Transformative Learning Theory

There is an instinctive drive among all humans to make meaning of their daily lives. Because there are no enduring truths, and change is continuous, we cannot always be assured of what we know or believe. It therefore becomes imperative in adulthood that we develop a more critical worldview as we seek ways to better understand our world. This involves learning “how to negotiate and act upon our own purposes, values, feelings and meanings rather than those we have uncritically assimilated from others” (Mezirow and Associates, p. 2000, p. 8). Developing more reliable beliefs, exploring and validating their fidelity, and making informed decisions are fundamental to the adult learning process. It is transformative learning theory that explains this learning process of constructing and appropriating new and revised interpretations of the meaning of an experience in the world. Thirty years ago, when Jack Mezirow (1978) first introduced a theory of adult learning, it helped explain how adults changed the way they interpreted their world. This theory of transformative learning is considered uniquely adult—that is, grounded in human communication, where “learning is understood as the process of using a prior interpretation to construe a new or revised interpretation of the meaning of one’s experience in order to guide future action” (Mezirow, 1996, p. 162). The transformative process is formed and circumscribed by a frame of reference. Frames of reference are structures of assumptions and expectations that frame an individual’s tacit points of view and influence their thinking, beliefs, and actions. It is the revision of a frame of reference in concert with reflection on experience that is addressed by the theory of perspective transformation—a paradigmatic shift. A perspective transformation leads to “a more fully developed (more functional) frame of