Prendiamoci cura della Terra

Facing the change: reflections and new awareness

In autumn, training activities resume: schools, universities, and professional institutes reopen after a period of enormous difficulties.

The pandemic has induced great transformations in behavior, teaching methods, and methodologies, in educational approaches.

How to face the change? In a context so profoundly changed that it has created dismay, anxieties, frustrations, and a loss of certainty in educators, teachers and trainers, we recommend a reflection on how to rethink and redesign one’s own strategies.

The theory of transformative learning. Learn to think like an adult

Author: Jack Mezirow | Curators: F. Cappa and G. Del Negro | Publisher: Cortina Raffaello
Edition year: 2016 | Pages: XLIV-175 p., Paperback | EAN: 9788860308320

Formulated in 1978 by Jack Mezirow, the “Transformative Learning Theory” has since aroused great interest in the fields of education, training, teaching, and care.

According to Mezirow, an unexpected “disorienting dilemma” that refutes certainties, experiences, and previous knowledge that do not offer solutions, can induce in an adult a process of reflection, questioning, new awareness and change that leads to different “perspectives of meaning “, that is, towards new personal frames of reference within which the experiences and skills acquired are assimilated and transformed.

Adulthood is therefore not a point of arrival, but a point of continuous restarts in incessant evolution. This ability of the individual to rethink and formulate his own ideas and beliefs, that is to have a critical capacity of his own experience is fundamental to trigger a lifelong learning process in him and to produce greater resilience useful for dealing profitably with change and redesigning his own. private and professional life.

Jack Mezirow (1923-2014) taught Adult Education and Life-long Learning at the Teachers College of Columbia University in New York. A scholar of learning processes in adulthood, he is considered the father of transformative learning theory.

Credits:

Author: Maria Beatrice Lupi. A naturalist and expert in training, planning for sustainable development, participatory methodologies, and European planning. Currently, she is involved in dissemination and education for sustainability.

Translation by Maria Antonietta Sessa