CWPD programme

The challenges both for students and tutors arising from the hybrid nature of the CWPD programme stem from its origins in a more standard creative writing programme. As discussed in Chapter 1, the programme set out to cater for a wide range of people, including those seeking to develop or free up their creative writing through self-reflection, those seeking deeper insight into themselves through creative writing, and those seeking to acquire skills for working with creative writing in the community. Consequently people came to the programme with very different needs and expectations, creating a number of tensions.

Tensions around giving feedback on creative writing

One of the main tensions was around giving and receiving feedback on creative work. Some Group 2 students, like Maria, who experienced significant opening-up in the early stages, needed more opportunities for personal sharing in the reading groups, whilst others, like Harriet, who were more focused on developing their creative writing, were seeking in-depth constructive critical feedback on work-in-progress. This was also a problem for some people in Writing and Groups. As discussed in Chapter 9, the feedback hand-out students received in Course 1 suggested engaging with each other's writing by focusing on their own felt response to it. This worked well for some, but less well for those with specific needs, such as Maria and Harriet. To try and remedy this, we suggested that when writers discussed their work they should indicate what kind of response they were seeking, whether a personal or a literary critical one, or both if time allowed, and students received an additional hand-out on how to respond in a more literary critical way. But we did not provide explicit guidance on how to respond when people were seeking a more personal kind of sharing, which clearly was an omission. Claire gives us a good picture of the frustrations of the feedback process in Course 1:

As a four we gelled superficially, but were not adept at offering the depth of feedback we clearly all craved. I repeatedly wanted to know more about the circumstances of each piece read out. The questions I asked were of the emotions and outcome created by a piece, and less of its style, structure and content. I realised that I was using the work as bridges into the writers more than as a basis on which to learn from and develop my fellow students. I was doing what I feared the others might do to me.

Whilst it was, of course, desirable that students got to know each other better through their writing, focusing on their own felt response in the first instance prevented what might have been experienced by some as intrusive probing at this early stage, and it is interesting to see this at work here. However, when the discussion did move away from the text into personal development issues in Claire's Course 2 reading group, she did not feel equipped to deal with it:

Sometimes what is revealed in the writing is big stuff. It's easy for discussion to move away from the actual writing and towards the impact of the events revealed and the personal development that may have followed. But I haven't always felt adept enough about having those conversations and closing them as a group in a safe and supportive way.

Obviously we were not encouraging students to psychoanalyse each other, and we were also trying to discourage lengthy offloading of individuals' painful material, hence the starting guidelines, but these comments highlight the need for broader guidance on how to respond when challenging personal development issues emerge in a context where sufficient trust has developed. In fact, students need guidance on three different kinds of feedback: (a) their felt personal response to others' writing; (b) their suggestions for how that writing might be developed; and (c) ways of responding when the writer is seeking personal development through their writing. Whilst learning how to do (a) and (b) is fairly straightforward, although not necessarily easy, the third might well require students to undertake some person-centred reading and tutors to model the process. Indeed all three approaches would benefit from more tutor modelling.

With regard to (b), some Group 2 students report frustration that the level of feedback did not gain critical depth until Independent Study. Ideally, all students needed to take a Writing Practice course where they could focus on developing their creative writing and learning how to give in-depth constructive critical feedback, but this was difficult to achieve within an already crowded two-year programme. Students could, of course, be expected to take a creative writing course as a prerequisite. Conversely, in some of the craft-focused courses such as Writing Practice and Independent Study the personal development dimension seems to have got lost, with groups becoming more like a standard Master's in creative writing, with their associated competitiveness and sometimes very challenging levels of criticism.

These various points highlight the importance for this work of helping students to gain confidence in giving different kinds of feedback, whether through hand-outs, or reading and discussion, or modelling by tutors. They also highlight again the importance for tutors of having all three areas of expertise mentioned above, for even within a craft-focused course the personal development process does need to be kept in view for those students for whom it is ongoing. As Christine says, the tutor group needed to be able to hold ‘the emotional arc of each student's journey’ through the programme, in the way that she felt we had come to hold the ‘intellectual arc’.

Tensions around assessment

Another significant tension at the heart of the CWPD programme was how to balance the needs of students engaged in sometimes very challenging personal development work with the needs of the institution for them to demonstrate their learning through formal assessment. This is something we struggled with as a tutor team and, whilst some progress was made, more could be done. Because the CWPD programme evolved out of the Certificate in Creative Writing with its focus on developing the writing, assessment in the early years included assessing the creative writing produced in Course 1 alongside the reflective essay. This inevitably created a conflict, which was quite acute for some Group 1 students. One says:

I felt strongly (and voiced this at the time) that there was a strong conflict within the course between personal writing and using writing as a therapeutic tool. The exercises were based around the latter yet the unformed products of this were ‘judged’ as the former, and of course they weren't written as such: this ‘product’ was poor artistically, and tutor feedback underlined this.

