Chapter 12
Is transformative learning a form of therapeutic education?
The connection between transformative learning and psychotherapy is occasionally mentioned in the literature, but rarely explored in depth. Illeris classifies transformative learning as a kind of learning that involves ‘personality change and is characterised by simultaneous restructuring in the cognitive, the emotional, and the social dimensions’, which resonates with the Sussex model. He points out that: ‘Such processes have traditionally not been conceived of as learning, but they are well known in the field of psychotherapy’, and he points to Carl Rogers's concept of ‘significant learning’ (1951) as the first attempt to ‘connect such processes to learning theory’ (Illeris, 2004b: 84). As noted previously, for Rogers significant learning takes place when the organisation of the self undergoes change (Illeris, 2004a: 94).
For Mezirow the difference between transformative learning and psychotherapy lies in the nature of the reflective work taking place:
Critical reflection in the context of psychotherapy focuses on assumptions regarding feelings pertaining to interpersonal relationships; in adult education its focus is on an infinitely wider range of concepts and their accompanying cognitive, affective, and conative1 dimensions.
(Mezirow, 2000: 23)
In fact psychotherapy can also focus on more than just interpersonal relationships, so this distinction does not get us very far. Also identifying critical reflection as the main feature in common between psychotherapy and adult learning misses the important role of embodied–experiential learning in both these activities. Patricia Cranton's suggestion, at a transformative learning conference, that the only difference between what she does and psychotherapy is that she is not a therapist is equally limited. It implies that transformative learning is psychotherapy but can be carried out by people who do not have the qualifications to do it. Yet, as Yorks and Kasl point out, tutors often shy away from whole-person learning because they feel ill-prepared (Yorks and Kasl, 2006: 46). Clearly there is a need for a deeper exploration of this relationship.
Linden West's description of psychotherapy as a form of adult learning made a deep impression on me when we were writing a paper a few years ago. In fact it triggered in me a perspective shift (although I would not call this transformative learning), causing me to reflect on the similarities between my experience of psychotherapy, in which I was engaged for the second time during the period of the research, and students' experience of the CWPD programme. I went into therapy with a well-defended self-concept, which was quite quickly dismantled through my therapist's gentle drawing attention to my obvious need to justify myself to her. This opened me up to a much more challenging sense of self, with anger and loss emerging, and the recognition of two ‘sub-personalities’ (see Chapter 7) in conflict with each other. My learning in the ensuing period could be described as becoming more aware of bodily-felt cognition, bringing this into the light and exploring its meanings, sometimes symbolically through dream images and metaphors, or poems I had written, and then allowing the new knowledge to sink back into the less conscious context of my everyday functioning. This is very similar to some Group 2 students' trajectories through the CWPD programme.
Of course, I always knew that there were similarities between the programme and psychotherapy. When interviewing applicants I would say that the programme had a therapeutic dimension but was not therapy. But it was only during the research that l was able to explore the connection more deeply, by asking the tutors and Group 2 students to reflect on it in interview. This chapter presents what I found and draws some conclusions.
The connection between CWPD and psychotherapy
Several students describe the creative and reflective writing of the MA as a form of gentle self-therapy. Jill feels that:
it's self-administered…, in my control. If I'm at all worried about where I'm going with it I can… do further writing. I'm not exposing myself if I don't [want] to; I'm exposing myself for me to understand.
This implies that she is taking greater responsibility for herself in the MA than would be the case in working with a therapist. What enables her to do this, she says, is the company of others undergoing the same process. For Susanna the writing approach is: ‘A very gentle and focused way of doing all the things I had been trying to do for myself and with a therapist’, and it is particularly Writing and Groups where the group work and sense of community ‘allowed an individual confidence and ability to write in safety…, very much in the way that a good therapeutic relationship operates’.
Several students indicate that the MA has something that psychotherapy lacks. Megan is surprised that she learns so much about herself through the writing in spite of her time in therapy. Susanna's therapy, which she has been having for several years before she starts the MA, has ‘moved along at a much quicker speed than before’. This is because: ‘Writing allows me to be with myself, and the MA has enabled that by requiring me to be with myself – something that was totally impossible for me prior to the course’. Elsewhere she articulates this ‘require-ment’ as ‘an incredible sort of permissiveness… for me to be myself’. Claudia also highlights the value of being given permission to focus on herself in a context where this is not normally the case: ‘[normally] you go and do the course and get the mark and you don't go there, you just take the bits of you that are required to do that course. But this course requires all of me’.
