Bigger is Not Always Better: Should Educators Aim For Big Transformative Learning Events or Small Transformative Experiences?

Facilitating transformative learning is a praiseworthy goal among educators who want to make a significant impact on the lives of their students. Transformative learning is typically defined as involving a fundamental shift in students’ worldviews and/or identity. While we agree that teachers should retain such important goals, we argue that facilitating transformative learning is difficult for many reasons. We then suggest that a more manageable task is to use existing instructional techniques to generate small-scale transformation in the form of transformative experience (TE). Specifically, TE can be used to create micro changes in student perspectives. Transformative experiences are more manageable in the typical classroom and an accumulation of small changes can lead to the type of transformative learning that influences student identity.