Transformative learning occurs when adult students come to understand that they have held a limiting view of the world or of how things work, and they adjust their thinking to accommodate a more accurate or expansive understanding. In other words, they turn away from their small myopic view of the world and move towards a broad, overall view or perspective on an issue or problem. For example, the late African American muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X, through his self-directed prison literacy studies, acquires a new understanding of his political and social reality and thus is “transformed” into someone who is not only able to engage in dialogue about his life as a black man, but also able to reflect critically about the plight of blacks throughout the African diaspora.
At the core of transformative learning is a change in perspective or frame of reference. For example, my point of view on gender-related issues was altered when, in the summer of 1998, I registered for a Woman Studies course—not because I was particularly interested in the content of the course—but because I needed to fulfill a humanities requirement for graduation. As a 20-year old male college junior, I was not prepared for how the course would challenge my own attitudes and beliefs about the intersections of race, gender and class. The course, taught by lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, reflected on issues around gender, but also involved some kind of organizing activity where students would go out and pursue social change.
In hindsight, I now realize that this course was my first real encounter with consciousness raising and with what Paulo Freire, author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, calls “praxis” or reflection and action. (87) The course changed how I think about all kinds of oppression, and more importantly, how I view myself and how I interact with others in the world. In that sense, my Women Studies course approached transformational learning as a social emancipatory endeavor where I could critically reflect and develop strategies to challenge oppressive power structures around race, gender and class. Moreover, my professor, through the use of dialogue and through problem solving, helped us to realize that we do not just have to sit back passively and accept what is, but that we can change the world by participating in hopeful solutions. Her demonstration of the teacher-student and student-teacher relationship was on full display as she shared her own story of how she as a white southern woman was used as a pawn in the lynching of black men. Her willingness to share her own story undoubtedly liberated us to share our own. Pratt’s pedagogical approach was social emancipatory and rooted in the teachings of Freire. They included the following tenets:
Teaching students to use critical reflection in order to develop abilities to change social power structures and students’ own circumstances; The problem-posing approach, which invites learners to focus on issues that require solutions and the use of dialogue to achieve goals; “a horizontal student-teacher relationship where the teacher works as political agent and on an equal footing with students (Taylor 8).
The difference between my experience with transformational learning and the psychocritical view of transformational learning theory espoused by Jack Mesirow is that my bout with it placed an emphasis on social change rather than individual transformation. In other words, my experience was particularly Freirian because I not only had to reflect on issues around race, gender and class, but I had to act on them in some way. So while Freire does agree with Mezirow that critical reflection is an important part of the transformational learning process, he sees its purpose based on a rediscovery of power such that the more critically aware adult learners become, the more they are able to transform society and subsequently their own reality.
Freire, in his work in literary education, contributed three key concepts to adult education. First of all, he thinks it is not transformative for teachers to give students knowledge and have students memorize it. He suggests that students have something to give back and this kind of memorizing and regurgitating does not work in adult education because students have something to contribute to the learning environment. The second step is critical reflection and the third step is a power-balanced student-teacher relationships. In other words, the student and teacher work on the same level. There exists a real partnership between student-teacher and teacher-student. Using this idea to create an environment that people feel comfortable to share and communicate in, is especially important in adult education.
In addition, Freire argues that education is a political act that cannot be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers (however uncomfortable it might be for some of them) sometimes have political notions that they bring into the classroom. Freire claims that "education as the practice of freedom” is problem-posing in that student-teacher and teacher-student work hand-in-hand for liberation and to solve problems. (81)
However, in terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He insists that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, and leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (77). To demonstrate his point, Freire uses economic and capitalist terms to illustrate the cold and impersonal nature of the "banking" concept of education. His stark description of students as objects or "receptacles" to be filled illustrates how this model of education is dehumanizing and oppressive. (72)
Ultimately, it seems that the banking model's aim is to control thinking and behavior and stifle the creative process. Instead of encouraging students to focus on social issues that have implications for their lives, the teacher-student relationship maintains the status-quo. It certainly is not transformative because the banking model does not set up the kind of dialogue between students-teachers where students can ask questions and create meaning for their own lives, a key component of transformative learning. Some of the ways that transformative learning can be demonstrated in the classroom is through “journal writing, simulations and case studies, critical incidents, role-playing, metaphors, personal biographical sketches, life histories, narratives, visioning, and both small and large group discussions” (Fleming & Garner 25).
