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2003 1: 16Journal of Transformative EducationWill McWhinney and Laura Markos

Transformative Education: Across the Threshold

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ARTICLE

Transformative EducationAcross the Threshold

Will McWhinneyFielding Graduate Institute

Laura MarkosInstitute for the Study of Transformative Education (ISOTE)

The human condition has changed radically in the past 100 years. Educational insti-tutions, formal and informal, have not kept pace with technological innovations, thelengthening life span, or the need for ongoing reeducation to reinvigorate lives. Theauthors distinguish between learning and education and, more significantly, betweentransformative learning and transformative education. They then introduce the pathof transformative education following a Navaho healing ritual that illuminates themega-myth of death and rebirth as a model on which to organize ideas of adult trans-formative education across an extended life span. The purpose is to highlight the needfor a fourth level of education suitable to 21st-century society, and to engage a global,cross-disciplinary dialogue to inform transformative educational practice across itspersonal, productive, instrumental, emancipatory, and holistic goals.

Keywords: liminal processes; rituals of education; Third Age; transformation; transformative

Beyond the looking glass, in a monastery, through the gate of purgatory, orunder the tutelage of a master, there is a liminal place in which education cantransform individuals, organizations, and societies. There one can get an educa-tion distinct from that acquired on the traditional path taken from infancy tomajority. An education that is transformative redirects and reenergizes those whopause to reflect on what their lives have been and take on new purposes and per-spectives. The transformation begins when a person withdraws from the world ofestablished goals to unlearn, reorient, and choose a fresh path.

The archetypal form of transformative education is the path of death and re-birth, of regression in the service of a forward leap—“reculer pour mieux sauter”(Koestler, 1964). It is a generator of revolution for a society and revitalization for

Journal of Transformative Education Vol. 1 No. 1, January 2003 16-37DOI: 10.1177/1541344603252098©2003 Sage Publications16

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Transformative Education 17

organizations. It has been an instrument of education in almost every recordedculture. However, the opportunity to undertake such a spiral path has been lim-ited to a small portion of a population and, on rare occasions, for communities.Transformation has been a luxury, one through which humanity has created itsgreatest spiritual, artistic, and intellectual achievements.

Now humanity itself has produced conditions that call for greater attention totransformative processes. Population growth that is pushing beyond ecologicallimits imperils our physical well being. Complexity generated by new technolo-gies leaves many of our social institutions obsolete. The rampant growth of pop-ulations and economies is producing a surfeit of adults who are living healthilywell beyond the age at which our social institutions expected their death. Thischanging demography calls on us to build on opportunities that were not feasi-ble when survival was the prime focus of life. As Walter Truett Anderson (1997)wrote with regard to the search for self, “Never before has such a fundamentaltheme of human existence been discussed on such a scale, within the context of aglobal civilization. Yet there is an older discourse, stretching back at least to thetime of Heraclitus and his Asian contemporary known as the Buddha” (p. 225).

In spite of their antiquity, transformative rituals of education and outcomeshave not been a subject of inquiry and research in the educational disciplines.They have remained marginalized aside the massive job of training the young andjob-skilling adults. It is timely to research and practice this order of educationthat has had little attention. Our purpose in this article—and in initiating theJournal of Transformative Education—is to open an enlivening dialogue abouttransformative education.

The body of the article describes one path of transformative education as anarchetypal form based on ancient healing rituals. To facilitate this exploration webegin with some definitions that distinguish learning from education. A moredifficult task is to establish distinctions between transformative and other formsof individual and social learning. We conclude with consideration of alternativepurposes and goals of doing transformative work in the rapidly changing contextof decentered cultures and information access.

Making Distinctions: Learning, Education, and Transformation

Our intent is to make distinctions among various ideas of learning, education,and transformation; to discriminate among the various manifestations of trans-formation; and to encourage research on and design of educational efforts.

To distinguish between learning and education, we use the accepted defini-tions found in dictionaries and common usage. Simply stated, learning is the ex-perience of acquiring knowledge and skills, and education is a course of learning.A learned person has acquired and internalized a vast knowledge. An educatedperson may be learned, but education also conveys a sense of properness; the ed-ucated person has been trained in some manner related to community expecta-




18 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

tions and traditions. Transformation refers to those psychological, cognitive, andsocial processes of learning and education that follow from a variety of reflectiveand maturing experiences.

LEARNING

We use learning to describe ways through which we internalize new skills andknowledge. Although the outcome of learning is knowledge, the ways in which weorganize and integrate material suggests that that there are a variety of processesthrough which we learn. Gregory Bateson (1972) and Chris Argyris (1982) pre-sented models that described three distinct levels of inquiry and learning, the dis-cussion of which will aid in exploring transformational processes as they are dif-ferentiated by the degrees of reflection and reorganization that accompany theacquisition of new understandings.

BATESON’S TYPOLOGY

Learning I (LI). In its simplest form, LI is rote learning. More generally, it islearning that adds information and skills without contradicting the prior learn-ings or raising questions as to the assumptions about what is being taught. Thisform provides the vast majority of our learning. Appropriately, most learning isachieved by mundane rote work, like learning how to buy food from a grocerystore; some LI is integrated in complex ways into existing knowledge and per-formance skills; and a small portion promotes reorganization of what we alreadyhave absorbed. Paulo Freire (1970) calls such learning banking.

