Transformative Learning, Dialogue, and the Metaphor of Pilgrimage
Tuesday, April 23, 2019 – 2:00-3:30pm, 133F Erickson Hall
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.
Professionals and their Lifelong Learning: Auto/biographical and Psychosocial Perspectives
Wednesday, April 24, 2019 – 2:00-3:30pm, 133F Erickson Hall
In this seminar, Dr. West draws on 3 in-depth auto/biographical narratives of professionals and their learning, lifewide as well as lifelong, when working in challenging, emotionally demanding contexts. The first is from a family physician, based in a difficult multi-cultural area of London. The second involves a young woman working as a careers guidance counsellor who experimented with narrative methods in her work among ‘disturbed’ young people, in a marginalised community. The third, is from a priest, who suffered a crisis of faith when working in a post-industrial city struggling with rapid economic decline, an epidemic of mental suffering, and the collapse or weakening of self-help institutions like co-operatives, trade unions, and the church. Each story brings to life the visceral, embodied, emotional, existential, narrative, dialogical, as well as cognitive dimensions of learning; and illuminates the relational, psychosocial resources people draw on, in keeping on keeping on.
Workshop – Registration Required
Learning from Our Lives: Auto/biographical Narrative Enquiry
Friday, April 26, 2019 – 9:00am-4:00pm, 252 Erickson Hall
This workshop introduces auto/biographical narrative research as a form of indepth qualitative enquiry—and illustrates its power to illuminate complex processes of adult and lifelong learning, including our own. The focus of the day is on three overlapping stages in research: first generating rich and thick narratives from diverse students and, second, how to analyse and theorise them, in empathic, reflexive and rigorous ways. Third, how such material can then be refined and represented in written form, as case studies, published articles, and even books. The workshop provides the background to this form of research, alongside experiential work on interviewing learners and interpreting the stories they tell. Participants will have an opportunity to interview and be interviewed as well as to work with others on making sense of narrative material.
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.
Co-sponsored by: Office of the Associate Dean for Research, College of Education