Claire's comment that her Independent Study project is ‘a form of therapy, to bring many issues full circle through the creative writing and the critical introduction’ also highlights the therapeutic value of being required to engage in a range of different learning tasks. In psychotherapy the task is to think one's feelings through the dialogue with the therapist, but in the MA the multiple ways of knowing – embodied–experiential, reflective, critically reflective, collaborative – provide a holistic way of learning about oneself. In fact the desire for holistic self-learning is precisely why some students choose the MA rather than psychotherapy. For Ruth, having a creative end-product is crucial:
it's not like going to hours and hours of counselling and, you know, all you've got to show at the end of it is hopefully your improved psyche. You'd actually have the whole thing on paper whether it's, I don't know, in the form of fiction, or autobiography, or whatever, so there's something of artistic merit as the end of it. So I could sort of recycle it into something.
Stella feels that producing a substantial piece of creative writing ‘is much more constructive and positive and ultimately cathartic’ than endlessly analysing her ‘issues’ with her mother, as might be the case in therapy. The play she writes for Independent Study on her difficult relationship with her partner provides, as she indicates in her Critical Introduction, a therapeutic vehicle for engaging with who she is in the here and now. It facilitates spontaneity of voice and has scope for creating action, which enables her to bring her struggles alive. In this sense it could be described as a kind of drama therapy, but through writing rather than acting.
For several students who are in therapy alongside the MA, exploring the self simultaneously in two different but closely related contexts is particularly valu-able. Susanna says that when material arises through the writing or course work that is too difficult or personal to share with her fellow students, she can take it into her therapy session. Conversely, being involved in writing about herself for the MA ‘made me sort of put down [on paper] what I was learning [in therapy, which] allowed me to concretise [it] in different ways, and then together [these two activities] seem to have a great energy’. Claire takes her creative writing into therapy, where her therapist has been ‘very good in picking out things that I've talked about that I've learned about from the course and… threading that through’. For Tess, having the therapy for the more direct self-exploration means that ‘the writing then became much more a place where I could just express ideas in a more artistic way’, thus freeing-up her creativity.
What this tells me about the relationship between psychotherapy and the transformative learning approach of the MA is that both provide opportunities for a form of deep self-learning, but whereas the former is a one-to-one relationship with a therapist or a group facilitated by a therapist, the MA is what one might call supported or accompanied self-therapy, with writing as the core focus. The support or company is provided by the collaborative community of others engaged in the same process, as well as by tutors who understand the mechanisms of, and are experienced in facilitating, deep psychological change.2 Further, whilst psychotherapy operates through a combination of embodied– experiential learning, involving engaging with bodily feeling via dream images and metaphors, and reflecting on them, the MA utilises multiple ways of knowing including embodied–experiential learning, reflection, and critical reflection via the study and discussion of course readings and the writing of reflective and academic papers. This creates the possibility of a multi-dimensional experience and understanding of the self in the learning process.3 There are, as we have seen, tensions for some people between the personal and the academic sides of the work, and the possibility of using the latter to reinforce psychological defences. However, this needs to be seen in the context of how easy it is to spend years in psychotherapy without dismantling one's defences. This is not to suggest that the MA is superior to psychotherapy, but that both have strengths and weaknesses.
The evidence for the deep nature of learning taking place in the CWPD programme and the speed at which change can happen for some people highlights the very powerful nature of its multi-dimensional learning approach with creative life writing at its heart, and this resonates with the increasing focus on the arts in transformative learning (e.g. Leonard and Willis, 2008). For tutor Christine the power of this approach lies in its ability to generate ‘a particular kind of challenge’, which she calls ‘an edge’. The ways people come up against this ‘edge’, she says, are very varied:
it may be through text, it may be through the writing exercises, the different kinds of writing, but it also may be coming up against sharing something very personal or all sorts of barriers, a barrier of persona perhaps, a way in which the persona that a person comes with simply cracks under the strain of the great change, and it may happen at any time…. And if they can go through that, that seems to be a very significant moment, and I think the [MA] is strange in offering so many different ways you come at that.
Cheryl takes this idea further. The power of this challenge or ‘edge’, she says, comes from students:
being put in situations in which their defences and their resistances come into play and working through those. It feels that when they're taken out of their safety zone, there's a sort of closing-up and then there's a corresponding opening-up, which is a much more significant opening-up than would have happened without that initial resistance really.
