Research & Practice

Objective

Humanity is experiencing increasingly an existential crisis in the form of COVID, climate change, disasters, environmental destruction, physical and mental disease, food and water insecurities, poverty, wars, racism and similar disorienting dilemmas. Transformative learning offers theories, methodologies, methods and tools that may contribute valuably to transforming and expanding human capabilities in vital ways to support the collective towards turning the tide.

To share existing and co-create new knowledge regarding transformative learning and pathways that facilitate individual and collective transformations, we are facilitating research and practice of transformative learning by supporting diverse ways that encourage and connect researchers and practitioners locally and globally in shared action-oriented learning.

Generating and sharing transformative paradigms, theories, methodologies, methods and practices that create the space for transformation and diverse ways of knowing to occur is key to deepening human capacity to understand and utilizing transformative learning individually and collectively in diverse spaces, including grass roots movements, communities, corporates/industry, government and education. The ITLA seeks to nurture and empower these diverse communities by co-creating opportunities to connect, share, support, empower and join forces.

Activities

The ITLA research and practice circle engages diverse pathways offering its members spaces of co-exploration, research and praxis on theories, methodologies and tools in in-person, virtual, synchronistic and asynchronistic spaces. As a member, you will have the opportunity to contribute to creating this transformative learning space, which envisions:

• Engaging with transformative educational/learning practices with researchers and practitioners from around the world
• Sharing learnings from transformative research projects to bring forward experience, knowledge and skills
• Contributing research and practice resources to the ITLA resource hub
  • Sharing funding opportunities
  • Featuring published works and sharing opportunities to publish (e.g., books, journals, special journal issues, reports)
  • Posting calls for collaborators
  • Spotlighting researchers, practitioners and research-practitioner collaborations (e.g., interviews, videos)
  • Collaborating with MA and PhD students to take lead in research and application of transformative learning, potentially with the support of senior researchers
  • Inquire into specific transformative topics and practices and how they are used with differing groups and spaces
• Co-creating and co-curating communities of research and practice, which may:
  • Align locally/regionally and/or across countries
  • Engage affinity groups (e.g., Indigenous, African American) and engage across communities of differing backgrounds
  • Explore philosophical frameworks and methodologies
• Host collaborative virtual writing retreats

If you love to co-create one or several of these activities with us, we love to explore with you what you like to contribute to and how we could work together. Please send us an email here.