Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education A Dialogue 1St Ed Edition Laura Formenti All Chapter
Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education A Dialogue 1St Ed Edition Laura Formenti All Chapter
Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education A Dialogue 1St Ed Edition Laura Formenti All Chapter
Transforming
Perspectives in
Lifelong Learning
and Adult Education
A Dialogue
Laura Formenti Linden West
“Riccardo Massa” Department of Human School of Childhood and Educational
Sciences for Education Sciences
Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca Canterbury Christ Church University
Milan, Italy Canterbury, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For all our friends—in Europe and a wider world—in the community of
scholars called the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults
(ESREA), Life History and Biographical Research Network. They have
contributed greatly to our understanding of self, our lives, learning and the
hope we call education.
Preface
This book will make a traveller of thee, if by its counsel thou wilt ruled be…
John Bunyan, (1678). The Pilgrim’s Progress. Penguin Classics, 1963: p. 4.
And yet, today as yesterday, and hopefully as tomorrow, unceasingly on
the brink of catastrophe, humanity keeps being held together by this very
same, almost invisible, thin thread: «know thyself», so that the sun may
keep rising. Daniela Boccassini (2017), On the Wings of the Night: Jung,
Dante and Individuation.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better…
Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse
again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Samuel Beckett (1983/2009).
Worstward Ho, In Company etc. Dirk Van Dyke (Ed). London: Faber
and Faber, p. 81.
The quotations from Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Daniela Boccassini
and Samuel Beckett express some of the spirit underlying our book on
transformation, transformative learning and adult education. The met-
aphor shaping the text is of pilgrimage; we have dialogued together, as
well as with diverse others, when walking our way through different
theories and perspectives on learning, formation and transformation.
vii
viii Preface
xiii
Contents
3 On Perspective 53
xv
xvi Contents
9 Imagine 215
Bibliography 283
Index 305
List of Figures
xvii
1
Landscapes of Transforming Perspectives
Introducing ‘Trans-formation’
In this opening chapter, we share with you our overlapping and distinct
reasons for writing this book and for engaging in such a challenging,
imaginative, eclectic, critical, deeply personal as well as an emotional
dialogue, on a topic that frustrates, inspires, intrigues and troubles us.
The book is the outcome of a kind of pilgrimage involving encounters
with an eclectic body of people and literature on transformation and
transformative learning; and of an effort to think afresh and challenge
some old binaries, between feeling and cognition, the sacred and the
social, conscious and unconscious life. We suggest that understanding
and engaging in transformative processes must be deeply rooted in real
life experience and an engagement with many perspectives. It requires
the capacity to listen to our own bodies and their manifold ways of per-
ceiving and knowing, beyond the obvious and visible.
We want to build a more holistic and richer perspective on the condi-
tions in which humans might flourish. Unfortunately, holistic is one of
those words, like transformation and transformative learning, carrying
the risk of cliché. So, we attempt to give all these words renewed life, or
Consumerism
Our discussion of transformation encompasses the here and now of
contemporary culture, where desire is mass produced and transforma-
tion marketed. Learning and education themselves can be thought of as
products or commodities, valued for their exchange value in accessing
a new job or desirable lifestyle. The barely concealed persuaders of the
advertising world and digital media are perpetually at work, encourag-
ing people to believe that to ‘Buy a new car, re-decorate your house,
replace your wardrobe, have a face lift’, or even, ironically, ‘take a
new course for skill upgrading’ are ways to transform ourselves. There
are ubiquitous images of this at airports: buy the latest Samsung or
Apple phone, sign a new insurance contract, buy a ticket for an amaz-
ing cruise, and you will be transported into a quasi-sexual, glamorous,
transformative fantasy.
Consumerism is pervasive in educational settings, often unquestioned
and under-interrogated. Universities are sold for their potential to offer
golden keys to the labour market or to enhance our lifetime’s earning.
Raymond Williams, the British cultural theorist and adult educator,
warned that the advertising agents hold a reductive view of people and
their potentialities, as ‘masses’ to be broken down into demographics,
to be sold a range of products. Expensively educated people were ‘now
in the service of the most brazen money-grabbing exploitation of the
inexperience of ordinary people’ (Williams 1989, p. 6). ‘The old cheap-
jack is still there in the market… he thinks of his victims as a slow igno-
rant crowd. The new cheapjack lives in offices with contemporary décor,
using scraps of linguistics, psychology, and sociology to influence what
he thinks of as the mass mind’ (Williams 1989, p. 7). S/he may nowa-
days be employed by Silicon Valley or in organisations like Cambridge
Analytica, using big data and psychological profiling to sell products,
1 Landscapes of Transforming Perspectives
7
When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise
‘What interests me is me, or my organisation, or my species,’ you chop
off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you
want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will
be a good place to put them. You forget that the eco-mental system called
Lake Erie is a part of your wider eco-mental system – and that if Lake
12 L. Formenti and L. West
self. Dewey also, like other American pragmatists, uses the word beauty
as part of a perpetual experiment in what works, intellectually, or in
creating good enough social forms. This book, for me, represents part
of a pilgrimage of lifelong learning, and a search for beauty. It includes
dialoguing with Laura about the systemic view of transformation; and
a larger circuitry that shapes lives. I seek to imagine experiences of
transformation through the eyes of a different person, a woman, from
Lombardy, in Italy, with different experience as well as academic per-
spectives. We can call this our compositional, experimental and existen-
tial pilgrimage.