Argyris’s use of the term single loop learning indicates banking is achieved bysingle cycles of stimulus and response. As learning accumulates, we learn lan-guages, social custom, and technologies, and take on pervasive worldviews. Dur-ing the course of a person’s life, LI can produce changes that are radical comparedto our infant states. However, we can learn an immense amount—languages, cus-toms, and professions—without examining our goals, ethics, or lifestyle, contin-uing to follow a worldview that we established early in life. The vast majority ofall behaviors are learned by additive exercises at this first level.

Learning II (LII). LII arises from reflection, from observing how one is makingchoices, and what frames of assumptions are involved in learning by rote and itsextensions. Such learning reframes experience through double loops in whichlearning assumptions as well as content are examined. Through reflective apper-ception, one considers assumptions that were set early in childhood and adoles-cence and chooses new responses to the diverse contexts and environments en-countered as adults.

The intent of LII is to question the data and assumptions used to conductone’s life, whether consciously or unconsciously, and to adopt new constructionsof reality, life goals, and moral obligations. Such questioning may produce broadchanges in a person’s life, leading to quite different worldviews. However, fre-




quently people and organizations make changes and adopt new learning withoutrecognition of the process by which they have chosen new worldviews. As Bate-son (1972) and Argyris (1982) indicated, people make such reformation withoutexploring the process, goals, or ideologies that initiated the reflection. Thus, fol-lowing the experience of new LII, most people settle back into programs of LIwith assumptions they feel are better suited to their present conditions. LII is anevent of change, a response to reflection and new insights, and a moment of in-stability that provides opportunities to take new paths.

Learning III (LIII). Bateson (1972) defined LIII as a mind set that allows oneto hold and work with contradictions and ultimately to

the resolution of contraries . . . in which personal identity merges into all theprocesses of relationship in some vast ecology or aesthetics of cosmic interac-tion. That any of these [people] can survive seems almost miraculous, but someare perhaps saved from being swept away on oceanic feeling by their ability tofocus on the minutiae of life. Every detail of the universe is seen as proposing aview of the whole. (p. 306)

Bateson argued along with William Blake that with LIII one sees “the World in aGrain of Sand,” in which all time and space are reflected in the moment. In sucha learning mode, one is able to concurrently engage with the details of the mo-ment while retaining the view of the whole, attaining humility in the presence ofthe infinite. Argyris’s (1982) use of the term triple loop learning indicates thedepth of this little-experienced form of learning. Kegan (1994) referred to a fifthorder of consciousness, transideological, and self-transformative.

LIII challenges the interpretation of experience, relations, and truth systems,leading to broad questions such as human life, world ecology, and relations to higherpowers. Freeing oneself from dichotomized thinking and assumptions about as-sumptions, ideologies, and reality allows one to carry exploration into the natureof paradigms themselves, although, as Bateson warned (1972), sometimes at theprice of one’s sanity. Those who indulge in such explorations are likely to be thesages and teachers of a society, the ones who induce LII, but who also disturb thecourse of normal community life. Sages and revolutionaries ask too many ques-tions and demand that we pay too much attention to what they are revealing.

So learning is the acquisition of knowledge as well as of modes of organizing,questioning, making decisions, and exploring our own assumptions and construc-tions of reality. Learning takes place in events, not explicitly laid out along a path.Learning is a process, not a program. Its outcome may be an educated person orsociety, but it is clearer to refer to the scholar as learned rather than educated.

EDUCATION

As asserted in the beginning of this section, education is a course of learning.As such, it has direction and duration and consists of a number of learningevents. We get a proper first-cut sense by noting that the term education was first





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used to describe the training of animals and the rearing of children. Alfred NorthWhitehead (1929) defined education as “the acquisition of the art of the utilisa-tion of knowledge” (p. 4), emphasizing its programmatic focus. Most educationtoday is a process for rearing people to fulfill their proper roles in the existing so-ciety, socializing them with language, then teaching them the economics of theirsociety, their role in procreation, and how they may make contributions to soci-ety in arts and sciences, as well as religions and philosophies. A few people are ed-ucated to be leaders for the political, economic, and legal systems, and for the tra-ditions that support further education. Some education simply brings us theskills with which to enjoy ourselves and our relations with others.

Emile Durkheim stated that

Education consists of a methodical socialization of the younger generation. Ineach of us . . . there exists two being, which, inseparable except by abstraction,remain distinct. One is made up of all the mental states that apply only to our-selves and to the event of our personal lives: this is what might be called the in-dividual being. The other is a system of ideas, sentiments and practices whichexpress in us, not our personality, but the group or different groups of which weare a part; these are religious beliefs, moral beliefs and practices, national or pro-fessional traditions, collective opinions of every kind. Their totality forms thesocial being. To constitute this being in each of us is the end of education. (1956,cited in Wexler, 2000, p. 88)

Education is always programmatic, designed to produce a specific social out-come for the particular populations that it serves. Education is never politicallyneutral; it leads pupils to accept its assumptions about power, reality, morality,and the formulations of knowledge that the curriculum imbues.

TRANSFORMATION

The descriptor transformative has introduced considerable difficulty for thosedoing adult education and organizational development, and for good reason. Theimage of transformation is closely related to the development of the individualpsyche and socioorganizational changes that may appear politically radical in cul-tures strongly biased toward a rationalistic paradigm in consumer-oriented cul-tures or traditional religious dogmas. Transformations in individuals or wholegroups can be disturbing to people for whom the status quo is the desired condi-tion. Euro-Americans have devised various strategies to avoid serious engage-ments with transformative issues. One is to relegate them to the spiritual or reli-gious realms to make transformation appear irrelevant to the productiveeconomy and inappropriate to consider as a secular goal for educational pro-grams. Another is to trivialize transformation so that it is reduced to a descriptordesignating any impactful learning for individuals and organizations. Thesestrategies have worked to marginalize the terms transformative learning andtransformative education. However, transformation is far too significant a processin human and social development to be dismissed by philistine disparagements.

Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003





Transformation refers to pervasive forms of development that occur in everyculture as an aspect of every rite of passage (van Gennep, 1908/1960) in the grandmovements from one social paradigm to the next. We get hints of transformationin the events many educators call transformative learning, events that promotereflective learning in a setting relatively free of social and political restraints. Andas used today by many authors, transformative learning describes a philosophy ofpedagogy congruent with transformative education but differentiated from crit-ical pedagogy, progressive education, and most adult education. Some note thattransformative learning and transformative education are used interchangeably.We prefer to distinguish between the two based on the programmatic content ofeducation that is missing in learning events.

All transformations have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There are condi-tions that support changes, processes that initiate them, and ones that completethe changes. Kurt Lewin (1946) captured the basic dynamic with the simple pre-scription unfreeze, change, and refreeze with the implication that refreezingplaces a system in a more desired state than that from which it started. Its classicform is more dramatically described as a renaissance, a sequence of death and re-birth that appears in the rituals of human development and most religious tradi-tions. It is a reenactment of the cycle of the seasons in the maturing of individu-als. In an individual’s life, it is a regression in the service of the ego, reported inbiographies from The Odyssey onto present day epics and dozens of books onmid-life transition (e.g., Kegan, 1982, p. 203). In form, if not in depth, it is builtinto therapies for individuals, organizations, and cultures.

The condition that fosters a person’s, organization’s, or culture’s search fornew meanings is often one of loss, a loss of support for what has been, or theawareness that one can no longer turn back. This crisis unfreezes the person toaccept the loss and begin a search that takes one across the threshold into a spacewhere one can risk deep exploration, a space in which the exploration is free ofimmediate threats and consequences. Victor Turner (1969) called this space lim-inal, a place that is on the threshold but neither here nor there.

Existing in this liminal middle space are the archetypal conditions that vesseltransformations of individuals, communities, and societies. There, learningtransforms in radical, irreversible, and often unexpected ways. The conditions forsuch change may occur by accident or intentional plan, or may emerge from thenatural rhythm of human life. They lead the traveler to let go of assumptions andwander in the transformative space, free from expectations and ego identity.

Typically, a transformation is considered irreversible, although there are con-ditions that drive a situation back to an earlier form. There are also considera-tions where accumulative transformative learnings during long periods of en-gagement gradually form a distinct worldview. The explorations we areencouraging with this article and journal should lead to better definitions oftransformative paths and identifying new conditions, new schemes for transfor-mation that may emerge in the informational society.

Those experiences which we now label transformative have been a part of so-cieties as far back as we have historical records. In most ancient cultures, the





changes in roles were formalized in ritual practices. People participated in rites ofpassage at certain stages in their physiological development: at puberty, at major-ity, and, in lesser numbers, at maturity. The societal rituals have largely disap-peared, but the needs for transformational pauses in our journeys are perhapseven more important now in an era when people are living well beyond the spanof life allotted to those in earlier traditional societies.

Transformation is a possibility in the mind of every social revolutionary and theawakening of consciousness that gives meaning to life for many people. The set-tings are diverse, but the main process is ubiquitous. In systems terminology, a trans-formation is bifurcation, a change of system attractors. In psychological terms, itis an occasion when there is a shift from one set of goals to another. In sociopo-litical terms, it is a change in assumptions about the desired governance of a society.

In this introductory article on educational processes, we depict a process usedby the Navaho in their healing rites to exemplify the diverse paths of change thatappear in the vast worldwide literature of transformation.

The Journey

Our image of transformative education is modeled on the archetypal heroes’journey that appears in myths of cultures around the world, both ritualized inceremonies of maturation and initiated in response to circumstance in an indi-vidual’s or community’s life. The ubiquity of this ritual form was brought to pop-ular consciousness through the work of Joseph Campbell (1949) and supportedby the research of Bühler (1968); Gould (1978); Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levin-son, and McKee (1978); Murdock (1990); and many others. There are other mod-els of transformation (McWhinney, 1997), but none so widely recognized as thatof death and rebirth. Lewin’s (1946) tri-part journey described it in the simplestform, but it is better articulated as a four-part path beginning with the crisis thatinitiates transformative action, as in the models presented by Mezirow (1981) andBoyd and Myers (1988). The depiction in the Navaho sand painting provides aneven richer expression.

The sand paintings are visual programs for a healing. The ceremonies collectwhole families and neighbors who gather to support the passage that may last 2to 5 days. The “painting” itself is cast specifically for the occasion. It symbolizesthe liminal space in which the malfeasant experiences transformation. The afflic-tions treated are of personal failings, such as thievery, indolence, and gambling—social illness. The ceremonies are therapies that support the initiate in reflectingon behaviors, values, and responsibilities to family and community, and identifya hero’s path as evidence of possibilities and a guide to future action. The ritualwe depict clearly presents four stages: the crisis as a retreat prepared for in totalisolation before assembling in the sacred space, entry into the womb of the earthrepresented by the painting, the transformative passage that takes place in thatspace, and the reintegration (rebirth) into daily life (Sandner, 1979). In the fol-lowing section, we discuss these as occasions for transformative learning.





