The Learning Matters Podcast captures insights into, experiences of, and conversations around education at the University of Sussex. The podcast is hosted by Prof Wendy Garnham and Dr Heather Taylor. It is recorded monthly, and each month is centred around a particular theme. The theme of our tenth episode is ‘transformative learning’ and we hear from Dr Adhip Rawal, Assistant Professor in Psychology in the School of Psychology, and Chris Stocking, Lecturer in English Language in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities. 

Recording

Listen to the recording of Episode 10 on Spotify.

Transcript

Wendy Garnham:

Welcome to the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, where we capture insights, experiences, and conversations around education at our institution and beyond. Our theme for this episode is Transformative Learning, and our guests are Dr Adhip Rawal, assistant professor in psychology in the School of Psychology, and Chris Stocking, lecturer in English language in the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities. Our names are Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor, and we are your presenters today. Welcome, everyone.

All:

Hello.

Heather Taylor:

Can you give us an idea of the kinds of discussions you’ve been having around transformative learning and what that means to you? 

Chris Stocking:

So the discussions that we’ve been having, they go back a good few months. Adhip and I, we sort of became aware of each other’s work after we won the Education and Innovation awards for our respective projects. And Adhip’s, if I remember, was on stories from the heart, who we are, what we are, and it really resonated with me in some research that I’ve been doing. So I had a look at Adhip’s profile and found a paper that he’d recently written, called Deep Calling, the Will of the Heart. And reading through this, I realized that I had found a very kindred spirit here at the university that was thinking about knowledge and understanding and learning through very different perspectives using different concepts. So I reached out to him, and we met, and we began discussions. And I think at that stage, we hadn’t called it transformative learning at all. This is something that we’ve kind of given it this name at this stage, just as something that we can start to build around.

Adhip Rawal:

And I think there was something, so we didn’t use those words, transformative learning, and we haven’t used those words yet. I think the words that we were using were sort of being and belonging because they spoke to the respective strands of the work we’re engaged in. And I kind of felt when Chris messaged me and I found out about his work that these were sort of two strands that ought to find each other. You know, just like people have to kind of find each other to do something creative, it also seems to me that there are certain themes that have to find each other. So this connection between the themes of being and belonging seemed very important to me. And I think one aspect of that is, and that relates, I think, to what transformative learning means to me, is that we kind of make an invitation to each other to be closer than people have ever perhaps been in academia. So we make this invitation to each other, “let us be closer to each other”. And in this atmosphere of closeness, something will be generated that could potentially be transformative.

Heather Taylor (03:12):

By closeness, do you mean sort of in my mind, I’m thinking of sort of closeness in terms of sharing, maybe without barriers or without sort of a little bit of personal pretence, you know, which there can definitely be in academia. I think students as well can be concerned sometimes about oversharing, you know. So by closeness, do you mean this sort of sharing of experiences or sharing of thoughts? 

Adhip Rawal:

I think what I’m speaking about is sharing at a level of being that don’t necessarily come into contact with each other anymore. So Chris spoke about this paper that I wrote, Deep Calling, the Will of the Heart, so I think what we’re speaking to really is that we kind of now need to make an invitation to reinstate a very old channel of human communication, which is a heartfelt connection. And that heartfelt connection, that heartfelt way of speaking to one another and orienting to the world, can somehow be regenerative. So I’m saying that a person can begin to recover certain things that they ought to know about themselves and that they ought to be doing in the world.

Heather Taylor:

Like a sort of… a reawakening from having these connections? 

Adhip Rawal:

So that’s exactly it. So I think that’s the beauty of the connection because we have stopped including the heart, I think, in how we work and how we speak and what we do in academia, and now it’s lying asleep. It needs some form of impulse to start awakening again, speaking again.