maternity as the central aspect of a woman’s life. She felt like a doll,
and treated as such, and began a journey towards self-respect. But what
of the children? Our defiance, and the urge to transform, inevitably
involves others, who can be damaged. Can there be narcissistic excess
in a journey of transformation, when our relationships are discarded in
the name of self-realisation? Is transformation necessarily a shattering of
lives, a wrenching, involving the sacrifice of others as well as fragments
of ourselves?
In Chapter 5, we pause to dialogue with Sigmund Freud about edu-
cation as an impossible business. How educational encounters are rid-
dled with infantilisation, envy and hatred. Where students are greedy
and demand instant gratification; and teachers sadistic. A pessimism
stalks this part of the landscape, maybe rooted in Freud’s own biogra-
phy and the barbarism he witnessed overwhelming Europe in the last
century. Humans, he insisted, are competitive and aggressive creatures,
and educators, in the name of rationality, easily airbrush this from the
picture. We consider other Freudian perspectives, including those of
Deborah Britzman, who regards love and education as intimates, and
their offerings as precarious. They encourage dependency and helpless-
ness, as well as the possibility of new perspective. Psychoanalyst Donald
Winnicott reminds us that we are always forged in relationship, and
as infants can feel misunderstood and even illegitimate. But recogni-
tion and reparation are always possible. Linden draws once more on
his research among adult learners in universities to illuminate deeply
ambivalent processes but how recognition arrives in the attentiveness
of a tutor, or in literature, enabling a student to feel understood, legiti-
mate, maybe transformed, at least for a while.
In Chapter 6, we meet ‘soul work’, a search to integrate different
parts of the psyche, in the name of individuation. We dialogue with
C.G. Jung and Sabina Spielrein who emphasised the importance of
symbolic rather than logical thinking, in releasing unconscious met-
aphors and energy. If Freud thought that religion was an escape from
reality, Jung considered it, potentially, as a route to the divine, and one-
ness with creation. Jung used literature, like Dante’s pilgrimage, to illu-
minate the journey of the soul to a kind of transformation; from base
metal to gold, with spiritual helpers on the way, including Beatrix,
1 Landscapes of Transforming Perspectives
23
Virgil, the Virgin Mary and Christ. Beatrix represents the transforma-
tive power of love. We finish the chapter with the biography of a family
doctor on a journey to self-understanding, and the integration of fem-
inine and masculine propensities as well as recovering the spiritual in
his life. The spiritual is especially important, for Linden, when working
with marginalised, distressed patients.
At the start of Chapter 7 we encounter a mature student called
Sofia, and Laura opens a window into embodied and embedded
learning. In Sophia’s biography, we have glimpses of struggles to be,
repressed in her family, but also in the organisation of university courses
and more generally by attitudes to mature women students in the wider
culture. Conversations in guidance workshops created a safe space for
different qualities of thinking to emerge. Transformation becomes a
whole-body experience; and education a process of fostering new rela-
tionships between people and with the symbolic order. Laura dialogues
with Gregory Bateson about different levels of learning. Level 0 has to
do with a capacity to respond consistently. Level 1 involves changes
in the quality or quantity of responses, within a given way of seeing.
Level 2 is finding other perspectives. Level 3 is about identity change,
a transformation in our ways of articulating alternatives, and ourselves.
Bateson considers unconscious processes to be dominant in human
activity, insisting that conscious purpose and rationality drive humans
into myopic and destructive behaviour. Corrective forces are found in
truer qualities of relationship, as well as in the unconscious and the sen-
sitive (aesthetical) body, through the mediation of art, dream, play, and
humour.
In Chapter 8, we engage with social transformation, as a kind of anti-
dote to more individualistic perspectives. We ruminate on the histori-
cal connection between democratic learning, individual and collective
transformation, and the role of fraternity, the spiritual and the good
enough group. We dialogue with the Christian/Ethical Socialism of
R.H. Tawney, a distinguished British adult educator, who saw the good
workers’ education tutorial class as a manifestation or social incarnation
of the Kingdom on earth, a microcosm of the transformed society. We
meet British cultural theorist Raymond Williams and his writing on
culture as ordinary. Williams was a humanistic Marxist, like Antonio
24 L. Formenti and L. West
below. Drawing on Blake and Bateson we suggest that heaven and hell
are in fact part of us, here and now and essential elements in seeking the
worthwhile life. We return to ideas of learning and the spirit of transfor-
mation. We contemplate an image of transformation that is emotional,
social and cognitive, as well as deeply embodied, relational, spiritual,
and critical at one and the same time. We seek to move beyond frag-
ments and consider a pattern that connects.