Figure 1: Reproduction of a Navaho Sand Painting Used in the Ritual Healing Ceremony,the Pollen Path

Source: Reproduced from Campbell (1986).




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CRISIS

Diversion from one’s expected life course toward a transformative experiencebegins with a crisis. Sometimes, the crisis follows dramatic loss: a loved one has

died, a dream is denied, a life-threateningillness challenges one’s mortality, or a suc-cess has fulfilled one’s life dreams, leavingno place to go. More often, the crisis ap-pears as a slow awakening that one’s life haslost meaning, that work, play, and relation-ships have habituated into empty routines.Anomie has taken over.

One may repress feelings of loss and re-jection to stay on track. Young adults usetheir high drives to repress the meaning oflosses and hold fast to familiar roles; peoplein marginalized populations resign theirhopes and deny their own competencies by

accepting the losses they experience as inevitable. When the losses are acknowl-edged and mourned, there is an opening to new learning that takes them beyondthe compliant banking of knowledge to a search quest (Sandner, 1979). TheNavaho chant represented in sand gives responsibility for this divergence to twotormenters whose job is it to awake the passerby to their frailties. Their tauntingeventually blocks the path of unconsciousness, allowing the traveler to reject theirhabitual existence.

In traditional societies, a crisis is ritualized at standard ages as a series of initi-ations into advancing maturity: puberty, early adulthood, marriage, and profes-sional roles in religious orders, education, and the military. Preliminary to therites are periods of training, of education in the larger responsibilities of the newstatus. The intent is transformative, although many participants deny the oppor-tunity and follow a linear course of instruction, not accepting the invitation ofmentors to challenge the assumptions of the social form from which they entered.

For a person, the crisis may be induced by physiological changes and promotedin the traditional rituals of passage. Each of these changes may present shocks toone’s self-image, often as a loss of capacity that provide openings to new perspec-tives and values for social engagement. These awarenesses may coincide with thetraditional transition phases or arise from personal journeys induced by particu-lar losses and awareness. Crisis may also be induced by simulation (Brookfield,1987) that provokes self-evaluation and begins a transformative learning cycle.

For an organization or community, crisis may begin with a disruption of thestatus quo, often due to a change in the external environment in which the or-ganization works. Crisis onset may also occur with a rising awareness of repres-sion or environmental conditions that have denied the possibility of communityaction and common direction. Such awareness might spontaneously arise withina marginalized community, as did much of the civil rights issues in the United






States; however, the focalizing energy is commonly generated by an outsider. Thisoutside energy is the origin of the great reform movements: in religion, St. Fran-cis of Assisi; in politics, Karl Marx; in education, Paulo Freire; and in participa-tive action, John Horton at the Highlander Education Center. Teresa of Avila, Tol-stoy, Gandhi, Mandala, and Saul Alinsky also exemplify this model. In each, thetransformative process originates with an intellectual from a privileged statuscoming to awaken a repressed population through education. The leader/teacherprovides new awareness about the conditions imposed by a person’s family, com-munity, or hierarchical dictates.

Organizational change may also be induced by crisis (Mitroff & Pauchant,1990), whether naturally occurring or by creating a sense of urgency (Kotter,1996). Similar to individuals’ experience, crisis threatens the core identity of anorganization, which induces fundamental change in the organization and its op-erating environment (Mitroff & Pauchant, 1990). For organizations and commu-nities, crises arise out of a failure to attain some political, religious, scientific, oreven managerial goals. Both typically enter into a transformative effort withpreestablished goals, only to find that those goals somehow no longer relate to thepresent conditions. Crisis is ultimately associated with a loss of meaning.

Both in myth and current theory (Boyd & Myers, 1988), one prepares fortransformation through mourning the loss of maintained intentionality.Processes for inducing confession, disowning, and ego release are essential toclear one’s spirit for new possibilities. Grieving unlocks the spirit and washesaway association with prior success and failures. One cannot go into nowhere an-chored to old expectations, grievances, or wealth. They must be “symbolically ex-pelled from daily life” (Shor, 1980) or blindly driven by the inarticulate sense thattheir path must detour. Resistance to letting go is a major cause for transforma-

tive education failures; frequently thoseentering keep one foot well planted inthe daily world. Robert Tannenbaumand Robert Hanna (1985) described thepreparatory grieving as “holding on, let-ting go, and moving on” (p. 95); WilliamBridges (1980) described it as endingsand beginnings. The responses to crisesin individuals and organizations sharemany characteristics.

ENTRY INTO THE LIMINAL SPACE

Entry onto the transformative pathbegins with crossing a threshold into a“no-place,” Turner’s liminal space. It is aplace of asylum variously described asthe hell that Dante entered with hisguide Virgil; the enveloping darkness of




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a night journey (nekyia); the hermit’s desert; a classroom; a church sanctuary; asafe space defined by a legal contract; the enveloping words of a guide, coach, orcharismatic leader; or even an hallucinatory vessel created by LSD. On entry, oneexperiences a symbolic death of the existing self. One way or another, crossing thethreshold separates the participants from normal activity and expectations, aswould their bodily death. They move into a liminal domain that is nowhere; thosewho cross the threshold vanish from their familiar selves and their communityinto night journey.

