Editor's Perspective

Abstract

The vitality, creativity, and wisdom of people across the life span are critical to society's functioning in this era of increasing turbulence. The energy once directed primarily to the satisfaction of the needs of the individual and family can be extended to new socially responsive roles when there is support for further development of skills needed for these enlivening ventures.…Our concern is to make visible processes that are supportive of new opportunities across populations and the life span and increase opportunities for people of every level of education and prior achievement. In pursuing opportunities for learning, we are committed to avoiding elitism to serve global variety in approaches, philosophies, and political orientations.- Markos & McWhinney (2003) With these words, founding editors Laura Markos and Will McWhinney (2003) sparked a lively, cross-disciplinary dialogue to inform transformative education practice on levels ranging from the personal to the global. Beginning with their article on the archetypal form of transformation-the path of death and rebirth-in the first issue, the Journal of Transformative Education (JTE) has chronicled efforts to design and redesign programs and institutions for "another education," including a fourth order of education for older adult learners. Current programs of education socialize our children, prepare adolescents for careers or further education, and provide specialized training to adults in the workforce. The demographic press of increased longevity, however, demands that we radically reconfigure not only education but all of the institutions of culture.Certainly, a recurring theme of JTE has been this fourth mode of education, which focuses on the issues and concerns, as well as the potentials and passions, of those in midlife and beyond. Other topics in the nexus of transformative learning, transformative education, adult education, and societal and organizational change and transformation have also been addressed. Contributors to the first three volumes have examined the epistemology of transformative learning (e.g., Cranton & Roy, 2003;Illeris, 2004;Mezirow, 2003); described exemplars of this new educational praxis, including a glocal learning community in Sweden (Gunnlaugson, 2004), an online cohort engaged in what the members call quadrinity learning (Feller et al., 2004), and curricular innovations in teacher education at a university in the United States (Hicks, Berger, & Generett, 2005) and in a university in Pakistan with outreach to the developing world (Ashraf, Khaki, Shamatov, Journal of Tr a n s f o r m a t i v e E d u c a t i o n / J a n u a r y 2 0 0 6