This very much supports my findings. It also again echoes Mezirow's idea, which has been important throughout my discussions, that transformative learning necessarily involves disorienting dilemmas. Whilst his original use of this term refers to events in people's lives that lead them consciously to seek out an environment for change – for which there is plenty of evidence in my study – it can also be seen, as others have pointed out (e.g. Jarvis, 2006), as a jolt or a push that comes from within the learning process itself. As we have seen, the CWPD programme creates these in a variety of ways.
The case for and against therapeutic education with adults
It might seem strange to be suggesting that the CWPD programme should be thought of as a form of therapeutic education when this term is being used – at least in the UK – primarily as a negative, to critique an approach to learning that, it is argued, privileges the emotions at the expense of the development of reason:
no matter how we are emotionally involved, or not, in intellectual work, we pursue that work in a disinterested way. We are not and must not be intellectually or emotionally biased in the pursuit of knowledge. Emphasis on the emotions in higher education is irrelevant, a time wasting activity based on a generalised notion of personal vulnerability.
(Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008: 97)
The argument that emotional expression in education encourages people to think of themselves as ‘vulnerable’ is very much at odds with the findings of my own and others' research (e.g. Taylor, 2001) that engaging with feeling and emotion in a learning context can actually enhance learners' inner strength although, as I have found, it may temporarily involve them in feeling more fragile. It also ignores a considerable amount of research in the cognitive and neurosciences that highlights the origins of thinking in emotional feeling. According to Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis, human experience is always marked neurally by emotion, so that when we engage in reasoning and decision-making, we are always drawing on emotionally-marked prior learning. Thinking and creativity always involve a ‘merging of intuition and reason’, where intuition comes from the way the emotions facilitate bodily-felt cognition (Salk, 1985, quoted in Damasio, 1994: 189) (see Chapter 6). This is important knowledge that can be used to help students to attend to their ‘felt sense’ for learning, rather than thinking of learning as disembodied cognition.
Of course, an approach to learning that only focuses on the emotions is likely to be as limiting as one that only focuses on disembodied cognition. The model of learning discussed in Chapter 11 takes into account both feeling-based and critically reflective approaches. As I have said, this follows McGilchrist's picture of the working together of the brain's hemispheres where knowledge of the world comes to us first as bodily-felt experience via the right hemisphere, is then transferred to the more conscious and willed left hemisphere for exploration and clarification, and is then returned to the right hemisphere where it becomes a living and growing body of intuitive knowledge. This is not about championing a vulnerable, diminished subjectivity, as critics suggest, but trying to understand more deeply how learning takes place. It is an approach to learning that is particularly important for people whose thinking or creativity have become blocked for emotional reasons.
In fact there seems to be a great deal of left hemisphere thinking amongst critics of ‘therapeutic education’, with binaries everywhere. All work highlighting the important role of feeling and emotion in education is indiscriminately gathered into one disapproved of category, and this is opposed to the approved of traditional approach to education that privileges the development of reason and focuses ‘on knowledge organised into subject disciplines’ (Ecclestone, 2010: 71). There is no middle ground where reason and emotion might be seen to work productively together. Another binary is that between a vulnerable, ‘diminished self’ resulting from an emotion-informed approach to education and an ‘empowered, autonomous and resilient self’ (Ecclestone, 2007: 466) resulting from traditional subject-based teaching methods. Conceptualising the psyche as a dynamic system where there is movement and collaboration between the right and left hemispheres is, I would suggest, much more useful. It provides a picture of the psyche as grounded and robust whilst also open and in process. It implies the ability to engage with the full range of the emotions for learning, whilst also having a sufficiently grounded sense of agency from which to manage the engagement with learning and other people. It entails a more challenging sense of self than a top-down model, but that does not imply a diminished self.
In the versions of transformative learning that advocate a whole person approach, there is an understanding of the place of feeling and emotion in a multi-dimensional learning process. As Dirkx says:
The imaginal is not intended to take the place of more analytic, reflective, and rational processes that have been associated with transformative learning. Rather, it is intended to provide a more holistic and integrated way of framing the meaning-making that occurs in contemporary contexts for adult learning.