In the Navaho ceremony, the liminal space is created on the floor of the cere-monial hogan that is the vessel of the transformative healing. The hogan, andmore immediately the sand painting itself, is a womb reentered for the passagealong the pollen path to rebirth at the head. It is a trip that takes one along thecorn stalk that Sandner (1979) identified with a passage through the seven chakraof the Hindu traditions.

At entry, the traveler finds that the liminal space is empty, frightening, andlonely. “What am I doing here?” has no answer. Murray Stein (1983, p. 9) de-scribed the characteristic feeling of those entering the liminal space as having

an unusual degree of vulnerability to sudden emotional drafts originating eitherwithin or without, to sudden moods and highly charged images and thoughts,to sudden gains and losses of confidence. Inner ground shifts, and because thebase is not firm a person can be influenced, pushed, and blown about. A suddenhappening will make a more than normally deep impression, like an imprinting.More malleable in liminality than otherwise, a person may carry the effect ofsuch imprintings through the rest of a lifetime.

Every culture uses different methods to enforce the liminal confinement. Sometraditional cultures use intense degradation to separate the initiates from theirprior habituation; the hazing in American college fraternities and boot camp inmilitary organizations copied this style. The Zen environment disposes ofevery awareness that would follow from causal thinking. Transformative educa-tors entice students with freedom from value judgments (grades). In current dayceremonies (often in growth workshops), separation begins with obscuringone’s name and professional identity, dumping one’s life story so that one’s bag-gage will not block self-awareness or inhibit talk with others. The resultingnakedness allows everyone to join in creating a community of searchers and beopen to instruction by a mentor. Without identity, intimacy becomes tolerableand attractive.

On their own, participants tend to recreate community, developing an inti-mate communitas (Turner, 1969). Such communities are made up of wandererswho seek intimacy with others as they become strangers to themselves. Somementors would speed this process by facilitating appropriate dialogue among theparticipants. David Bohm’s (Bohm & Peat, 1987) design of dialogue sessions andthe early exercises in appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider, Sorensen, Whitney, &Yaeger, 1999) create such environments. The emergence of community within the






liminal space eases the pain of separation, which enhances learning but can alsointerfere with passage. One can grow attracted to living in a faux community;learners can become perpetual students, and spiritual seekers become groupies.

The design of the vessel, the degree of impenetrability of its borders, the du-ration of the passage, and the mode of direction are central curricular issues fortransformative education. Dipping in for 2 hours on Tuesday evenings after workis not likely to produce transformation, although it may lead one to seek furtherinsight. Nor can we expect transformative learning to take place in the corporateconference room. Rather, physical isolation is usually needed to support the psy-chic separation. Effective designs use retreat centers, monasteries, outward-bound excursions, and absence from one’s work and family responsibilities. Sim-ilarly, transformative education requires blocks of time. An individual mightdwell liminally for 40 days or several years or, after letting ideas brew for years,one may suddenly find rebirth in a flash. A society or organization might wallowfor decades without finding stable direction to be transformed, then suddenlythrough social revolution reestablish its vitality. We have yet to see if liminal spacecan be created in the virtual nowhere of electronic networks (Turkle, 1995).Wexler (2000) observed that new movements arising in the embodied self-workand decentered environment of the Internet “does not have such easily delimitedborders . . . but are ongoing social practices that have the appearance of continu-ity and stability that we once attributed only to institutions” (p. 28).

Liminal space is no more value-neutral than any other educational setting.Every design implies a theory of human and social development, and every de-sign has a political effect on the participants, whether by implication or followingan explicit ideology. For every rebirth, there is an archangel and a creed for everycrêche. Each practice of transformative education has its own purposes for edu-cating and designs the liminal vessel accordingly. Adult education has tradition-ally been designed for effective participation in the work economy; Mezirow’swork has evolved to support a consciousness of power relations; and Horton atHighlander Center and Freire in Brazil designed the vessel to prepare for socialaction. O’Sullivan, Morrell, and O’Connor (2002) in Toronto imbue a responsi-bility for a holistic-ecological worldview, and religious sects have a variety ofroutes through the stages of death and rebirth.

Absence or weakness of an appropriate vessel for participants is another ma-jor cause of the failure of transformative programs. Irresponsibility by those whoinitiate liminal work without adequate provisions for vesseling has given cre-dence to charges that much work advertised as transformative is opportunisticmanipulation and New Age hucksterism. Conversely, designs that effectively in-still an encompassing belief system may deny the rebirth of the individual, en-trapping rather than transforming their acolytes and evading the challenges ofLIII.

The design principles for entry and vesseling differ greatly among the manytheories and schools of adult education. Although there have been many studiesof transformative learning viewed as specific events, there have been far fewer re-ports on the overall design of transformative education as the instrument for




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transformations either in individuals or societies. This lack of understanding isone that we hope will be reduced by publications in this journal.

PASSAGE

The transformative passage in theNavaho ritual is depicted as having twophases. One is characterized by a rain-bow, the other by a lightening bolt, or-ganized around the corn stalk. On theright, the processes are biased towardfeminine; on the left, masculine.

The rainbow stage displays the earlyexploratory behaviors: questioning, col-lecting data, forming potential self-im-ages, and envisioning new directions—none of which materializes at this stage.In transformative education, it is a pe-riod of unlearning, of research, organiz-ing ideas, exploring forms of relation,and testing possible roles to adopt onreemergence. Some people follow thediffuse rainbow independent of others,

but often students do their work in floating communitas—in student friendshipgroups, community projects, rural communes, and artist communes—that givecomfort while in dark passages.

