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This study explores reflective experience during transformative, group-based learning among university leaders following a natural disaster such as a typhoon in two Philippine universities. Natural disasters are recurrent phenomena in many parts of the world, but the literature largely ignores their impact on lifelong human learning, for instance regarding preparing the university setting for future natural disasters. The study used interviews and document analysis, drawing on a body of interrelated works in transformative learning theory, critical educational theory and conceptions about group processes and reflective practice to understand university leaders’ lifelong learning from natural disasters as experiential, transformative, reflective and group oriented. The findings document that university leaders’ reflective, transformative learning depends on individuals’ experience of natural disasters as disorienting dilemmas, and that reflection is facilitated by decisive group dynamics rather than only personal reflection. Facilitating a learning space for transformative, reflective learning in university settings might assist university leaders to enhance disaster risk preparedness, for instance through local policy change

Parental participation is a fundamental principle of the Danish folkeskole (for children aged 6–16), yet this article explores how too much parental cooperation influences the relationship of teachers to their professional responsibility. The majority of research on parent–teacher cooperation has focused on parents’ opportunities to participate in school life, but little is known about what teachers think about such collaboration, and how imbalances in power and authority in parent–teacher cooperation influence teachers’ professionalism. The use of reflexive autoethnographic accounts, participant observation and document analysis during a four-year period in one school provided emic insight into the, often invisible, social processes of power. Semi-structured interviews with teachers in a second school were also conducted. Drawing on a body of interrelated work focusing on Bourdieu, situated learning theory and literature about professional studies, the findings suggest that parent–teacher communities can be understood as stratified fields which provide different and complex spaces for exerting power and domination. Although power in these communities is constantly negotiated, professional responsibility may be lost when parents occupy central positions in parent–teacher collaborations.