Freire also argues that the dominant class creates a “culture of silence” which instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. (33) The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. Also, a culture of silence can cause the dominated individuals to lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture. Furthermore, this culture of silence, Freire suggests, is embedded into the conventional educational system and eliminates paths of critical examination for the oppressed.
Nowhere is this culture of silence so easily demonstrated as it is in the early life of the late African American muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X. In his autobiography, it is clear that Malcolm X is a bright, proud, and confident student. In the eighth grade, he gets top grades and shares a competition with another boy and a girl. His teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, encourages all of his peers to become, among other things, “a county agent…a veterinarian…a nurse. When Malcolm X tells his teacher he has been thinking about being a lawyer, his teacher tells him: “a lawyer – that’s no realistic goal for a nigger…why don’t you plan on carpentry” (Malcolm X 132)? Consequently, Malcolm X recounts, “I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon” (Malcolm X 132). In other words, Malcolm X internalizes a culture of silence. Instead of challenging the oppressive and dominant culture that stifles his dreams and aspirations, he is silenced and muffled by it.
Thus, Malcolm X learns that society and his teacher have low expectations for blacks. Slowly but surely, he begins to know his personal and social reality. These expectations are made even more startling when Malcolm X reveals that the teacher really liked him and that he had “gotten some of his best marks under him” (Malcolm X 130). This comparison reveals that his teacher’s advice wasn’t personal. Instead rather it was a condemnation of an entire race.
After this incident with his teacher, Malcolm X comes to know, at least in part, the impact of racism on his social and political reality, but he does not take any action to change it. Malcolm X reflects on it, but instead of acting on it in a positive way, he drops out of school in the eighth grade. At age 20, Malcolm X is sent to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. Perhaps this outcome is to be expected. After all, at this time, Malcolm X is a teenager, and he might not have had the ability or the knowledge to name or to give words to describe or express the dehumanization he feels.
Ironically, it is in prison where Malcolm X’s life is transformed in two ways: his conversion to Islam and his rigorous self-directed education leads him to a life of political activism. When Malcolm X concedes that he is frustrated because he is not able to express and communicate his thoughts and ideas to Nation of Islam Leader Elijah Muhammad, he embarks on a mission “to acquire some kind of homemade education.” He acknowledges that, “I saw the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words” (Malcolm X 431). This realization by Malcolm X that he needed to improve his language and literacy skills is crucial in his personal transformation because by broadening his word-base, Malcolm X is able—maybe for the first time in his life—to “name the world, to change it” (Freire 88).
For Freire, words are the building blocks of dialogue. In fact, he calls the word the “essence of dialogue” (Freire 87). Words, in fact, become a crucial tool for Malcolm X as he transforms his life through his prison literacy studies. For example, one of the first things that Malcolm X does when he begins to tackle his illiteracy problem is to copy the entire dictionary. By taking on this arduous task, Malcolm X initiates the process by which he will be able to “name the world” and “make dialogue possible” between him, his supporters and his detractors. (Freire 88)
Malcolm X demonstrates praxis by not only reflecting on his illiteracy but also by taking action to correct it. In this way, Malcolm X’s simple act of picking up a dictionary is evolutionary, self-empowering, and ultimately transformative. It set a trajectory for the remainder of his life that he probably never could have imagined.
