Winner of the AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award

This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of ‘transformative’ adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships.

At its core, transformation is never easy – nor always desirable – and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth.  This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education.

Laura Formenti is Professor of General Pedagogy and Director of the PhD programme “Education in Contemporary Society” at Milano Bicocca University, Italy. Her research uses autobiographic, cooperative and transformative methods to enhance critical thinking and dialogic collective transformation. Chair of the European Society for the Education of Adults (ESREA), she jointly convenes the Life History and Biography Research Network.

Linden West is Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. His research has focused, auto/biographically, on racism and fundamentalism, professionals in demanding social contexts, and young families in programmes like Sure Start. He helps coordinate the ESREA Network.