As a consequence, she goes on to say, the Diploma ‘sapped all confidence in my own writing, and I stopped’.⁵ In light of students' feedback we subsequently stopped assessing the creative writing in Writing for Personal Development and Writing and Groups, and focused instead on assessing students' reflections on the writing and the writing process in the end-of-course essays. This worked much better. However, the creative writing continued to be assessed in Contexts for Practice in Year 2, which was a problem for students with little or no experience of engaging in creative writing, and with little opportunity in Year 1 for direct work on the craft, as discussed above. One solution to this might be to give students the option in all Year 2 courses of having their creative writing assessed, rather than it being mandatory. Cheryl disagrees with this, saying that ‘for writing to work in a personal development context there needs to be an emphasis on quality, as this is what allows the writing to reach and communicate beyond the individual’. This is an important point. However, it may be that group sharing can already achieve this. In light of the effectiveness of having just such a range of assessment options in Independent Study (see Chapter 1), a flexible approach of this kind across the programme as a whole could make assessment more beneficial.

Linked to the above is the challenge of running this kind of programme in the context of the less ‘soft’ structures of academic exam boards and associated committees where submission dates, at least at Sussex, are absolute and extensions only granted for significant mitigating circumstances. Claire's experience of trying to get an extension for the submission of her Independent Study on the grounds of an unexpected increase in her professional workload ran into serious problems, causing her extreme stress at a time when she was already feeling fragile as a result of opening-up to painful personal insights. Her view is that:

the university authorities were unwilling or unable to understand how the content and requirements of this course might impact a student in my position. … [They] showed absolutely no evidence of understanding how people learn and the differences that exist across the range of subjects offered by the university.

Whilst I am obviously not privy to the University's version of events here, Claire's point that universities need to understand the kind of learning taking place in programmes such as CWPD is important. Where much of the work is carried out with the aid of ‘soft’ curricular and pedagogical structures, the necessarily ‘harder’ institutional macrostructures need to have sufficient flexibility to take account of the sometimes fragile states of the learners involved. Clearly there is work here for the convener to make sure university authorities are adequately briefed.

Implications for adult learning

The above discussions carry a number of important implications for a transformative learning approach of this kind:

• It is not suitable for everyone, and it is crucial that students are made aware of the challenges at the interview stage;
• Tutors need to have therapeutic as well as subject-specific training for facilitating the multiple modes of learning taking place in this context;
• Students need to be supported across the whole period of study, including the long vacation and periods of independent study, and need to be fully aware of the possibility of extra support via in-house counselling services;
• Tutors also need to be supported, for example through peer mentoring and/or a facilitated group, and need to be able to share information about students' experience as they progress through the programme;
• Careful consideration needs to be given to the question of whether assessment should be flexible to cater for the needs of students pursuing different pathways through the programme;
• Students need more explicit training, within the programme, on how to engage with each other via their creative work in a personal development context;
• Academic institutions need to be aware of the challenges for students of transformative learning.

In sum, a transformative learning programme of this kind needs more support than is usual, whether from the convener, the tutors, or the institution generally. One way of facilitating this, of course, is to locate it not in adult education, as was the case at Sussex, but in a counselling or psychotherapy context. This is, in fact, what has been done with the MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes at The Metanoia Institute in Bristol. Here the emphasis is less on the development of the creative writing and more on personal and professional development for people wishing to augment existing skills or to start working in this new field, with participants having some therapeutic support within the programme. This is a useful approach, but whilst it might have alleviated some of the tensions in the Sussex format, it would have meant losing some of the clear advantages in a personal development context of combining multiple modes of learning. Focusing on personal development via the development of an arts-specific skill in an educational context clearly enables learners to engage deeply with their learning and ‘selfing’ processes, and problems they might be having with them. This is a different kind of learning from developing professional skills, although it can be combined with it.

Further, as I said in Chapter 1, the programme attracted a very varied and interesting group of learners, making for a rich and stimulating learning environment. For many of the people who participated, the combination of developing creative writing skills and engaging in a degree of self-exploration and studying the connection between the two brought their interests together in a unique way. And some of those who benefitted most would not have applied if it had been located in a counselling context or had been more directly focused on personal development. Indeed at least two Group 2 students applied to the MA as an alternative to therapy, saying they did not want just to explore their psyche, but to produce a significant piece of creative work in the process. This brings me full-circle to the question of the identity of the programme which I discussed in a preliminary way in Chapter 1. Whilst I have come to think of it as a form of transformative learning, is it perhaps more appropriately thought of as a form of therapeutic education? And if so, what does this have to say about the relationship between transformative learning and psychotherapy? This is the subject of the final chapter.

Notes

1 An example of this beyond my study is Jane Mathison's experience of learning to ride a horse through a body-focused method (Mathison and Tosey, 2008).

2 This is a further example of how the research project provides another level of reflection and containment.

3 MA students sometimes spontaneously extended their reading groups into email groups outside the programme. This was before contact via online groups became more generally available at Sussex.

4 This was the first year these courses became available as options for students not wishing to follow the ‘professional development’ route.

5 This student subsequently returned to creative writing, and to the programme to complete her MA.