For Malcolm X, social emancipatory learning does not take place in a classroom but in the confines of a prison cell and in the stacks of the prison library. Perhaps, this is what social and cultural critic bell hooks means when she says, “One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library” (Hooks 95). In fact, it was in the prison library shelves that Malcolm X found books like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, H.G. Wells’ Outline of History and Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois that help him question white supremacy and domination. Furthermore, Malcolm X’s, social emancipatory learning, a form of transformative learning, is “race-centric,” in that, it puts black people at the center of his personal and political transformation. (Taylor 9) He even acknowledges that, “Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of sufferings of exploitation” (Malcolm X 442).
He acquired a new understanding of his political and social reality and thus became a new person—one who is not only able to engage in dialogue about his situation, but also able to think critically about how he sees himself and his community in a racist and oppressive society. But more importantly, with this new consciousness, Malcolm X is able to go out in the world and effect social change through his speeches and his willingness to challenge the dominant ideology of his time: black inferiority.
Basically, his consciousness changed from one in which he internalized society’s opinion to one in which he is free to embrace his own humanity and his blackness. Words and literacy play a crucial role in this paradigm shift. And in the process, Malcolm X becomes political and conscious.
Through books, Malcolm X found his voice and validates Freire’s claim that “Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection” (88). In his autobiography, Malcom X reflects on how reading opened doors for him and changed the course of his life. Like Freire’s illiterate peasants, reading and writing gave Malcolm X the wherewithal to liberate himself. As Malcolm X puts it, “As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive” (448).
Fleming, Cheryl Torok, and J. Bradley Garner. Brief Guide for Teaching Adult Learners. Marion, Ind.: Triangle Publishing, 2009. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print
Hooks, Bell. Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. New York: Atria Books, 2003. Print.
Taylor, Edward, “Transformative Learning. “Third Update on Adult Learning Theory. Ed. Merriam, Sharan B. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 5-15. Print. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education #119
X, Malcolm and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 1992. Print.
At the core of transformative learning is a change in perspective or frame of reference. For example, my point of view on gender-related issues was altered when, in the summer of 1998, I registered for a Woman Studies course—not because I was particularly interested in the content of the course—but because I needed to fulfill a humanities requirement for graduation. As a 20-year old male college junior, I was not prepared for how the course would challenge my own attitudes and beliefs about the intersections of race, gender and class. The course, taught by lesbian poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, reflected on issues around gender, but also involved some kind of organizing activity where students would go out and pursue social change.
In hindsight, I now realize that this course was my first real encounter with consciousness raising and with what Paulo Freire, author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, calls “praxis” or reflection and action. (87) The course changed how I think about all kinds of oppression, and more importantly, how I view myself and how I interact with others in the world. In that sense, my Women Studies course approached transformational learning as a social emancipatory endeavor where I could critically reflect and develop strategies to challenge oppressive power structures around race, gender and class. Moreover, my professor, through the use of dialogue and through problem solving, helped us to realize that we do not just have to sit back passively and accept what is, but that we can change the world by participating in hopeful solutions. Her demonstration of the teacher-student and student-teacher relationship was on full display as she shared her own story of how she as a white southern woman was used as a pawn in the lynching of black men. Her willingness to share her own story undoubtedly liberated us to share our own. Pratt’s pedagogical approach was social emancipatory and rooted in the teachings of Freire. They included the following tenets:
Teaching students to use critical reflection in order to develop abilities to change social power structures and students’ own circumstances; The problem-posing approach, which invites learners to focus on issues that require solutions and the use of dialogue to achieve goals; “a horizontal student-teacher relationship where the teacher works as political agent and on an equal footing with students (Taylor 8).
The difference between my experience with transformational learning and the psychocritical view of transformational learning theory espoused by Jack Mesirow is that my bout with it placed an emphasis on social change rather than individual transformation. In other words, my experience was particularly Freirian because I not only had to reflect on issues around race, gender and class, but I had to act on them in some way. So while Freire does agree with Mezirow that critical reflection is an important part of the transformational learning process, he sees its purpose based on a rediscovery of power such that the more critically aware adult learners become, the more they are able to transform society and subsequently their own reality.
