Understanding Young University EFL Teachers’ Transformative Learning: Case Studies

In the present era of transition, Chinese university EFL education confronts many challenges resulting from belief contradictions, which brings severe predicaments for young university EFL teachers’ professional survival and development. Transforming one’s beliefs for the needs of personal and societal development is of vital importance for the teachers to deal with the predicaments. But there are few teacher learning studies in China that inquire into EFL teachers’ belief transformation process. Studies in the West show that adult transformative learning theory from a critical perspective, can effectively guide studies on teacher self-transformation and social adaptation by transforming beliefs. Thus, guided by transformative learning theory, this study inquires into nine young university EFL teacher-as-doctoral-students’ transformative learning experiences, especially their transformative learning process and the influential factors. The data are collected through a pre-interview inventory, interviews, case documents and field notes.Based on the data analysis, three major findings are drawn. Firstly, all the nine teachers experience transformative learning that leads to whole-person development. Their experiences concern transformation to various degrees both in their points of view and that in the belief systems. The content of transformation covers teacher beliefs about teaching, research, interpersonal relationship, professional development and life. The teachers experience transformative learning throughout their career life course, the beginning, the middle and their doctoral studies. Most of the experiences happen when they are involved in informal individual activities, and mostly appearing in the form of incremental transformation.Secondly, the teachers’ transformative learning process is generally triggered by different types of events, driven on by the teachers’ critical reflection, enhanced by their dialogues with others. Some new beliefs are confirmed by action while others are not. The process finally leads to positive outcomes of perspective transformation, behavior change and emotion improvement. But after that some teachers would experience difficulties to put their beliefs into practice. This process has similar stages as those found in the western literature but with obvious culture-specific features, such as the multiplicity of the trigger events, the reflexivity of critical reflection, the constructive dialogues with significant others, the fuzziness of teacher action, and the diversity of transformation outcomes. The findings also indicate the unique transformative learning processes of each participant, which could be grouped into three patterns, the five-stage, the four-stage, and the three-stage processes. The more complete the transformation learning experiences are, the deeper the learning is, the more incremental changes there is, and more likely happen in the mid-phase of the teachers’ career. This finding demonstrates the contextuality and individuality of the transformative learning process. A relevant finding is that, the more proactive teachers experience more complete and deeper transformative learning processes.Thirdly, the teachers’ transformative learning is deeply affected by individual, interpersonal and contextual factors. The individual factors such as teacher emotion, personality and career stage have both facilitative and inhibiting function, while the significant others in the career circle, the study circle and the life circle all have mainly positive influence. Among various contextual factors, the discouraging organizational culture is the major prohibitive factor, while the assessment system that favors research over instruction promotes young EFL teachers’ short-term research development. Further analysis reveals that teachers having stronger professional agency were more enthusiastic, more active in dialogues and more sensitive to the organizational culture. Underlying all the above factors, Chinese traditional culture plays an important but indirect role.The major contributions of this study are three-fold. The first contribution lies in the exploration of teacher transformative learning from the critical perspective. By taking into consideration the essence of teacher as an adult learner, this study not only breaks through the existing studies’ inadequate attention to teacher’s deep learning, but also emphasizes the value of teacher learning for their own emancipation. Thus, this study makes a beneficial attempt to step forward in in-depth teacher learning research.The second contribution of this study lies in its extended application of Mezirow’s transformative learning model, based on which a new transformative learning framework is proposed that is characteristic of the young university EFL teachers under the study. The new framework has three strengths: overcoming the linearity of the original model, demonstrating the factors of complexity, and revealing the transformative learning mechanism which shows the interaction between individual teachers and various factors. These strengths make it a valuable analytical and interpretive framework for future studies on Chinese teacher belief transformation.Another contribution of the study is the abstraction of four characeristics of transformative learning, which provides practical strategies for young university EFL teachers to respond to difficulties in their professional development. Underlying the characteristics, such as learning from critical experience, learning from deep reflection, learning from constructive dialogues and learning with rich emotions, a more important discovery is teacher professional agency acting as the most important driving force throughout their transformative learning process. This ruling quality will guide teachers in their active pursuit of deep learning and transformation.