CHAE Speaker Series: Transformative Learning, Dialogue, and the Metaphor of Pilgrimage, Dr. Linden West

Transformative Learning, Dialogue, and the Metaphor of Pilgrimage

This talk uses the metaphor of pilgrimage to illuminate and interrogate ideas of transformation and transformative learning. Transformative learning can be part of the problem rather than the solution in a liquid, frenetic world while it can also be an empty signifier, meaning all things to all people. But the idea of pilgrimage can sensitize us to lifelong and lifewide struggles to learn at deeper levels: of a quest for answers to difficult life questions; of exhilaration and friendships forged on a journey, alongside moments of doubt, darkness, and danger. Drawing on in-depth qualitative enquiry among diverse adult learners, as well as depth psychology and literature—such as Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy”—the talk illuminates the importance of dialogue, “negative capability,” and of abandoning rational certitude in struggles to know and transform.

Dr. Linden West is Professor of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca and at the Université de Paris Nanterre. He also works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He has been an historian of popular and workers’ education while his main contemporary interest lies in applying auto/biographical and narrative enquiry, and interdisciplinary psychosocial perspectives, to diverse educational, social, cultural, political and psychological phenomena. His new book, written with Laura Formenti, “Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education: A Dialogue,” focuses on building dialogue across difference as well as on the conditions which nurture or constrain transformation and transformative learning.