Transformative Experience: An Integrative Construct in the Spirit of Deweyan Pragmatism

Abstract A sentiment held by Dewey and shared by other educators is that learning should enrich and expand everyday experience. However, this goal has not been a focus of research. In this article, I propose transformative experience as a construct capable of reflecting this goal and functioning as an empirical research construct. I discuss the theoretical grounding for this construct in the work of Dewey and define it in terms of three characteristics: (a) motivated use, (b) expansion of perception, and (c) experiential value. In doing so, I describe how transformative experience integrates current research constructs such as transfer, conceptual change, and task value in a holistic way. I then provide illustrations of transformative experiences and review the existing research. ACKNOWLEDGMENT I thank David Bergin, David Wong, and the reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this article. I also thank Gale Sinatra for her editorial support. Notes 1Prior work has provided initial conceptualizations of transformative experience (see CitationPugh, 2002, Citation2004; CitationPugh, Linnenbrink-Garcia, Koskey, Stewart, CitationGirod & Wong, 2002) have used the term aesthetic understanding in place of transformative experience. However, the constructs are similar. For a discussion, see CitationPugh and Girod (2007). 7The Rasch Model is a psychometric model used to create measures. It is beneficial for research involving integrative constructs, because it has tools to test whether items function as a unified construct and, if so, provides composite scores representing levels of performance for this construct. 8Specifically, a measure of task-based transfer (CitationPugh & Bergin, 2005) was used. Thus, the researchers investigated whether students who willfully applied learning in free-choice transfer contexts as part of a transformative experience would be more successful at applying such learning when required to do so by an assessment task. According to the CitationBarnett and Ceci (2002) transfer taxonomy, the transfer items used represented far transfer in terms of the knowledge domain.