Freire, in his work in literary education, contributed three key concepts to adult education. First of all, he thinks it is not transformative for teachers to give students knowledge and have students memorize it. He suggests that students have something to give back and this kind of memorizing and regurgitating does not work in adult education because students have something to contribute to the learning environment. The second step is critical reflection and the third step is a power-balanced student-teacher relationships. In other words, the student and teacher work on the same level. There exists a real partnership between student-teacher and teacher-student. Using this idea to create an environment that people feel comfortable to share and communicate in, is especially important in adult education.
In addition, Freire argues that education is a political act that cannot be divorced from pedagogy. Freire defined this as a main tenet of critical pedagogy. Teachers and students must be made aware of the "politics" that surround education. The way students are taught and what they are taught serves a political agenda. Teachers (however uncomfortable it might be for some of them) sometimes have political notions that they bring into the classroom. Freire claims that "education as the practice of freedom” is problem-posing in that student-teacher and teacher-student work hand-in-hand for liberation and to solve problems. (81)
However, in terms of actual pedagogy, Freire is best known for his attack on what he called the "banking" concept of education, in which the student is viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. He insists that "it transforms students into receiving objects. It attempts to control thinking and action, and leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power" (77). To demonstrate his point, Freire uses economic and capitalist terms to illustrate the cold and impersonal nature of the "banking" concept of education. His stark description of students as objects or "receptacles" to be filled illustrates how this model of education is dehumanizing and oppressive. (72)
Ultimately, it seems that the banking model's aim is to control thinking and behavior and stifle the creative process. Instead of encouraging students to focus on social issues that have implications for their lives, the teacher-student relationship maintains the status-quo. It certainly is not transformative because the banking model does not set up the kind of dialogue between students-teachers where students can ask questions and create meaning for their own lives, a key component of transformative learning. Some of the ways that transformative learning can be demonstrated in the classroom is through “journal writing, simulations and case studies, critical incidents, role-playing, metaphors, personal biographical sketches, life histories, narratives, visioning, and both small and large group discussions” (Fleming & Garner 25).
Freire also argues that the dominant class creates a “culture of silence” which instills a negative, silenced and suppressed self-image into the oppressed. (33) The learner must develop a critical consciousness in order to recognize that this culture of silence is created to oppress. Also, a culture of silence can cause the dominated individuals to lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture. Furthermore, this culture of silence, Freire suggests, is embedded into the conventional educational system and eliminates paths of critical examination for the oppressed.
Nowhere is this culture of silence so easily demonstrated as it is in the early life of the late African American muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X. In his autobiography, it is clear that Malcolm X is a bright, proud, and confident student. In the eighth grade, he gets top grades and shares a competition with another boy and a girl. His teacher, Mr. Ostrowski, encourages all of his peers to become, among other things, “a county agent…a veterinarian…a nurse. When Malcolm X tells his teacher he has been thinking about being a lawyer, his teacher tells him: “a lawyer – that’s no realistic goal for a nigger…why don’t you plan on carpentry” (Malcolm X 132)? Consequently, Malcolm X recounts, “I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon” (Malcolm X 132). In other words, Malcolm X internalizes a culture of silence. Instead of challenging the oppressive and dominant culture that stifles his dreams and aspirations, he is silenced and muffled by it.
Thus, Malcolm X learns that society and his teacher have low expectations for blacks. Slowly but surely, he begins to know his personal and social reality. These expectations are made even more startling when Malcolm X reveals that the teacher really liked him and that he had “gotten some of his best marks under him” (Malcolm X 130). This comparison reveals that his teacher’s advice wasn’t personal. Instead rather it was a condemnation of an entire race.
