When baking bread, bakers choose their recipes, use appropriate ingredients and imagine how they want the results to be. Similarly, educators have indispensable components that are a part of the learning processes they try to inspire. But to achieve significant results, bakers must be aware of the way they bake. Teachers, too, have realized that learning for the twenty-first century requires new procedures. Education has begun to shift from primarily being a process of transferring information to one of galvanizing individual and collective transformation.

Transformation instead of transmission

While general consensus exists about the need to significantly modify education, opinions vary as to how. SDG4 refers to the urgent need for “quality” education and lists in target 4.7 important elements of content, but it does not describe the methodologies that are needed to achieve improved education. However, researchers and educators, as well as UNESCO and other international agencies, have pointed to “transformative learning” as a way forward. Not for the fainthearted, transformative learning involves, on the part of the learner, advancing into unknown realms, leaving behind familiar ways of thinking and doing, accepting loss, dealing with guilt, clinging to hope and exposing oneself to unknown opposition. It is both a rational as well as an intuitive and emotional process. In other words, transformative learning, as it has been defined in recent research, is closely related to the concept of learning by wondering, wandering, caring and daring.

Expanded consciousness

The traditional approach to education in which the teacher is the expert and disseminates information in a predominately one-way process is referred to as “transmissive” education. Learning is measured by observing each student's growth and development in relation to thinking and inquiry processes. While transmissive learning can result in notable changes in understanding on the part of the learner, the main goal of this form of education remains the cognitive acquisition of information. It provides limited opportunities for students to associate what they learn to their personal values and daily life context. Nor does it necessarily assist the learner to question and adjust the ways in which they interpret and use the information they have acquired.