Arab Educational Information Network

Teacher education aims to foster a change in perspective in teaching and learning within various educational contexts from prospective teachers to real teachers. This change is often seen to involve three forms of knowing: knowing "that", knowing "how", and knowing "why". Transformative learning has much to do with such a change. When prospective teachers critically reflect on teaching as a process, and are engaged in a rational dialogue within a safe, supportive, collaborative classroom environment, they will be able to accomplish the outcomes coming and then consider them in future practices: elaborating or redefining the existing frames of reference, learning new frames of reference, transforming points of views, and transforming habits of mind. By so doing, they can become transformative teachers who can affect their learners – implicitly or explicitly – to be transformative as well. Therefore, this paper addresses how transformative learning can be activated in teacher education programs in general for constructing a community of knowledge. The paper has four main sections. Section one deals with the relationship between transformative learning, critical reflection and teacher education. Section two tackles the form, the features and the requirements of the pedagogic context for developing transformative learning. The paper concludes with section three which proposes a conceptual model for using transformative learning in teacher education contexts. It ends with section four giving some implications that can be implemented so as to set the proposed transformative learning-based model into practice. (Published abstract)