Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing

Chapter 8

Developing reflexivity through creative life writing

 

 

 

Since my research began there has been an increasing amount of work on the role of fiction and autobiography in transformative learning. Christine Jarvis, for example, focuses on fiction's ‘power to engender empathy’, as well as its ‘ability to enable us to stand back from our own situations [through] distancing techniques’ (Jarvis, 2012: 487). Elsewhere she talks about fiction as offering ‘the kinds of “disorienting dilemmas” that Mezirow and others have identified as triggers that start the transformative process’ (Jarvis, 2006: 76). These ideas resonate strongly with my own findings, as does Rebecca Ruppert Johnson's view that autobiographical writing can help us to ‘trust ...