The European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA)
Transformative Processes in Learning and Education (TPLE) Network
In collaboration with the Hellenic Adult Education Association
What we know and don’t know about transformation:
Building a new community in research and praxis
The 4th Biennial Conference of the Network will be held in Athens (Greece)
from Thursday June 25th to Sunday June 28th, 2020
Context of the 2020 conference
The context of our conference includes what we see as the limitations of much existing research and understanding of transformative processes in lifelong learning and adult education, and the need for less reductive sensibilities in our conversations, conferences and research. We need to acknowledge more of what we don’t know or are uncertain about in relation to human and or social transformation and transformative learning. We should strive, in dialogue, to combine cognitive, corporal, relational, psychosocial, aesthetic and ecological perspectives in getting closer to the complex heart of transformational experience. Ours is a time of urgency, crisis even, in our individual and collective lives and our relationship to the planet. We are witnesses to profound, sometimes disturbing economic, cultural and ecological transformations affecting individuals, whole societies and the planet. People can seem reluctant or unable to engage with all this, for fear, perhaps, of being overwhelmed. Diverse aspects of everyday life, the life course, as well as our relationships are all affected. The aim of this conference is to capitalize on existing literature on transformative learning (e.g., Mezirow & Associates, 2000; Taylor & Cranton, 2012) and explore further more recent research initiatives, such as those associated with the development of the TPLE Network (e.g., Alhadeff-Jones, 2017; Flemming, Kokkos & Finnegan, 2019; Formenti & West, 2018; Laros, Fuhr & Taylor, 2017). Doing so, we would like to revisit collectively how we frame and engage with transformative processes, and resistance to them, in all dimensions, to help build a new, interdisciplinary, multi-referential, and imaginative research and praxis community. The aim of this conference is to extend the dialogue, again, with you, as to how our collective work can be enhanced, and in what ways and on what and whose terms.
Illuminating the complex dynamics that facilitate or constrain transformative processes
The idea of transformation, as the action of transforming or the fact of being transformed, refers to a type of change characterized, one way or another, by its radical nature. References made to transformation in lifelong learning and adult education involve processes, whose functional or symbolic effects can be envisioned as relatively “deep” or “durable”. Thus, the notion of transformation is generally used to evoke changes that affect significantly and durably our ways of feeling, knowing, and of relating to others, or to the environment, as well as, existentially, to self and the other. Typically, such changes occur when adults reenter formal education, due to either personal or professional circumstances, including life crises. More broadly, the idea of transformation is associated with situations when life events challenge the taken for granted (e.g., in family, health, work) and trigger the need to think, feel, imagine and be, afresh; and to question and critically revisit the assumptions that frame how experience is encountered and interpreted (Mezirow, 1991). Transformations also occur through incremental changes that remain sometimes almost invisible (e.g., ageing, health condition, evolving relationship). Everyday life appears therefore as another locus to study and influence transformational dynamics.
Experiencing change and transformation has never been easy. In the contemporary context, additional difficulties appear with the increased tempo associated with phenomena of social and technological accelerations and the ways it affects personal and professional lives. Overly rapid experiences of “changeability” or a disturbing perception of too rapid a process of change, can lead to a destabilizing sense of impermanence, where depth and durability are no longer to be taken for granted. The lack of coherence, consistency, clarity or scale of what is desirable transformation (whether psychological, aesthetic, social, cultural, economic and or political) contributes to a kind of progressive despair. This can lead in turn to a cynical vision of adult or higher education, evacuated of meaning. Consumerist influences compound the problem. Feelings of resignation, too, even hopelessness about democracy, evoke acceptance of a status quo or return to the old seductions of strong leaders to sort out problems. Struggles to change may feel too hard, uncertain, long term, and time consuming. Fostering individual or collective transformation asks a lot of us, with attention to be given to our lives in their temporal, historical, material, cultural, relational, psychological, unconscious as well as aesthetic dimensions. This is a challenging agenda.
So, our conference is an attempt to chronicle and theorize, in an interdisciplinary, multi-referential and imaginative way, the complexities of transformative processes. We seek to work in dialogue, intensively, over the conference, using plenary sessions combined with intensive small group work. The groups and whole conference will operate in different and more experimental ways, in comparison with previous conferences: exchanging ideas and biographical information, giving time for discussion, as well as aesthetic/artistic/experiential expression to enhance our dialogue, insights and community.
We call for proposals and papers that strive to rethink, or reimagine, processes of transformation and research to illuminate transformations in more convincing, less reductive and superficial ways.
We imagine a conference where papers will be available in advance, published in the online Conference Proceedings. As work-in-progress, those papers will not necessary be “finished products” but communicate doubts and uncertainties. We will, as stated, work in small groups, for some of the time, focusing on themes and shared questions, privileging a heterogeneity of perspectives. Participants are asked to bring an object that represents some aspects of transformation, and to share their ideas and stories, as well as explore new ways of thinking, discussing, and connecting questions to generate new answers. Each group will have two experienced facilitators to manage and nurture the time and space in which thoughts, papers and practices are developed. Our hope is that the conference itself becomes a good enough transitional, and even a transformational community.
After the conference, we will work to compose an edited collection of texts, to be published as a new book, focusing on the fears, anxieties, temporalities, materialities, spiritualities, aesthetics as well as possibilities of transformative processes in learning and education in a troubled and “liquid” world. These texts will be based on the proposals submitted by the participants and will have a more extended and elaborated form.
Aim of the conference
Accordingly, the emphasis of the conference will be on formulating and exploring, collectively, in dialogue, the questions that currently shape how we conceive, study and promote transformative processes. Participants are asked to contribute to our conference with questions they do not have answers to and that they wish to explore further. Our work, as stated, is not to be structured in a traditional format privileged in previous conferences (paper presentation and short Q&A).
Our aim is to provide and facilitate a time and space, where participants can delve more deeply into the process of exploring and discussing/answering questions rather than just offering a place to share given answers and research results.