The final metalogue begins with reflection on two cathedrals, the
Italian Gothic Duomo in Milan, and the Norman/Gothic Cathedral
of Canterbury. They are symbols of landscape. What do we see when
looking at these two magnificent buildings? In Milano, Linden saw a
huge screen on the left-hand side of the Duomo, advertising Samsung
mobile phones. Laura had not noticed this at all. You need the other’s
sight, to discover your own. Our final metalogue strives to move beyond
the seduction of images, capitalism and the loss of the sacred, as well
as the patriarchal and reductive representation of women, towards the
imperative of quest and keeping on keeping on in our nomadic lives.
We have learned to grasp details and get a glimpse of a bigger landscape,
and to be perpetually curious and reflexive towards the world outside
and within. We are lifelong learners and our task, as academics, is to
bring love and criticality into the frame, and to be perpetually open to
new, multi-disciplinary, and beautiful ways of seeing.
Fig. 1.1 Michelangelo’s La Pietà, St. Peter’s Cathedral, Rome
What Do You See? A Metalogue
on Difference
Linden: It was years ago. I cried when I saw it. I did not know what was
happening to me. I saw the sculpture, half-hidden in a corner of St
Peter’s in Rome and thought or rather felt ‘This is beautiful’. It spoke
to me then, and still speaks now, more than words.
Laura: This is not only what you see. It’s about memory, emotions, identity.
A reconstruction and the story of an encounter that touched you inside.
Linden: Well, I was wandering around this huge basilica, and five to
ten minutes later I saw the sculpture and seeing it triggered the strong
reaction. Overwhelming. I did not know immediately that it was by
Michelangelo. Only afterwards, walking away from Piazza San Pietro,
I saw it in the souvenir stands: dozens, hundreds of postcard reproduc-
tions of La Pietà. Then I knew.
Laura: My first meeting with it was at sixteen, visiting Rome with my
class. It surprised me, it was already my favourite piece, but I had
imagined it bigger. I also felt strangely moved by it, for the contrast of
beauty and sorrow that it communicates. At that time, the piece was
not protected, as it is now, under a glass box. You could almost touch
it. Sculptures are so material that I always think about touching them.
Linden: Touching is a different way of knowing from seeing.
Laura: Yes, wasn’t this conversation meant to illuminate the process of
seeing? Learning by seeing seems crucial for the human species.
Linden: Perception is more than seeing. It is a meeting between inside
and outside. Body, heart and soul are entailed.
Laura: What do we know about perception? Visual perception is so
dominant for us but touching or hearing work differently. Do you
know John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, the book from the BBC show
in the Seventies? He claimed that ‘seeing comes before words’ and
we approach art in ways that are not neutral since we are guided by
assumptions, and our frames may be problematic indeed, shaped by
power, by our previous learning contexts, and prejudice. How can we
become aware of the relationship between what we see and what we
know? And how did we come to see things in such a way, affected by
what we know or believe?
Linden: I know the book. ‘Every image embodies a way of seeing’ (Berger
1972, p. 10). I liked it, but somehow, I was not fully satisfied; it is too
materialistic in its suspicion of the idea of mystery and the religious.
Laura: But matter matters. Perception depends on our place in space and
time, and our position, not least physical. We see what we act. I learnt
this from my father, a photographer and a self-taught amateur of art.
He showed me how we need light and shadow, in good proportions,
1 Landscapes of Transforming Perspectives
29
Language: English
From
Dickens
Holly
Berries
From
Dickens ·
Copyright
DeWolfe Fiske & Co
Boston · 1898 ·
First Day.
Dickens.
Mr. Pecksniff.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
Sam Weller.
Second Day.
Pickwick.
Charles Cheeryble.
Mr. Jarndyce.
Dickens.
Third Day.
Pickwick Papers.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
Haunted Man.
Little Dorrit.
Bleak House.
Martin Chuzzlewit.
Oliver Twist.
Fifth Day.
Battle of Life.
Haunted Man.
Little Dorrit.
Pickwick Papers.
Seventh Day.
Barnaby Rudge.
Bleak House.
A joke is a very good thing ...
but when that joke is made at the expense of
feelings, I set my face against it.
Nicholas Nickleby.
Little Dorrit.
Eighth Day.
Pickwick Papers.
Stagg.
Pickwick Papers.