Transformative Learning

Living successfully in a second culture for an extended period time can often lead to a transformation. This transformation is a change in perspective requiring a stranger to look at his or her new world from a different perspective, often in conflict with deeply held values and beliefs, leading to a more reflective, inclusive, and open worldview. This transformation is indicative of a learning process of becoming interculturally competent, which can be explained by transformative learning theory, developed by Jack Mezirow. After defining the nature of transformative learning, this entry delineates the relationship between intercultural competence and transformative learning, notes alternative perspectives, and describes current research dilemmas.

Transformative learning is a constructivist theory about the process of constructing a new or revised meaning of an experience to guide future action. It seeks to explain how adults’ expectations, framed within cultural assumptions, directly influence the meaning they derive from their experience. Since there are no fixed truths and change is continuous, adults cannot always be confident of what they know or believe. This is particularly the case when learning to live successfully in a new culture. Therefore, it becomes imperative that as strangers seek better ways to understand the world around them, they need to develop a more critical worldview. This more critical worldview helps them understand how to negotiate and act on their own meanings rather than those uncritically assimilated from others; they develop more reliable assumptions about the new culture they are living in, regularly exploring and testing their dependability and making decisions on an informed basis, all of which are central to the process of transformative learning.

As described by Mezirow, change in transformative learning is reflective of change in meaning. Structures that act as culturally defined frames of reference are inclusive of meaning schemes and meaning perspectives. Meaning schemes, the smaller components, are indicative of specific beliefs, values, and feelings that reflect an interpretation of experience. On the other hand, a meaning perspective is a general frame of reference, world-view, or personal paradigm involving a collection [Page 819]of meaning schemes forming a large meaning structure containing personal theories, higher order schemata, and propositions. Meaning structures operate as perceptual filters of experiences. These structures are composed of two dimensions: (1) habits of mind, which are far-reaching habitual cognitive practices influenced by deeply held cultural, political, social, educational, and economic assumptions, and (2) a point of view, an expression of a habit of mind that comprises a collection of meaning schemes that tacitly influence how a stranger interprets, judges, and makes sense of the world.