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. So I mean, it’s interesting, you know, when I’m speaking with Adhip, and the words, the language that he uses, this idea of being, because a lot of the work that I do is looking at 

becoming. And so the way that I frame and understand these discussions and this proximity, this closeness that we’re engaged in is through kind of this collaborative becoming. It’s kind of leaning into these unexpected avenues of thinking, of discussing, being vulnerable enough to respond, to stumble in discussion, and to find sort of the edges of one another and to start to sort of, say, dream beyond those. So there’s a lot of different kind of epistemic framings that we’re engaged in, this discussion, this idea of the heart, of dreaming, of dancing. I think when we start to use different terminology, and this is what we’re engaged in, this is what we’re practicing, this is what we’re allowing ourselves to investigate and stumble and feel our way into, we start using these different concepts or terms to talk about learning and this experience of listening and speaking and thinking and feeling from the heart, the soul, the spirit, it allows us to start thinking about learning in different terms, different ways. And for me, there’s something very generative and creative and earnest in this. It doesn’t need to fit back into a certain research paradigm or a certain disciplinary framing. It’s indisciplinary in that sense, so we’re drawing on a lot of different concepts. We’re investigating teaching in very different ways, Adhip, through his work within psychology, and my own with interculturality and these intercultural spaces, which are very dynamic, rich, fixed, and tender spaces. There’s a lot of contestation and negotiation that is required. There’s a lot of care that is required. And it’s something that I notice a lot when I speak with students that I teach is one thing that they continuously say is that they felt it was a space in which they were cared for. And that, I think, is very important. So in this extension, this invitation that Adhip has offered by thinking about the heart, there is within that an invitation for thinking about how we care within the university and ways that we frame discourses around students who are people with sometimes very complex lives and how we acknowledge that and talk differently about the people who are here at the university.

Wendy Garnham (07:48):

It sort of raises two things for me. One is that sense of personalization, which it seems to be much more about the individual and directing the learning to that individual. But also, I wondered if you sort of thought about how this relates to the sort of the whole idea of 

risk taking and learning, because it sort of feels a bit more like it’s like that sort of caring, supportive context within which you can take risks, and you can stumble, and you can make errors, but that is how learning is most effective, I guess, in some ways. So I don’t know if that is sort of a true reflection of what you were thinking with that.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. I think it’s a very, very nice reflection, actually, a very nice question. Because I think what you’re speaking to there really is something very, very important that there’s a kind of a recognition or at least a possibility that what the individual has to say is important and could be of profound significance. Maybe they have something to say that has never been said in the world and could never be said without this person speaking it. So I think that sort of openness to that possibility that is very, very important to be open to who is this person in front of me and to pay attention to the more subtle realities of this person, has a huge possible reward. The risk that I take could come at the reward that I begin to speak myself into the world.

Chris Stocking:

There aren’t neat ways that we can evaluate or judge this. And I think, you know, similar to this discussion that’s taking place right now, there is this sense that we are 

co-creating meaning together, that we’re sensing one another, and that there is this risk of saying things that perhaps don’t transmit. It’s a discussion that Adhip and I actually had before coming to take part in this podcast of how can we ensure that what it is that we’re saying is transmissible because we’ve had these discussions. We’re coming from, there’s an implicit understanding that we have and an acceptance towards one another to speak in these ways. And so how do we invite within our learning spaces these kinds of discussions and this kind of speaking to emerge and for the people in these spaces to find that sense of caring towards another person so that they can take these risks, that they can be vulnerable, that they can open up, and that they can share. And then how does this link back into disciplinary frameworks, institutional frameworks, the learning that takes place in the university and the constraints that come with that? Because, you know, what we’re talking about here, I don’t think it’s something that lends itself necessarily to the kind of evaluated knowledge production that takes place at a university. where we’re looking at starting a program, a module, being guided through that of taking on this knowledge and then shunning that we understand this knowledge and that we can be creative and critical with it. But if we haven’t had a space to authentically start speaking from our own sense of being and that becoming that happens when you do start speaking with somebody else, that’s it’s very difficult to start. Where do you start with them? These are the kinds of discussions that we’ve been having. It’s one of the reasons why this idea of transformative learning, I suppose, this the name that we’ve given at this stage, it’s something that we still we don’t really have a neat definition for because we’re still talking through all of the other ways that learning could be taking place in university, all the other ways that we could be, showing care towards the people who are here and the learning and what it means to them. 