All along the path, participants are kept alert by the two spirit messengers, whoare like the angel-devil pair that sit on children’s shoulders to prick their con-science with issues that accompany each new awareness. The spirit messengers areguides. As depicted here, they are agents of one’s intuition. But often they arementors, chanting a ritual as in the Navaho ceremony, putting questions as didSocrates, or indulging in psychotherapy.

In the ideal passage, the wanderer at a moment of deepest despair comes on anew sense of self or of the issue that drove despair. Lightning strikes, and a per-son or a group grasps a direction on which to recreate identity. Teilhard deChardin (1965) reported that on his journey there appeared “a bottomless abyssat my feet and out of it came—arising from I know not where—the currentwhich I dare to call my life” (p. 48). From this moment, one organizes and directsenergies using the more masculine style of encounter. Campbell (1986) notedthat the moment of epiphany takes place at the heart chakra. A worldview isadopted on which to form meaning for one’s reentry, yet it may take time toevolve a robust form suitable to the everyday world.

In traditional societies, the departure is programmed by completion of the re-quired ritualized tasks; in the academic world, with the completion of projects,papers, and dissertations; and for organizations and communities, a rising aware-





ness that it is now time to resume responsibility in the world left behind. Rebirthcomes when a person or system can reintegrate into the community or has gath-ered the strength to remain at the threshold in continual experience of LIII.

REINTEGRATION

The flowering of the corn tassel and thebird’s flight jointly illustrate the return to vi-tal engagement as a generative and freed spirit,ready to resume one’s place in the commu-nity. This is the normal turn in the path forthe Navajo healing ceremony and those trans-formations that have achieved a LII program.The person, organization, or community hasretreated, reconceived the mission, adoptednew directions, structured new roles, and isnow ready to reappear in the agora. But all re-turns do not follow such a routine rebirth.

The alternative outcomes of the death andrebirth cycle reflect distinctly different ener-gies and serve a variety of social needs. Thereturn, Lewin’s (1946) refreezing, allows reag-gregation with society. In Lewin’s model, andin the common parlance of change manage-ment, the system, person, organization, or so-

ciety settles into a new stasis. If the reflective learning has occurred, the systemwill perform in some ways more compatibly with its environment. In Argyris’sview (Argyris & Schon, 1978), a double-loop learning has been completed andcontinues to travel a purposeful course, putting behind the joys and pains of lim-inality. Such reintegrations are merely corrective; the person or system now per-forms as expected. In other cases, the changes are so dramatic as to leave one un-recognizable, even unwelcome to family and prior associates. One may stay indialogue, continuing to work the questions raised in the liminal world and ex-ploring other possible journeys of the psyche or society. Such commitment toopenness creates a continual LIII giving birth to sages, quiet wisdom, and perhapsa sense of the Tao.

TRADITIONAL RETURN

When the formal ceremonies are completed, the communitas dissolves and itsmembers reencounter the mundane with a new worldview. Lewin (1946) envi-sioned them refreezing into a transformed system, thereby establishing new at-tractors with goals and commitments to new hierarchies of values. On return, in-dividuals and communities again follow paths of LI, building from newassumptions, typically with more socially responsive relationships. The civilized,





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undisturbing reentry is the desired outcome of most transformative educationprograms undertaken for personal or organizational needs. The return as ma-tured member of the community is the expected outcome of those journeys takenon at adolescence as in a bar/bas mitzvah, as a young adult through military serv-ice, or as an adult following a midlife crisis. Similarly, it is the desired refreezingafter a corporation has adopted new operating principles and established aproper image in its business community.

THE LIMINAL LIFE

Not all those who retreat into the cosmic womb return. Some participants re-main encompassed. A continuing liminality is a destination for those who take ona spiritual life, devoted to preparation for the afterlife in a monastic vessel. Oth-ers find a lifestyle with one leg in the liminal world and the other treading in thework-a-day environment. Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) exemplifies a successfulprocess that maintains both the day-to-day responsibilities and a communitas ofa higher power. Part-time communitas enable members to resist their addictionswhile performing socially conforming functions. AA meetings form permanentlyfloating communities of people able on occasion to set aside their personal iden-tities, honoring their commitments to mutual contribution and relationship.Many meditative and religious organizations and the occasional formal educa-tional institution provide the same function, ranging from nearly complete de-votion to activities that primarily support secular functions, which recreate limi-nal communitas when former participants reconvene.

BEYOND LIMINALLY

A third outcome of the inner passage is to a transcendent LIII mode, where theindividual continues to question and lead others to explore beyond their habitu-ated lives. This is an ultimate goal of transformative education: to live in perpet-ual self-renewal, reviewing the assumptions by which self and society are guidedand given support, reflecting on and challenging their belief systems. The epit-ome of this transliminal emergence is seen in the great religious leaders (Laotze,Buddha, and Christ) but also Socrates, the poet Maya Angelou, and the AmericanIndian Chief Seattle. The appearance of transcendent ones is disruptive to theircommunities, leading to social turmoil, unmanageable anxieties, and some times,paradoxically, social class distinction such as emerged in the Hindu caste system.We can dream of a society of transcendent citizens, but have little idea of how toorganize an egalitarian society that operates without stable goals and confiningconditions that guide short- and long-term behaviors.

