Student Transformative Learning in Software Engineering and Design: discontinuity (pre)serves meaning

Reflective practice is considered to play an important role in transformative learning of educationally critical material, but students often respond in other, less productive ways. Transformative learning is used here as a lens to investigate reflectiveness: understanding the place of reflectiveness – and how defensiveness has no place – in transformative learning illuminates its operation and mechanism. The paper is written as part of an ongoing exploration into how to engender students’ reflective response to difficult material, preparing a foundation on which to address that question directly. Previous preparation includes phenomenological analysis of reflectiveness and defensiveness, and a careful examination of the operation and mechanism of defensiveness, both based on Segal’s explication of Heidegger’s dynamic of rupture. Qualitative data for the investigation comes from an upper-level undergraduate software engineering and design course that students invariably find quite challenging. A grasp of concepts presented here should enable faculty to develop improved pedagogy and institutions to design more effective curricula for engendering students’ reflective response to difficult material in computing – and other – education.