It reminds me a little bit of, a journal that I know that Sarah (Watson) has been involved in, POESIS, which is the creative act of knowledge. And she’s been writing about how when we’re in a lecture, when we’re in a seminar, from our perspective as educators, we’re using words in a way that we feel is transparent. We feel that the words are stable and that when we use them, they’re transmitted across and that whoever’s listening receives the words and understands them in the same way that we’re presenting them. But there’s disconnections all through there. There’s disconnections that come from learning the words, from performing the act of being a student, of being in a lecture, performing the act of listening to take notes. These are all very different ways of listening and being and becoming with somebody else that have been taking place with the conversations that Adhip and I have been having, which has been I think I use this term perform, this kind of collaborative becoming. In that a call is put out, it’s received and responded. And so we’re kind of creating knowledge in this way that takes us into strange territories. So I think it’s trying to understand how all of these processes, what it is that we’re talking about, how that can then extend into the university to challenge it, to give different spaces of learning and being and becoming.

Wendy Garnham (13:45):

So it sounds as though I mean, that really gives us an idea of at least some of the challenges. Are there any other sort of challenges in terms of actually getting transformative learning happening?

Adhip Rawal:

So, I mean, I think if I speak to that from experience, then I think one of the challenges that is involved in that is that, you know, what you’re trying to really do there is you’re trying to present the possibility that what we do in a classroom needs to be fundamentally different to what we do in daily life. Because you may have this kind of assumption that what we draw on from daily life is not enough for us to transform ourselves. So we have to do something different. Something different has to be in the classroom, operate in the classroom to allow that from happening. And of course that requires you to be free fundamentally to do those things. There’s an inherent, I think, obligation to suspend what might be expected of you and to do things differently if you really believe that something like you were speaking to this POESIS, which is really based on the idea that there’s something absent that my speaking can make present. Now that, you know, is fundamentally, I think what we’re talking about. Right? That, we need to be so be really aware of the relational responsibility that we have towards each other. That my speaking can be an act of your becoming. And I think so that of course, I mean I think so the point I want to make so sometimes, you know, colleagues say to me or students say to me, Adhip, why are we doing this again? This is going nowhere. And you have to, I think, have the courage to say, I understand that, but let’s go there again. Let’s go again to nowhere. Because I think that’s fundamentally what is involved. Right? All the other places we’ve been to already.

Chris Stocking (15:47)

Yeah. And I think other challenges Adhip was talking about there, what we’re doing in daily life, the impositions that we’re facing through daily life in, you know, our modern world and the – without sort of getting too much into politics and but there was framings of higher education that exist today that exert an enormous pressure over students, the way that they internalize this sense of going into debt to get an education, but the reward there linking them to a job, something in the future. But how all of this is couched in neoliberal ideology and terminology and the pressures and that kind of flattening out of identity into something which is quite, well, one dimensional in that sense. So when we engage in these kinds of discussions, Adhip and I have been having, we recognize the value of these discussions as opening up space for a different kind of being together and collaborative becoming and construction of knowledge and thinking, the way that we experience the world, the relational encounter with one another, and how that spills out into the way that we encounter other people, other members of the university, the students who are here at the university, the family. There is this an extension there which is challenging these implications of living in the modern world. 

But it’s one of the issues that comes from that is thinking about the value that students perceive from having these kinds of discussions, engaging with this kind of thinking and being together, and whether they can see value in that knowing that there is debt being incurred to get the education and that the education is a pathway to get a job to meet the material needs of the future. And I think that pathway has a lot of implications for how we experience learning, how we experience teaching, and how particularly the learners understand what’s happening at the university. And so it’s a question also that that comes to my mind is where do these kinds of spaces that we’ve been discussing exist today in higher education and education in general? Because I certainly can’t remember any point in my education having these kinds of discussions that we’re having today. And they are for me, they’re such an important part of the life that I have here at the university. To have found somebody like Adhip and to have these conversations, it allows me to reengage with the university, to reevaluate what it is that I’m doing, to perceive the people here at the university differently and otherwise, and so to create different relations with them. And so it’s that question again that it comes back to how can we frame this kind of learning in a way that is valuable to students, there are other constraints and pressures on them to go through university and the learning and what learning means?

