Transformative Learning: promoting change across cultural worlds

This paper explores the transformative potential of cultural change in one locale for other cultural worlds, examining how participants in a particular cultural transformation may become influential when positioned as strategic agents in other contexts. A collaborative action research study in teacher education is described, in which mature-age trainee teachers of technology studies (who had previously been tradespeople) initially reproduced significant aspects of their former workplace culture within classes at an institute of education. Ways of enabling cultural production to generate a more open learning climate are described and analysed, particularly the use of narrative as a resource for cultural change. Links between changes in culture, knowledgeable skill levels and identities within a learning group, and subsequent innovations made elsewhere, are also discussed. Such links are related to questions of learning transfer and implications for vocational education are explored.