Introducing the NEW Community of Practice on Transformative Education
Transformative education is about possibility - the possibility that everyone has the opportunity to learn, grow, develop, and contribute. Through the lens of educational inequity, many face limited opportunities, considerable barriers, and diminished life chances.
Students who have faced the disempowering nature of educational inequity come to us with a broad set of needs. Rather than start out simply with a best practices model borrowed from others, we can use an inquiry-to-practice approach that has been guided by big questions such as:
- How do individuals from marginalized backgrounds overcome and transcend limiting circumstances and diminished life chances?
- How can individuals respond intentionally, skillfully, and in healthy and wise ways to social and educational barriers as well as inevitable challenges in life?
- How might we help students engage in the transformative process of finding meaning, purpose, direction, and vitality?
In the Transformative Education Community of Practice, you will bring your questions about teaching for creating equitable outcomes for all students. We will begin with where our praxis has led us thus far with special attention to critical integrative, transformative, and a commitment to participatory inquiry, dialogue, reflection, and action.
As David Shenk puts it in The Genius in All of Us, "We do not have a talent scarcity, but a talent abundance. We can begin to think of ourselves as teaching for educational equity--creating environments and facilitating experiences that can lead to a level of student actualization and meaning-making that is transformative and transcendent in the face of inequity".
For more information, Contact Charlie Johnson
chajohns@iupui.edu