Thesis advisor: Audrey A. Friedman / Through adventure-based learning (ABL), individuals analyze unique experiences in order to generalize and apply critical skills and dispositions to their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities (Dillon, Tannehill, & O’Sullivan, 2010).  However, there is a lack of research documenting the transferability of ABL to other contexts (Kraft, 1999; Furman & Sibthorp, 2012). In educator preparation programs, coursework in ABL has been found inadequate for its incorporation into practice (Sutherland & Legge, 2016; Dillon, Tannehill, & O’Sullivan, 2010). Expanding this research base is critical in justifying “adventure programming [as] more than just fun and games, and to support it as the powerful form of change that practitioners tacitly know it to be” (Priest & Gass, 1999, p. 478), and understanding how that change can impact teachers. This research is informed by the overall question: In what ways can experience as an adventure-based learning (ABL) leader impact the subsequent epistemologies and practices of professional educators? Utilizing qualitative, collective case study methodology (Yin, 2018; Hancock & Algozzine, 2017) and grounded in Mezirow’s (2000) transformative learning theory, this research studies ten professional educators who, as college students, had served as ABL facilitators. Findings indicate that participants’ experience in facilitating ABL aligned with Mezirow’s criteria for transformative learning both personally and professionally. While participants rarely incorporated the physical challenges and fantastical premises typically associated with ABL, they reported their pre-professional experiences deeply influenced their pedagogical practice.  This research posits a new framework for these connections, adventure-informed pedagogy, to explore how ABL philosophies and processes, but not practices, impacted former facilitators and their classrooms. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

In the current globalizing society, teachers are provided opportunities to move across their national borders to seek learning, professional development, and working opportunities. Technology-related professional development is particularly valued for teachers' sojourn to the technology intensive cultures. This qualitative cross-case study explored the K-12 Chinese language teachers' changes of teachers' application and perspective toward educational technology in cross-cultural teaching context through the lens of transformative learning theory. The qualitative data is collected from the interviews with 20 teacher participants in the four stages of cross-cultural sojourning: pre-departure, currently sojourning, post-sojourn, and immigrated. A qualitative cross-case analysis is conducted to compare the characteristics of teachers in different cases, and developed the complete process of the cross-cultural technology adoption and perspective. Factors contributed to the changes are also identified. Five issues related to the process are discussed. Implications and future directions were also included.

A Thirst for Moretakes the reader on a journey into self-development culture around Portland, Oregon. The author attends events devoted to personal growth to try to understand how this culture shapes our lives and the way we think. Along the way, she encounters psychics, mystics, an alleged cult leader, and seekers and self-reinventors of all stripes. As participants in this culture work to build their own philosophies and define their own spirituality, they also create their own communities--intentionally and otherwise. These communities form the heart of this exploration. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the spontaneous communities that arise during afternoon events in which participants pay for goods, services, and information pertaining to personal growth and spirituality. Chapter 3 delves into a sacred art and music festival in which participants gather outdoors for a handful of days in the hopes of connecting with each other and transforming themselves--and society--in the process. The final chapters explore the lives of two communities. In Chapter 4, a woman devotes her life to starting up an eco-village in the foothills of Mt. Hood. In Chapter 5, the author visits a 41-year-old commune in which residents and visitors have abandoned former lives in their search for meaning, fulfillment, belonging, and a place to call home. As the author questions others about their beliefs, she begins to question her own. Why do we believe what we believe?