(Dirkx, 2012: 127)
Similarly in the CWPD programme we were at pains to integrate the experiential dimensions of the programme with the more traditionally academic dimensions, as shown in Chapter 11, and the whole was framed by a series of assessments through which students could demonstrate their different kinds of learning. In fact, Ecclestone denies that she wants to disregard the ‘emotional aspects of learning and experience’ and that she is primarily concerned about what she sees as the high-profile vulnerability discourse in education and the negative effects of this on education policy (Ecclestone, 2007: 467). If this is the case, then she needs to be rather more discriminating in her analyses of the kinds of learning that explicitly engage the emotions. When seen as a form of deep learning that engages the whole person in careful and well-thought-out ways and involves ‘self-work, self-change, and transformation’ (Dirkx, 2009: 64), therapeutic education is positive and highly appropriate in a world where the ability to think creatively and independently is more needed than ever. As Terry Hyland says: ‘The world can only be changed by people, and often the reflective capacity to change ourselves is precisely what is required before any wider social change is possible’ (2010: 528–9).
Implications for transformative learning
If, then, the CWPD programme is both a form of transformative learning and a form of therapeutic education, does this mean that transformative learning is itself a form of therapeutic education? As I have made my way through the literature, it has become obvious that there is much disagreement about what transformative learning actually is, with some commentators suggesting that so many different kinds of learning are now being referred to as transformative that the term has lost its value. Thus Newman suggests that much of what goes under this banner does not involve the ‘dramatic,4 fundamental change’ (Merriam et al., 2007: 130) that is said to be its characteristic feature; rather it would be better described as ‘good learning’, of the kind you might expect in much adult learning. The term ‘transformative learning’, he concludes, is therefore redundant and should be abolished (Newman, 2011: 37). Clearly I do not agree with this conclusion or I would not have written this book, but I do concur with Kegan (2000) and others that it is important to use the term only where it is fully warranted.
The extensive and unwarranted use of the term transformative learning may be a consequence of the limitations of the field's constructivist paradigm, which I have noted before. Putting the emphasis, as Mezirow's more recent work does, on transformative learning as discourse, focuses attention on being able to think outside of external ‘frames of reference’ such as political orientations, cultural biases, religious doctrines, etc. (Mezirow, 2003: 59). And indeed a great deal of transformative learning focuses on this. Yet this sounds very much like learning to think critically, which any adult or higher education worthy of the name is likely to involve. This is not to say that being able to think outside of existing frames of reference is not part of transformative learning, but my research leads me to the view that the change is first and foremost in the way the self functions and only secondarily in the ability to think outside of existing frames of reference.
To summarise my understanding of transformative change, it involves the relaxing of the autobiographical ‘I’ in the left hemisphere so that it provides a robust but flexible frame for the mind. This facilitates a shift in the leading edge of the psyche from left hemisphere control to right hemisphere bodily agency, which enhances creativity and independent thinking; and it is this shift from top-down to bottom-up cognition that makes it possible to evaluate with a greater degree of independence – that is, from the perspective of the right hemisphere which, it has been argued, brings us closer to the real – the frames of reference in which we are embedded. Thus it is both an ontological shift, in that it entails increased bodily-felt awareness (and, in a programme such as CWPD, a more explicit understanding) of the operation of innate cognitive mechanisms, and an epistemological shift in awareness and understanding that knowledge emerges out of the dialogue between bodily-felt experience of the world at a low level of consciousness and intentionality and more conscious and intentional language-based thinking. This extends Dirkx's idea of transformative change as a shift in ego consciousness and the generation of a dialogue between the ego and the deeper, unconscious aspects of the psyche, and provides an understanding of Boyd's expansion of consciousness as the larger sense of psychic space and movement that accompanies these ontological and epistemological shifts.
If, then, transformative learning involves a fundamental change in the functioning of the self, it is arguably a kind of therapeutic education, as this is precisely what psychotherapy aims to achieve. This description is apt in light of transformative learning's origins in psychodynamic psychotherapies (see Chapter 7) and of the utilisation, by a number of current approaches, of techniques from a range of psychological therapies, from psychodynamic (Jungian, Horneyan, humanistic) to cognitive (neuro-linguistic programming and mindfulness). As outlined in the previous chapter, this has implications for the way it is taught, the sort of training required by tutors or facilitators, the kinds of people we encourage to participate in it, and the learning environment it needs.
Notes
1. Conative means pertaining to the will (Merriam Webster).
2. Of course, it students are simultaneously in psychotherapy, then the MA functions as an accompaniment to therapy, as in the example of Susanna.
3. Constructivist therapies are more multi-dimensional in that they encourage journal and autobiographical work, and some therapists recommend self-help books to read (McLeod, 1997: 76–80), but there is obviously no explicit study of theory or opportunities for articulating theoretical understandings in essays.
4. Actually Mezirow (1978) says that transformative change can be dramatic or gradual, and my study supports this.