Written by Michelle Meyer, Professor in OWU's Department of Psychology
September 2024
At Ohio Wesleyan, we proudly voice our desire to offer students the best learning experience we can. It's why we support students to think big, do good, go global, and get real.
Although a lot of higher education institutions might tout aspirations like these, many struggle to live up to them, instead falling back on decades-old patterns of what education can look like. The reality is that offering this kind of experience is hard, and there's always another step to take. At OWU, though, we are truly committed to getting through this struggle. So for this month's blog, I'm going to cover some of this struggle in providing the best possible learning environment, and present one such solution for how we at OWU can continue to fulfill our offer to students.
Most of the U.S. education system is based on the banking model, which places the instructor as an expert who transmits information to the student learners. This model treats students as a "bank" that institutions and instructors put information into as a sort of investment. After graduation, they take this information to careers and cash in on that investment.
As we've likely seen in our own teaching, the pedagogical problem with the banking model is that it has been shown to have negative impacts of critical thinking and information literacy, as well as reducing successful career outcomes. This method of instruction works when assessment focuses on repetition and restating of information, but doesn't work with cultivating applications of knowledge and growing disciplines. Different approaches have tried to counteract this, many of which we are actively trying here at OWU. Relying on my own practices and scholarship, I'm going to focus specifically on describing transformative learning theory (TLT).
At its core, TLT is a pedagogical framework that emphasizes the use and purpose of knowledge to change a person's state of being and habitual behaviors. It suggests that we all exist at a certain homeostasis – our knowledge, assumptions, and beliefs have settled into a comfortable, unquestioned balance that remains solid until we come into contact with an outside catalyst that disrupts it.
Traditional, instruction-based education usually fails to penetrate this barrier. In banking, the process of giving information is direct and streamlined, leaving little room for connecting learners to use cases and context. You've probably seen this before, where the banking model results in an intelligent person who can answer every question correctly on an exam, but struggles to identify the same terms or theories when they get a job in their field.
Instead, TLT requires learners to understand where their existing habits are and then use content knowledge as a form of counter-example. Sometimes, this is done on the instructor's side, where we are able to mold our own teaching based on what students will do with it. Other times, students who are aware of their own goals can do this process on their own.
In order for us to foster a transformative learning environment in a classroom, we need to incorporate six major characteristics:
The most modern revision of TLT also includes a ten-step process to transformation. Beyond the original process, there are multiple critiques and revisions from over the past ten years, some of which are discipline-specific.
Inevitably, a lot of us end up teaching existing knowledge as content (in introductory courses and early STEM, especially). In order to have critical thoughts, students need a baseline of facts to work with, which can end up feeling like uncomfortable banking. I understand the concern that TLT wouldn't work in these contexts, as this same concern was shared by research literature in its early years. However, modern studies suggest TLT practices work in a variety of content fields, including engineering, physics, sustainable education, healthcare, first year seminars, and many more.
TLT pedagogies are effective because transformative learning doesn't obfuscate content knowledge. Rather, facts as we know them are to be used in practice for the purpose of a life and a career. Even factual ideas and discoveries of the past can be interpreted through the lens of how they are used in the modern day, or tied to connections of student experiences of where they came to believe a different perspective.
TLT practices go far beyond the scope of what was presented here, but there are some immediate pedagogical tweaks that you can take into your own classroom, and examples of how I'm trying to do this in my own classes.
TLT is far from the only pedagogy that counters the banking model, but it does carry the same dedication for student learning that we strive for at OWU.
Even sampling from these practices can help keep nudging us away from the banking model and spur the deep learning we want to see.