Transcommunality and Transformative Learning

I really enjoyed this week’s readings—just as I have, for the most part, all of the other material from the semester thus far.  What struck me this week in Expanding the Boundaries of Transformative Learning: Essays on Theory and Praxis (O’Sullivan, Morrell, and O’Connor, 2002) and Transcommunality: From the Politics of Conversion to the Ethics of Respect (Brown Childs, 2003) was the call to consider larger issues affecting humanity and the planet.  In particular because of the focus we’ve had thus far on individual identities, I’ve found myself thinking a bit myopically, not necessarily in a bad sense, but certainly to the effect of not thinking about how these larger global issues with which I am concerned fit in.  This week’s texts though build upon these notions of self-identity and empowerment toward the project of a more just and sustainable world.

Brown Childs defines transcommunality as “the constructive and developmental interaction occurring among distinct autonomy-oriented communities and organizations, each with its own particular history, outlook, and agenda” (Brown Childs, 10) and traces his interest in such collaborative efforts toward social change back his own roots.  Far from negating the importance of individual and community identities, Brown Childs advocates for using these in concert with those of others toward more a more socially just and ecologically sustainable world.  Borrowing ideas and methods from indigenous communities and cultures and their connections to the natural world, he looks at ways in which we may come together “without simply duplicating the hierarchies of power and domination with which we are contending” (Brown Childs, 10).

 The concerns that Brown Childs has (the human and ecological price of our rapidly globalizing world) are similar to those of O’Sullivan, Morrell, and O’Connor in Transformative Learning.  Transformative learning for them goes beyond the projects of cultural studies and critical pedagogy, which focus primarily on human issues and extends itself to integrate issues of peace, social justice, and ecology in such as was as to present a fundamental challenge to market-driven education (O’Sullivan, Morrell, and O’Connor, xvi).  As a starting point for the volume, they define transformative learning as:

Transformative learning involves experiencing a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feelings, and actions.  It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world.  Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations, our relationships with other humans and with the natural world, our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race, and gender, our body-awarenesses, our visions of alternative approaches to living, and our sense of possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy. (O’Sullivan, Morrell, and O’Connor, xvii)

How do we begin to make connections between our own lives and choices with the lives of others around the world and with the world itself?  How do we begin to integrate consideration of these things into our everyday experience?