Abstract
The University of Central Oklahoma’s (UCO’s) Student Transformative Learning Record (STLR) initiative is an institution-wide implementation of transformative learning (TL) in both the curriculum and the cocurriculum. Most of the institution’s faculty were unfamiliar with TL when it became a focus of the university’s mission. Consequently, UCO had to train faculty in instructional practice meant to prompt for TL. This chapter examines STLR’s impact on student success and beyond-disciplinary learning. Also examined is the impact of faculty’s adoption of STLR on their pedagogy/andragogy and upon their conceptions of the teaching/learning enterprise. The multiparadigmatic research approach advocated by Taylor, Taylor, and Luitel (International Handbook of Science Education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2012) serves well in conjunction with the transformative framework described by Creswell and Plano Clark (Designing and conduction mixed methods research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2011) for this inquiry.
An overview of the STLR process is provided for context. That discussion includes a description of STLR’s beyond- or trans-disciplinary focus areas, called “tenets,” and how curricular and cocurricular learning activities align with them to help scaffold students’ growth toward transformative understandings. Quantitative results illustrate significant association between STLR and student retention as well as academic performance across all 5 years to date of the initiative. Multiparadigmatic analysis, while still preliminary, supports faculty and student transformation also associating with STLR. Recommendations for further research are presented.
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King, J., Wimmer, B. (2020). Operationalizing Transformative Learning: A Case Study Demonstrating Replicability and Scaling. In: Spector, M.J., Lockee, B.B., Childress, M.D. (eds) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_151-1
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