After this incident with his teacher, Malcolm X comes to know, at least in part, the impact of racism on his social and political reality, but he does not take any action to change it. Malcolm X reflects on it, but instead of acting on it in a positive way, he drops out of school in the eighth grade. At age 20, Malcolm X is sent to prison for larceny and breaking and entering. Perhaps this outcome is to be expected. After all, at this time, Malcolm X is a teenager, and he might not have had the ability or the knowledge to name or to give words to describe or express the dehumanization he feels.
Ironically, it is in prison where Malcolm X’s life is transformed in two ways: his conversion to Islam and his rigorous self-directed education leads him to a life of political activism. When Malcolm X concedes that he is frustrated because he is not able to express and communicate his thoughts and ideas to Nation of Islam Leader Elijah Muhammad, he embarks on a mission “to acquire some kind of homemade education.” He acknowledges that, “I saw the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words” (Malcolm X 431). This realization by Malcolm X that he needed to improve his language and literacy skills is crucial in his personal transformation because by broadening his word-base, Malcolm X is able—maybe for the first time in his life—to “name the world, to change it” (Freire 88).
For Freire, words are the building blocks of dialogue. In fact, he calls the word the “essence of dialogue” (Freire 87). Words, in fact, become a crucial tool for Malcolm X as he transforms his life through his prison literacy studies. For example, one of the first things that Malcolm X does when he begins to tackle his illiteracy problem is to copy the entire dictionary. By taking on this arduous task, Malcolm X initiates the process by which he will be able to “name the world” and “make dialogue possible” between him, his supporters and his detractors. (Freire 88)
Malcolm X demonstrates praxis by not only reflecting on his illiteracy but also by taking action to correct it. In this way, Malcolm X’s simple act of picking up a dictionary is evolutionary, self-empowering, and ultimately transformative. It set a trajectory for the remainder of his life that he probably never could have imagined.
For Malcolm X, social emancipatory learning does not take place in a classroom but in the confines of a prison cell and in the stacks of the prison library. Perhaps, this is what social and cultural critic bell hooks means when she says, “One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library” (Hooks 95). In fact, it was in the prison library shelves that Malcolm X found books like Will Durant’s Story of Civilization, H.G. Wells’ Outline of History and Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois that help him question white supremacy and domination. Furthermore, Malcolm X’s, social emancipatory learning, a form of transformative learning, is “race-centric,” in that, it puts black people at the center of his personal and political transformation. (Taylor 9) He even acknowledges that, “Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of sufferings of exploitation” (Malcolm X 442).
He acquired a new understanding of his political and social reality and thus became a new person—one who is not only able to engage in dialogue about his situation, but also able to think critically about how he sees himself and his community in a racist and oppressive society. But more importantly, with this new consciousness, Malcolm X is able to go out in the world and effect social change through his speeches and his willingness to challenge the dominant ideology of his time: black inferiority.
Basically, his consciousness changed from one in which he internalized society’s opinion to one in which he is free to embrace his own humanity and his blackness. Words and literacy play a crucial role in this paradigm shift. And in the process, Malcolm X becomes political and conscious.
Through books, Malcolm X found his voice and validates Freire’s claim that “Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection” (88). In his autobiography, Malcom X reflects on how reading opened doors for him and changed the course of his life. Like Freire’s illiterate peasants, reading and writing gave Malcolm X the wherewithal to liberate himself. As Malcolm X puts it, “As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive” (448).
Works Cited
Fleming, Cheryl Torok, and J. Bradley Garner. Brief Guide for Teaching Adult Learners. Marion, Ind.: Triangle Publishing, 2009. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print
Hooks, Bell. Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem. New York: Atria Books, 2003. Print.
Taylor, Edward, “Transformative Learning. “Third Update on Adult Learning Theory. Ed. Merriam, Sharan B. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008. 5-15. Print. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education #119
X, Malcolm and Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 1992. Print.
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