Wendy Garnham (19:26):

It sounds as though relationships are really at the heart of it, sort of relating to each other. So I think that’s one of the key takeaways, I think. 

Heather Taylor:

Yeah. I think as well, you know I mean, you sort of inferred this at different points, but it is a bit of a tricky situation where you’re talking about something quite deep and maybe, like an organic kind of thing. And when you look at, like, marking criterias and learning outcomes, it’s all very intellectualized, and it’s kind of hard, I guess, to intellectualize. It’s almost paradoxical to intellectualize what you’re talking about. Does that make sense?

Yeah. And I think that I guess, I suppose I mean, how do you – I know you’ve done some work, you know, with the life stories. And how have you, in that respect, sort of because of when you’re doing that, you’re not asking people to, you’re not calling it transformative learning. Right? How are you approaching it so that you are getting this sort of essence and this, I guess, making these people comfortable to share their stories in this way?

Adhip Rawal (20:11):

There is a couple of things that are involved in that. So I think one thing that is involved in that is that I need to be able, as an educator, to also show the student that what they have to say also matters to me.  And if you say something that comes out of your heart, of wherever, I’m prepared for that to change me as well. That’s the assurance that I give you, you know. So it’s that as well, you know, that sort of recognition that, what the student has to say. So it’s not necessarily, you know, we’re going to explore the meaning of life. We’re going to explore the meaning of your life. And that change, I think, is very, very important. When the student hears the change in that question, they want to speak. And then it’s up to you, you know, to stay with them for however long they want to speak. Right? So you make this sort of invitation and I think it’s quite remarkable what students, when they feel safe, begin to say and what they begin to communicate. You know? And it’s up to you to allow that to happen. Right? That, you know, that you take an interest in them to the degree that they feel okay. What I have to say, I’m going to share with you.

Heather Taylor:

I love that adding your because I can see how it brings about safety because of essentially, there can’t be a wrong answer. Right? Unless you are conflicted and not being open. And even if you’re conflicted and not being open, and so give a technically incorrect answer, nobody else knows. Only you know. And actually, that’s I think that’s learning something, isn’t it? You know, sometimes when someone might tell you something about yourself and you go, that’s not what I’m like. And then you have a think about it later and you go, oh, you know? And it’s sort of that level of self reflection though in answering these questions, the meaning of your life. And I do think that’s really important as well that you’re not just asking them questions because of you have to, you know, because I know you do this in your module, your final year module as well. You’re not asking them questions because you have to or because you have to fill time. You’re asking them questions because you are genuinely interested in the answer. And the more willing they are to explore how they feel rather than just what they think about things, the more even the more interested you become. You know? So, yes, it’s lovely. It’s I think it is a lot of the time missing in education. But again, like I said, it’s not that easy – they’re very at odds with each other, the whole systems and this thing, which is very fluid, you know.

Adhip Rawal:

But I think there’s something, you know I mean, of course, I mean, there’s all sorts of pressures around this. Right? But I think if you observe a student doing this, then you can’t help but prioritize that. You know, that whole when you were asking about the personal element of it, when you see somebody speak to you in that way, you can’t help but say I’m gonna pay attention to you. I don’t need 20 students. I don’t need 40 students. All of that will be relativized because you have one person there in front of you. And that’s enough for you if you begin to see that.

Wendy Garnham (23:27):

It sort of reminds me of one of the quotes that one student said to me recently, which was that they felt heard. And that seems to be at the heart of what you’re saying is that students have that desire to feel heard rather than be one in a large group where they sort of just become quite anonymous in a large group. So I think the importance of that personalised approach is really sort of coming to the fore. I hope it’s coming to the fore. 

