Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing

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 ...