We could assert that all transformations follow the path of death and rebirth,and that the apparently linear accumulation of a new worldview is a reduced ex-pression of that cycle. However, the conditions that support a linear progressionare different from those that produce the regression that initiates the rebirth.Every educational path should open its followers to reflection on their world-






views. The reflective stance is one of the specific goals of liberal education; it istraditionally induced by a rich encounter with the literature and philosophies ofother cultures. Progressive education challenges students’ cultural predilectionsusing crafts, the arts, and participative teaching methods. These and other meth-ods used in primary schools and beyond encourage students to develop tools forcontinually testing one’s worldviews. Linear development can be induced at anyage, perhaps more easily with children than with young adults who have builttheir identities during a decade or two of public performance. It is a question forresearch to ascertain whether the accumulation of learning can produce the samedepth of learning as does the cyclical path of regression and return, and whether“work of the self on the self” of which Michel Foucault wrote can be as effectiveas that work done in communities of seekers.

Four Goals for Transformative Paths

We have described an archetypal path of transformation. It can be undertakenfor reasons that vary greatly with one’s social and psychological condition. Insome sense, these journeys are always imposed, some overtly by one’s society fol-lowing a tradition of maturation, some by a rational analysis of opportunities,some by the internal loss of self, and some in the service of transcendent causes.Although the paths they follow may be similar, different purposes call for differ-ent guidance, enabling conditions, and support from the enveloping communityduring the preliminary, liminary, and postliminary stages. There are quite differ-ent requirements for the educational institutions that support these diverse soci-etal outcomes: some supportive of the status quo, others leading to revolutionarychanges, and others leading us to continual inquiry.

Productive and Instrumental

A highly visible form of transformative education is the enhancement of one’scareer opportunities. Such education follows a route much like that of the origi-nal carrière that young Parisian architectural students used to deliver their entriesinto competitions. Their vehicle from which we derived career provides a richmetaphor for the indoctrination and training that adults undergo to enter orgrow in a profession. The preliminaries are acquisitive LI engagements aimed atmastering a field, a process that is often diametrically opposed to one’s uncon-scious goals. These are trips of the mind. For many, the regressive effort that takesone across a threshold into a liminal state is wasteful of everything they haveworked for through the accumulation of knowledge. They may retain goals of ad-vancement while avoiding the dangers of a transformative journey. Others whostart on the same preliminary path suffer the downward spiral of awareness ofloss and enter on the liminal state in which they experience LIII they did not an-





ticipate although intuitively chose. Many of those who take on career enhance-ment at midlife come to recognize that the career work was a personal cover storyto allow them to embark on an unrational journey into their own souls.

The instrumental function serves organizations and communities as it doesindividuals to enable them to operate more effectively. However, the processes oforganizational learning and education differ enough from individual and culturalmethods that we would address this domain in future issues of the journal. Theinstrumental path is supported by the economies of Western capitalistic democ-racies, as it seldom disturbs the political climate. It encourages LI that leads to im-proved performances. As in the Indian healing ritual, the adult returns better ableto serve the employer’s and the community’s needs. Most adult education pro-grams have the goal of providing such a product. The payoff to society is oftengreat enough to offset an occasional loss of a good employee to a higher socialpurpose.

PERSONAL

The personal argument for transformational experience, the classic path ofloss, liminality, and return, is embarked on due to changes in personal circum-stances. It is a healing process for personal health and often chosen as a therapy,although it is more, as Csikszentmihalyi (1993) argued:

To help guide the progress of evolution it is not sufficient for a person to enjoymerely any kind of life, but a life that increases order instead of disorder. To con-tribute to greater harmony, a person’s consciousness has to become complex.Complexity of consciousness is not a function of only intelligence or knowledge,and is not just a cognitive trait—it includes a person’s feelings and actions aswell. It involves becoming aware of and in control of one’s unique potentials,and being able to create harmony between goals and desires, sensations and ex-periences, both for oneself and for others. People who achieve this are not onlygoing to have a more fulfilling life, but they are almost certainly more likely tocontribute to a better future. Personal happiness and a positive contribution toevolution go hand in hand. (pp. 207-208)

The objective may be entirely personal, as Abraham Maslow (1943/1996) sug-gested, the drive for transformation is “the desire to become more and more whatone is to become everything that one is capable of becoming”(p. 168). However, manyinstitutions recognize the value of transformation in developing a more con-scious and involved population of adults. Clearly, with the changing demograph-ics of the 21st century, transformation at mid-life and beyond can be an increas-ingly important educational contribution for the society as well as the individual.

Transformation becomes a goal most commonly at mid-life, when individualsare likely to suffer awareness of loss and personal mortality. As Robert Jay Liftoncommented, “There is a special quality of life-power available only to those sea-soned by struggles of four or more decades. The life-power of this stage can be es-pecially profound” (quoted in Hudson, 1995/2001).




New goals at this life juncture tend to focus on issues other than those of theproductive consumption-oriented society and more toward personal health,community responsibilities, and eventually to a concern with the spiritual do-main. Still, there is little public support for personal transformation. It is leftmostly to growth centers; religious and spiritual organizations; for-profit insti-tutes such as the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, California; private collegeslike the Buddhists started at Naropa; and graduate institutes such as Fielding,Union, and Saybrook (McWhinney, 1990). For all its importance to modern so-cieties with life spans now 30 years longer than when most current schooling sys-tems were devised, almost no effort has been expended to develop this fourth or-der of education.