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. It’s something I think also that Adhip and I share in common, this respect for reflective practices of sense making through one’s own life and the experiences that they’ve had. And, it just it brings to mind some of the work that I’ve done in the intercultural spaces where the assignments are critical reflections, where the students are then trying to go back through. And they’re going back through. They’re making sense of themselves in different ways. And there’s been some very powerful pieces of work that have been submitted where students who perhaps come from backgrounds – so there was one student who came from – her parents were from one country. She grew up in another country, and then she was studying in the UK. And so she had this persistent question throughout her life as to, you know, which culture she belonged to. We come back to that sense of belonging. And through the module and deconstructing this idea of how we understand culture and how we understand identity, she came to see, and she was able to claim ownership of existing in all of these spaces and none of them as something that was novel, something that was new, a different sense to speak from and to speak into. 

And I think this was very, very powerful to see so many students taking these modules, starting to speak of their experiences, being given space to talk about their experience, about their life, and how they’ve understood it, and the struggles that they’ve had. That sense of being marginalized, that sense of being othered, of trying to fit into certain ascribed criteria that are given by others, and to claim a sense of ownership over who they are and to feel proud of who they are and of how they understand the world and to understand that they matter. And I think that this is something that I was having a discussion about this morning. This sense of belonging from an institutional kind of top down approach to creating conditions of belonging can sometimes be alienating. I found myself alienated by having people tell me how to belong and the conditions for belonging in a certain space. Whereas when we flip this and we start talking about mattering and how a student matters, then they’re starting to come together. They’re starting to collaborate and become together and share with one another and to create the conditions for what it means to belong in that class with themselves rather than it kind of being an imposition or imposed upon them.

Wendy Garnham (26:55):

And I suppose that’s the same for staff as well, isn’t it? Staff in an institution could do the same thing. That sort of coming together, that sort of sharing about our experiences and so on. So, yeah, I think it’s quite a powerful concept.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. Can I ask you one more thing about that? Because I think this thing that we’re speaking to, the students’ experience and our experience and why that is valuable. Because I think one of the reasons why it’s also valuable is because that’s not only characterized by difficulty, it’s also characterized by inspiration. And I think the youth, they are very sensitive to inspiration. And how do you navigate the road to the future? You need the inspiration of the youth. So I think we need that. You can’t do it without it. They have they have much more, much richer lives than I have. You know? And my job to listen to what they have to say.

Heather Taylor:

Oh, I agree with you. I think the yeah. I think the, I mean, I’ve never thought of it in these terms before, but, you know, the sort of better I think rapport sounds superficial, but, you know, like, the better sort of connection I mean rapport, but, you know, like, with the better connection you have with students and the easier you find to get them and they get you and, you know, it sort of develops generally over the term. I find that actually, you know, they do sort of teach you things about yourself, but not necessarily explicitly. Sometimes they just pose questions that challenges you, and it makes you really question, you know, like, I know, like, from one lesson, someone asked me a question and they were saying, well, isn’t this thing normal? Don’t you do this? And I went, oh, don’t ask me if as an example of whether people think this is whether this thing is normal or not because it was to do with health. And, actually, after that, I really thought about it, and I was like, I don’t care about my health. Right? And I really recognize that I physical, you know, and I really sort of thought and it bothered me for ages, not the student. The student I appreciated that they’d do you know what I mean? It was a throwaway question to them, and it was a phrasing. They didn’t mean it like you. You know? But it really made me think about it. And I’ve actually been, like, training for a run since then, haven’t I? So it is really cool. And that is that’s transformative because I had crisps for lunch. You know? So I’m still eating crisps at lunch. But is it you know, that, like, that did change me. It did not just that. It fit in with a lot of other things at the same time, but it made me think, and it made me reflect. And I think, yeah, and it’s and it the other thing is when you’re dealing with especially when you’re talking about health, sort of younger people, most of them are much younger than me. They’ve got health most of the time on their side. Do you know what I mean? More so than I have. And when they bring up these sorts of things or when they bring up stuff to do with, you know, the environment or the economy or whatever, it’s much more it’s much more important, I guess, to them because it’s gonna affect them for longer, and it’s affecting them more than it will be me. And it does just make you stop and go, oh, what am I doing? You know?