The Adult Education sector in South Africa (SA) occupies a crucial space in higher education (HE) in terms of securing access and opportunities for a diverse group of non-traditional students to further their development. Amongst this diversity are highly marginalized subgroupings of adult learners, especially black working-class women. Participation of these women within HE requires serious attention given the low social ranking that this group continues to occupy in all spheres. Evidence drawn from Adult Education research suggests that not enough attention has been given to this group of learners with respect to how they are impacted by issues of geographic, cultural and racial diversity in the Adult Education setting. This study undertaken here reports on transformative dimensions underlining Adult Education pedagogy, with a specific focus on the concept of empowerment and how this is attained by RPL learners. A qualitative case-study methodology using a critical interpretive perspective grounded in phenomenological enquiry, was used to develop contextual understandings of four disadvantaged adult female learners' experiences of their transitions into HE. The focus is on these learners' perceptions of the forms of empowerment they have gained from their participation in a Higher Certificate in Education in Adult Education (HCEAE) course, and the extent to which such empowerment has impacted positive change in their lives, even beyond the course. The argument made in this qualitative study is that the active participation of marginalized black women in Adult Education, does lead to the attainment of multiple levels of self-empowerment. Such empowerment is realized when the objectives of national educational provisions, operationalized through Adult Education legislature, are correctly aligned with the transformative and social justice mission of Adult Education theory and practice. Proper alignment yields desirable outcomes in terms of enabling transformative learning environments that engender experiences of self-empowerment, agency and control. To this effect, an evaluative study was conducted of the Higher Certificate in Education in Adult Education (HCEAE) course offered by the University of Cape Town. The findings in this study demonstrate that factors such as race, geographic setting and cultural location, impact experiences of empowerment amongst adult learners. Furthermore, it is evident that such experiences of empowerment is a multi-layered and dynamic process which occur at cognitive, personal and social levels that can only be realized through praxis. The bringing together of educational policy, theory, and practice in proactive and productive ways in this study, also offers the potential for designing new hybrid frameworks for assessing the extent to which Adult Education provisions successfully achieve their transformative function, beyond the educational setting.

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The National Writing Project (NWP) conducts four and five-week professional development summer workshops that K-16 expert teachers consistently praise as transformative. The central question posed in this dissertation focuses on whether the NWP workshop, based on a teachers-teaching-teachers design, could also serve as an effective professional development vehicle for transforming and preparing graduate student instructors (GSIs) to teach first-year composition. This question arises out of the need for knowledge-building graduate student preparation programs that keep pace with the increased demands of the first-year composition course and of the first-year composition students. Methods used to explore the feasibility of the NWP to prepare GSIs involve an analytic autoethnography and two survey research instruments. In the autoethnography, the researcher views the various processes experienced throughout the NWP workshop through the twin lenses of Transformation Learning (TL) theory and constructivist learning pedagogy. In the survey research, the researcher investigates the GSI participants' and local site directors' perceptions concerning the value and benefits of the NWP workshop to prepare GSIs for teaching writing. The researcher's analytic autoethnography reveals the transformative effects of the NWP experience on the teacher-frames of the researcher and of those peers attending the same NWP institute, while the surveys of the GSI participants and the local site directors reveal similarly positive effects of NWP pedagogy for preparing GSI for teaching writing. Based on these findings, combined with foundational support from the NWP meta-analysis of student writing outcomes of NWP participating teachers generated by the Local Sites Research Initiatives (LSRI), along with the independent Inverness Associates' studies focusing on the perceptions of teachers involved in the NWP's New-Teacher Initiative (NTI), the researcher recommends a pilot project involving a NWP designed pre-semester workshop for graduate student instructors prior to teaching first-year composition.

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The research project asks the question: What role does storytelling have in enhancing cultural self-awareness and achieving perspective transformation in terms of values, attitudes, and assumptions about the world? The study group comprised people who participated between 1995 and 2009 in a year-long Colorado Vincentian Volunteer (CVV) program for young adults. It combined an online survey with 1-hour follow-up interviews by phone with nine individuals. This data is augmented with written stories produced during their volunteer year by the interviewees. The study shows that over 90% of those surveyed agree that regular, structured reflective story-telling sessions helped consolidate their learning and foster perspective transformation as defined by Mezirow (1990). Analysis of interviews plus evidence from written stories supports these claims and also illustrates volunteer development of cultural self-awareness as described by Yoshikawa (1980). I conclude that storytelling can be a significant emotional, psychological, and intellectual support to people involved in voluntary intercultural experiences.

The purpose of this study was to verify Mezirow's (1978) Transformative Learning Theory as a model to explain how study abroad participation facilitates efforts to internationalize students in higher education. Specifically this study used block-entry, logistic and linear regression models to explore the relationship between transformative learning processes and study abroad outcomes. Data were collected from business students (N =107) at Brigham Young University using a retrospective pretest method. Findings indicated transformative learning was occurring in short term study abroad settings and transformative learning phases were related to increases in Intercultural Competence. These findings were consistent between year cohorts suggesting the impacts were lasting.