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No recent body of research in the field of adult education has been given more attention in the pursuit of understanding adult learning than the study of transformative learning theory. Transformative learning theory is uniquely adult, abstract, idealized, and grounded in the nature of human communication. It seeks to explain how adults' expectations, framed within cultural assumptions and presuppositions, directly influence the meaning individuals derive from their experience. Since the original research by Jack Mezirow (1978) over 20 years ago that studied women returning to school after a long hiatus, numerous investigations and theoretical critiques have been undertaken to explore transformative learning in relationship to community and social transformation, power, intercultural learning, critical reflection, whole person learning, and career change, just to mention a few (see E. W. Taylor, 1997, 1998). In addition to the empirical and theoretical discussion, a growing body of instructional literature offers practitioners who work in a variety of adult and higher education settings innovative methods and techniques for fostering transformative learning in the classroom (e.g., Anderson & Saavedra, 1995; Cranton, 1994, 1995, 1997; Fulton, Licklider, & Schnelker, 1997; Jamieson, Kajs, & Agee, 1996; Laiken, 1997; Mezirow, 1990, 1991, 1995, 1997; Nabben, 1995; Robertson, 1997).
Fostering transformative learning is a practice of education that is "predicated on the idea that students are seriously challenged to assess their value system and worldview and are subsequently changed by the experience" (Quinnan, 1997, p. 42). However, despite the continued interest in transformative learning theory, little is known about how it actually looks in practice from an empirical perspective. My earlier, extensive review of the research on transformative learning revealed that "concepts of promoting and fostering transformative learning are the least empirically investigated" (E. W. Taylor, 1997, p. 38). Only five studies were identified in this review that directly informed the practice of fostering transformative learning in a typical classroom setting. In a subsequent paper (E. W. Taylor, 1998) I confirmed this same pattern of a lack of research and identified the need for researchers and adult educators to explore "the practicality of Mezirow's ideal conditions for learning in a typical classroom setting" (p. 61).
In essence, adult educators are being encouraged to promote a form of teaching from an array of instructional text...