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. I like what you’re speaking to there. It kind of speaks to me of this slippage of identity positions. So we go into a classroom and we think about this teacher-student relationship. And I think what you’re talking about there is this kind of slippage where suddenly you’re a person. And you’re speaking with people, and that allows for this transformation that perhaps wouldn’t happen if you were to just hold yourself in this teacher and student identity, which is often done so it’s not embodied in the same way. And then when you suddenly slip, something happens, and it breaks the carapace of those carefully cultivated identities, and suddenly there’s that exposure. And you’re there and you’re with people. And there’s that possibility for learning and speaking and doing otherwise that affords for very interesting transformations to come about that you would never have thought that something like this, this kind of learning might take place in that space. And suddenly, just through a conversation, just through a question, you’re changing things about the way that you live in your lifestyle. And I think that’s it’s very, very important that we start to recognize these moments in a classroom and we start to give voice to them and shape them because these are the stories that, at least for me, really interest me and that remind me that here in the university, we are people, we are working with the youth who, as Adhip said, are the ones that are going to be shaping the future. You know? So how do we support them, and how do we allow them to come back to themselves as people in these learning spaces? 

And I think the only way we can do that, and Adhip made this lovely distinction earlier, not learning about life, we’re learning about your life. That suddenly makes it very personable. And then when we’re thinking, it becomes more complex than when we start thinking about global universities and all of the different experiences and framings and positionalities that come into these learning spaces that have to be recognized and spoken to. And the only way we do that in a meaningful sense, I believe, is through hearing one another, through listening to one another’s stories, of understanding one another. And that requires this that that we allow for these personal narratives and histories to be present in the classroom. Because when you start to speak of them and you start to speak to them as, you know, you know, there are three psychologists here in in this this kind of speaking therapies, there’s something very transformative about saying and talking and hearing yourself say words that perhaps you wouldn’t say otherwise. And to hear that repeated back in other ways, to see where it touches and connects with the other person that you’re talking to, to allow for that collaborative becoming as research, as a methodology of research, that collaborative becoming, sharing stories in the space and seeing what comes out of it, and reflecting on that, and learning the tools to speak and listen and be heard, and to allow yourself the luxury of sounding like an idiot.

Wendy Garnham (33:23):

I think it is that opening up. Yeah. Isn’t it? Just opening yourself up. And the more you do that, the more the students seem keen to do it.

Heather Taylor:

Being willing to get things wrong and say I don’t know – I’m always saying I don’t know because I don’t know.

Wendy Garnham:

When technology doesn’t work.

Heather Taylor:

Yeah. When technology doesn’t work. I think also, you know, even sharing sometimes sharing little things about – I’m always sharing things about myself with my students. It’s not even deliberate. It’s sometimes because of something. I don’t mean, like, my PIN number or whatever. I mean, like, you know, just things that little anecdotes that, like, pop into my head. Because for me, it’s made me able to understand something, and you just have a go and see if it helps them. And I do find actually that, you know, I’m not doing it with the intention of getting them to share. Right? I don’t, because I honestly, I don’t mean to do it as it happens. It just happens, But it does help them share. And I think it also helps them recognize they’re allow allowed to give an answer or allowed to give some input that isn’t academic. You’re allowed to give a response that you didn’t get out of a book.

