Millie Randall

Jim Vandermey

English 111

18 October 2017

Difficulty Paper

Jack Mezirows Chapter is about what he calls the Transformative learning theory.

Throughout his article he talks about different aspects to the theory such as autonomous learning,

or independent and personally driven work, the importance of the foundation we receive as

children, and why discourse is imperative. In his piece, I found myself agreeing with a lot of

what he ha to say. I did however find a few of the points he made puzzling. More specifically, I

began to feel lost as he spoke about the education for transformative learning. Mezirow claims

that to facilitate transformative learning, teachers need to call the assumptions we make as

students to our attention, and then we need to be critical and challenge these ideas. Learners

need practice in recognizing frames of reference and using their imaginations to redefine

problems from a different perspective.

I found this to be puzzling at first because I didnt fully understand what he meant to

redefine problems. I get that as students, we see and encounter problems, evaluate them and

are expected to solve them. When he follows that up by proposing that we approach the

problems with a different perspective it made his point more clear. In this section I feel that he

was simply trying to say that the perspective, attitude and or the approach that we as students

take to problems is most effective when we take a step back and think deeper as problem solvers,

as opposed to just immediately grasping onto the ideas that initially pop into our minds. His
purpose is to call attention to the need to be more critical thinkers, and to give more thought to

our immediate assumptions.

This is an important part to his article as a whole. The idea of challenging ourselves to

think more critically goes directly along with other big topics of his main idea. As being

autonomous learners requires lots of personal and independent working, critical thinking in depth

is something that requires a student to generate thoughts within their own minds as well. Using a

frame of reference, taking action as a responsible agent, using your imagination to reevaluate and

define problems, and giving critical thought to problems and questions are all things directly

related to one another, that Mezirow theorizes as qualities required for Transformative learning

to take place. Another quote taken from his passage reads A frame of reference encompasses

cognitive, conative and emotional components, and is composed of two dimensions: habits of

mind and point of view. This is confusing and hard to understand at first. Upon unpacking this

section as well I was able to directly relate it to my passage I had chosen. Basically what he was

doing was introducing the idea of frames of reference and the move he was making was to

explain the importance of it so that later on in the article when it was brought up again the reader

was already familiar with the idea of it.