EMANCIPATORY

Emancipatory education has goals of social transformation. It uses educationto achieve what Freire (1970) called conscientização of a population to conditionsthat enforce their repression and to transgress oppressive boundaries (hooks,1994). It is education in the service of society, rather than an intended transfor-mation of the involved individuals. The initiating condition for this work is so-cial repression, not individual loss or aimlessness. In this framework, a crisis is in-duced by the leaders to awaken discontent across a population. Some peoplebecome followers continuing on a path of social reform using new LI, othersdeepen their engagement into a personal transformation.

During the past century, the leadership for sociopolitical transformative edu-cation has come from inner-city housing and welfare agencies, from union move-ments such as the United Farmer Workers with Cesar Chavez, in the antiwarmovements in the 1960-1970 period, and from civil rights groups. It has beensupported by theories of social action, socialism, radical egalitarianism, and crit-ical education theory (see Mayo, 2003 [this issue]). However, few organizationshave sustained programs of emancipatory education. Horton’s Highlander Cen-ter is an exception that for more than half a century has vesseled the developmentof political consciousness and participative action skills; a newer effort is at theLabor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles. These organizations are effec-tive in training for social transformation but have less provision for personaltransformation. Without enabling personal transformation, social reformationsare susceptible to corruption and cooptation by those whose political goals ex-ceed their concern for individual rights.

Outside of these highly developed organizations, socially emancipatory edu-cation is mostly relegated to the fringe American and European institutions, forexample, in single courses and transformative learning events. It often is tooclosely associated with humanistic psychology or left-wing socialism to find sup-port in establishment schools and agencies. But we have not yet felt the effect ofnetworking and decentered learning situations that are coming with new modesof communication and the emerging spirituality. We do not know what paths willemerge from thousands of years of tradition in the face of new conditions.





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Holistic: Spiritual and Ecological Evolution

The most ancient of transformations are those in search of spirit and a holis-tic engagement with the natural environment. Transformations and commit-ments to these goals were a central feature of agrarian and nomadic societies, buthave generally lost out in the industrialized economies. They have been slowlyreappearing in holistic education and green political movements worldwide andwith the reemphasis on spiritually in the United States in the past decades.

In our experience, students at mid-life often start programs without transcen-dental goals of the spirit or for humanity. Rather, such goals appear in the depthof their liminal explorations. An individual or group may regress over issues ofrights, property, injustices, and losses, then find that at heart they are in pursuitof ethical, spiritual, and environmental issues of the world. In the United States,there is a revival of the spiritual worldview that is far greater than has been char-acteristic of Western populations since the beginning of the Age of Rationality.There is less pressure to stay the course of one’s ego and economic life, and morechance for the unconscious to surface earlier and start the detour more openly.These opportunities are being supported first by the established churches but alsoby many new age, environmental, and organizational development leaders. TomAtlee described this broad movement in an article titled “Co-intelligence: A Vi-sion for Social Activism” (2002), taking a perspective that leads to environmentaland spiritual development as well as engagement for social change.

Beyond Thresholds

In this exposition of transformative education, we indicate that characteristicsof human life, maturation, social support, and the existential fact of individualdeath are conditions for transformative education. There is historical and psy-chological support for the traditional model of transformative education thatcalls for regression in the service of a better start. This educative mode requireslearners to cross over into a liminal space away from the world of linear engage-ment and responsibilities. The liminality echoes the origins of life in the womband the role of the family and immediate community in vesseling the develop-ment of a person or an organization. It assumes cycles of return, death, and re-birth in response to internal and external changes. Its base in human physiologyensures it will continue to be an aspect of educative processes. However, thereare emergent changes in culture that may lead to new learning situations relatedto the informational structures. Wexler (2000) observed that “the social relationsof high informational production dematerialize the body and restructure timeand space, unintentionally setting the stage for a mass resacralization of sharedmeaning” (p. 70) and, quoting Robert Bellah, “a revival of the profound collectiveexperience.”






There are new possibilities arising with communications that use the vast ca-pabilities of the Internet to open the boundaries of one’s engagements and chal-lenge one’s sense of identity. With such a scope of information and immediacy ofexchange, we may find that the existing images of education are inadequate, andeven transformative education may take on forms more related to collective ex-periences than individual passages. What has been liminal may become the spaceof social commerce. What have been community rituals become private explo-rations. The vessel of transformation becomes the world in a grain of sand.

There is much to be learned and presented in the new journal.

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Will McWhinney, Ph.D., is founding coeditor of the Journal of TransformativeEducation. He has been working as a faculty member at the Fielding Graduate Insti-tute (FGI) and leading workshops for mid-career adults for more than 30 years. Hehas been a designer of new educational programs at Leeds University (England), theUniversity of California at Los Angeles, FGI, and in corporate settings and is contin-uing to create new learning opportunities for transformative engagements. His lifelongfields of special interest have included system thinking, myth and metaphor, and theirpractices in organization and community development. These focuses are combined in





his 1997 publication, Paths of Change, and further elaborated on in a newly com-pleted work, Grammars of Engagement.

Laura Markos, Ph.D., is founding coeditor of the Journal of Transformative Edu-cation. She is an independent organizational consultant to nonprofit, educational,and business organizations, specializing in facilitation of systemic cultural change.Her practice draws on experience as an international consultant, change agent, cor-porate executive, and volunteer. She has taught graduate-level professional courses,published several professional manuals and articles on change, and is a frequent con-ference speaker and facilitator.





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