scholarly journals Disorienting Dilemmas: A Studio Model for Teaching Meaning-Making and Reflection in Action

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Singeisen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Personal Epistemology ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Jack Mezirow ◽  
History Of ◽  
Reflection In Action ◽  
Technical Rationality ◽  
Disorienting Dilemmas ◽  
Architectural Research

The term meaning-making has been used in constructivist educational psychology to refer to the personal epistemology that persons create to help them to make sense of the influences, relationships and sources of knowledge in their world.1 According to the transformative learning theory of sociologist and educator Jack Mezirow, adults interpret the meaning of their experiences through a lens of deeply held assumptions.2 When students experience something that contradicts or challenges their way of negotiating the world they have to go through the transformative process of evaluating their assumptions and processes of making meaning. Mezirow called these experiences that force individuals to engage in this critical self-reflection “disorienting dilemmas”.3In ‘Educating the Reflective Practitioner’, Prof. Donald Schön suggests that artistry is necessary for the solution of problems in professional practice that occupy the indeterminate zones of uncertainty, uniqueness, and conflict. The two traditional approaches to the teaching of artistry, however, are problematic. The first, its elimination from a curriculum based on technical rationality, is predicated on the belief that artistry is mystical and essentially unteachable. The second, its reduction to a set of procedures, has proven not to work with indeterminate phenomena that are inherently unmanageable. Schön proposes a third strategy: reflection in action, based on his observations that considerable tacit knowledge is already built into practice. By entering the condition of action and reflecting on what has been done, one can resolve “indeterminate” problems in situ by d oing.4It is the view of this paper that by first positioning students in a disorienting dilemma, and by second, providing a framework for ‘reflection in action’ for students to identify and use analogous architectural research elements, students develop a personal methodology and their own contextual position relative to the history of architecture.

scholarly journals Dialogue and language as factors contributing to transformative learning in academic tutoring

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 164-186
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Grzegorczyk
Keyword(s):  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Fourth Moment ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Self Regulated Learning ◽  
Personalized Education ◽  
Educational Coaching ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cognition And Learning

Abstract Among a number of teaching practices, personalized education is gaining in popularity owing to its enticing appeal of a novel, humanistic attitude with unparalleled pedagogical results unlike those observed in traditional standardized mass education models. As part of the fourth moment in the history of education (according to the timeline in Davis, Sumara and Kapler, 2015), personalized education under the guise of tutoring or educational coaching is boldly re-entering schools and the academic world. Observing the daily practices of tutors and educational coaches on various levels of schooling, we can note a number of features which contribute to the emergence of a model where learning becomes an autonomous, lived experience. In this model communication is understood as a collaborative dialogical practice, which leads us to see learning as a result of interactivity in the learner-tutor dyad afforded by geo-spatial conditions, physio-psychological elements and language. All these contribute to the occurrence of transformative results as evidenced in student post-tutoring narratives. In this paper we present learning in the dialogical tutor-tutee paradigm as a distributed, embodied, and enacted meaning-making process rather than mere ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ of substantive information (e.g., De Jaegher and DiPaolo, 2007; Neuman and Cowley, 2013). Described as such, the method fits in the paradigm of self-regulated learning. We therefore postulate the claim that personalised education as exemplified by tutoring is co-agential and prompts learning on multiple timescales. Consequently, cognition and learning in tutoring is enactment of knowledge, while coordinating speech rather than knowledge transmission

Illuminating Transformative Learning/Assessment: Infusing Creativity, Reciprocity, and Care Into Higher Education

2021 ◽  
pp. 154134462110451
Author(s):  
Michelle Searle ◽  
Claire Ahn ◽  
Lynn Fels ◽  
Katrina Carbone
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Learning Assessment ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Jack Mezirow ◽  
The World ◽  
Holistic Assessment ◽  
The Individual

In this article, the authors speak to the paradox of assessing transformative learning (TL) in higher education. TL theory, developed by Jack Mezirow, is a theory of learning to describe the process of change in how individuals view the world based on previous experiences. Recognizing that the 10 phases of Mezirow’s TL theory are fluid and intertwined, three prominent aspects resonated within the individual narratives: the importance of a disorienting dilemma, the qualities of self-reflection, and liberatory actions. By exploring the complexities, challenges, and possibilities encountered in their classrooms, the shared narratives reveal how students were engaged in TL and embedded within are holistic assessment processes the authors enacted with learners. Throughout this dialogical narrative inquiry focused on assessment, the authors underwent their own TL in the presence of each other, confessing uncertainties and vulnerabilities, thus showcasing the potential to transform understanding with and through reciprocal learning.