Chris Stocking:

It’s another way of making sense of the learning experience, but through ways of speaking that aren’t themselves inherently academic, and I think that that opens up the possibility of learning, and learning about disciplinary content as well, by speaking about it, by hearing a terminology, not some terminology, not necessarily fully grasping it, but allowing it to trigger moments in your life and to discuss these to bring yourself into the learning environment as a way of navigating and migrating back towards developing a more full, embodied understanding of the concepts, the terms, the theories, the research that you’re reading about, thinking about, challenging. But I think that that’s very important for me is that embodied sense. And the only way it really becomes embodied is if we’re fully present to it. So there’s also some of those discussions that we’ve had. And I remember the last time we spoke, we were talking about just even the constraints of a classroom. And I was talking to a friend last night about this. He’s got a younger daughter who’s 10. And, they were discussing her favourite subject at school, and she said that it was physical education because she can learn while she’s moving. You know? And this idea, I think, is Wendy, you’ve been involved in outdoors learning, so learning while walking, the way that it triggers makes you think differently, have different conversations. So opening up all these possibilities for learning otherwise. Learning in different ways that aren’t necessarily just sitting down and making notes and listening and then talking in in an abstract and somewhat removed sense.

Heather Taylor:

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to make learning transformative?

Adhip Rawal (36:27):

So I think we’ve touched on something just now which I think is important in that, which I think is the recognition that I don’t know. And that sort of recognition that I also don’t know who I am really. Because I think there’s something liberating in that. I mean, the young person, if he hears another, if he hears an educator saying I also don’t know who I am, there’s something I think that that recognition does that allows for this deeper connection to become present. Because I think essentially what we’re saying is that the transformation doesn’t require the input of money. It doesn’t necessarily require the input of knowledge as such. Maybe certain knowledge can help you keep that, sort of keep transformation in vicinity, but essentially it’s about relational support. And I think also that flow of recognition that what that transformation will be, we don’t know. I don’t know. What would you say, Chris, about that?

Chris Stocking:

Yeah. I mean, it’s a very difficult question because you know, the first thing that, you know, when we were thinking about this podcast and I was making notes was that, you know, we’re not really sure at this stage what transformative learning really is. And I think that probably this discussion has revealed somewhat that we’re still trying to understand what it is that we’re talking about and how we make sense of it and how we bring that into a more formal academic setting. But relationality, I think, is definitely important. And I think that the sort of the peeling away of layers to understand again and to remind ourselves that from an educational perspective and as educators that they are people before us. They aren’t students. They are people who have incredibly rich, vibrant stories, experiences, inspiring, difficult, and all of that is always present in any shared space. And that we should never make assumptions about how somebody is responding in a classroom. And that we should afford for the opportunity for different kinds of discussions, different kinds of conversations to emerge. And if they open up organically and naturally to work with that as a learning substance and material to feed and fold ourselves into to support the learning and to support that sense of being present with one another.

Adhip Rawal:

Yeah. Yeah. So then maybe what one thing that we’re saying is that any kind of transformation requires communication. Right? And it requires us to be present to the communication, to the full spectrum of communication. So, essentially, that’s a function of attention. You know? The depth of my attention might be very important and, you know, somehow, facilitating this process from coming about.

Chris Stocking:

I think Wendy had mentioned that, being heard, some feedback that you’d heard from students, that idea of being heard, I think, is also very important. Because when you afford that space for somebody to speak and you don’t allow them you don’t afford this space of them speaking, waiting to navigate the conversation back where you want it to go, but you respond to whatever it is that’s being said in a meaningful way. I think that is very important that people feel heard, that they feel visible, that they have a voice that matters, that matters to you as an educator, as Adhip said earlier. And I think that, yes, that that being present, that capacity to listen, tenderly and in a way that is actively involved in caring for the cultivation of another human being.

Heather Taylor:

I would like to thank our guests, Adhip Rawal and Chris Stocking.

Adhip Rawal:

Thank you.

Chris Stocking:

Thank you.

Heather Taylor:

And thank you for listening. Goodbye. 

This has been the Learning Matters podcast from the University of Sussex, created by Sarah Watson, Wendy Garnham, and Heather Taylor, and produced by Simon Overton. For more episodes, as well as articles, blogs, case studies, and infographics, please visit blogs. Sussex.ac.uk/learning-matters.