Serious Games for Transformative Learning

2010 ◽  
pp. 74-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Yannuzzi ◽  
Bryan G. Behrenshausen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Pedagogy ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Serious Games ◽  
Information Transfer ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Praxis ◽  
Critically Reflective Practice

This chapter discusses the ways in which an understanding of key concepts from both communication studies and critical pedagogy can improve the use of serious games in learning environments. By exploring a history of educational theory that champions the ontological work of critical pedagogy, the authors note how critical self-reflection can be facilitated by serious games. This chapter then distinguishes between models of human communication as information transfer (on which some educational gaming situations are implicitly based) and models of human communication as social construction, or a process of co-constructing social realities and identities (on which new and future gaming situations might be based) as a way of demonstrating to both designers and educators the benefits of viewing games communicatively. Because video games are symptom and emblem of life in informatic control societies, their role in education is exceedingly important for cultivating students’ critical reflection on the binarisation of everyday life (which is increasingly structured by algorithmic logics that polarize lived experience). Serious games often provide opportunities for gamers to become “experts” of scientific or informational knowledge and often more skilled technique—or skilled, technical know-how. However, they often fail to provide opportunities for critically reflective practice or the development of praxis. Incredibly rapid technological/scientific advancements in societies focused on production leave little room for mindful activity. Although we continue to “advance,” we often fail to unite two fundamental aspects of critical learning: the moral and political (praxis) with the technical and productive (techne). Serious games can assist in doing this.

International Legal Thought

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kleinlein
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

This contribution reflects on the role of tradition-building in international law, the implications of the recent ‘turn to history’ and the ‘presentisms’ discernible in the history of international legal thought. It first analyses how international legal thought created its own tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These projects of establishing a tradition implied a considerable amount of what historians would reject as ‘presentism’. Remarkably, critical scholars of our day and age who unsettled celebratory histories of international law and unveiled ‘colonial origins’ of international law were also criticized for committing the ‘sin of anachronism’. This contribution therefore examines the basis of this critique and defends ‘presentism’ in international legal thought. However, the ‘paradox of instrumentalism’ remains: The ‘better’ historical analysis becomes, the more it loses its critical potential for current international law. At best, the turn to history activates a potential of disciplinary self-reflection.

Return to the ancestral land: The semiotic map of the Mapuche people

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-269
Author(s):  
Camila Pérez ◽  
Giuseppina Marsico
Keyword(s):  
Meaning Making ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
Territorial Claim ◽  
Mapuche People ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
Von Uexküll ◽  
Over Time

Indigenous territorial claims are a long-standing concern in the history of Latin America. Land and nature have profound meaning in indigenous thinking, which is neither totally understood nor legitimized by the rest of society. This article is aimed at shedding light on this matter by examining the meanings at stake in the territorial claims of the Mapuche people. The Mapuche are an indigenous group in Chile, who are striving to recover their ancestral land. This analysis will be based on the concept of Umwelt, coined by von Uexküll to refer to the way in which species interpret their world in connection with the meaning-making process. Considering the applications of Umwelt to the human being, the significance assigned to land and nature by the Mapuche people emerges as a system of meaning that persists over time and promotes interdependence between people and the environment. On the other hand, the territorial claim of the Mapuche movement challenges the fragmentation between individuals and their space, echoing proposals from human geography that emphasize the role of people in the constitution of places.

Epistemic media and critical knowledge about the self: Thinking about algorithms with Habermas

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052110441
Author(s):  
Eran Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Self ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Types Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

This article explores the ontology of personal knowledge that algorithms on digital media create by locating it on two axes: historical and theoretical. Digital platforms continue a long history of epistemic media—media forms and practices, which not only communicate knowledge, but also create knowledge. As epistemic media allowed a new way to know the world, they also facilitated a new way of knowing the self. This historical perspective also underscores a key difference of digital platforms from previous epistemic media: their exclusion of self-reflection from the creation of knowledge about the self. To evaluate the ramifications of that omission, I use Habermas’s theory of knowledge, which distinguishes critical knowledge from other types of knowledge, and sees it as corresponding with a human interest in emancipation. Critical knowledge about the self, as exemplified by psychoanalysis, must involve self-reflection. As the self gains critical knowledge, deciphering the conditions under which positivist and hermeneutic knowledges are valid, it is also able to transform them and expand its realm of freedom, or subjectivity. As digital media subverts this process by demoting self-reflection, it also undermines subjectivity.

scholarly journals Authorial Self and Modernity as Reflected in Diaries and Memoirs. Three 19th-Century Hungarian Case Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.

scholarly journals Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Transformative Education on Assessing Transformative Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 295-305
Author(s):  
Kris Acheson ◽  
John M. Dirkx
Keyword(s):  
Adult Education ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Postsecondary Education ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Transformative Education ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Jack Mezirow ◽  
Education Community ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over 40 Years

Over 40 years ago, Jack Mezirow introduced the idea of transformative learning (TL) to the adult education community. Representing a profound shift in how one thinks and feels about one’s self and the socio-cultural context in which one is embedded, transformative learning has since evolved to reflect numerous theoretical lenses and its framework continues to be extended and elaborated. As TL theory expands within different contexts and across different disciplines, particularly within postsecondary education, the term transformative learning is often employed with scant connection to the theoretical framework in which it was initially grounded. Learners and educators alike frequently describe learning experiences as transformative, yet little consensus exists around a definition of transformative leaning However, if the field is to continue to evolve theoretically, we cannot accept these claims of transformation at face value. The phenomenon must be measured in some manner. The field continues to struggle with several perennial issues related to assessment. This special issue of the Journal of Transformative Education seeks to address the need to wrestle with these underlying theoretical and conceptual issues by critiquing the state of the field, introducing new approaches to operationalizing the phenomenon, and advancing new trajectories for research. We approach this charge through two major threads explored through eight papers that represent Methodological Innovations and Cases of Methodological Application. We close this introduction to the Special Issue with key themes represented in the eight papers and recommendations for addressing the challenges of assessing the processes and outcomes of transformative learning.

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