Study On The Application Of Transformative Learning In Adult Higher Education

Transformative learning in foreign countries has a history of over 30 years, with ever increasingly sophisticated theory more and more people have applied it to practice. Transformative learning has been fruitful in higher education, workplace and community education. The research on transformative learning in China is mostly focused on the translating and sorting of foreign theory. The practice of transformative learning is gradually being applied in many fields. For example, it has had positive results in enterprise training, school education and for socially vulnerable groups. However, the innovativity of the theory on transformative learning is still leaving a lot behind. Little efforts are being made to promote the practice besides much of the research is shallow. So it is necessary to make it more suitable for adult students by changing the teaching method through a complete and operable transformative learning mode that based on the status of the current situation in higher education.This paper is based on humanistic theory, lifelong education theory and constructivist theory. It has integrated use of literature research, questionnaires and interviews. In the process of research,in order to sum up the current existing problems in adult higher education, verify the feasibility of the transformative learning mode. I did the research from multiple perspectives, such as investigating questionnaires to adult students, interviewing experienced teachers, and conducting participant observation to the courses.Through investigation, I found that there is the lack of interaction between teachers and students, and the current classroom arrangement is not constructive to interaction, the personal experience of adult students is not effectively used, students have low interest in learning, but most students are willing to participate in the courses, and they want to learn to solve practical problems.Through the research of transformative learning itself, according to the applications of transformative learning from home and abroad, and basing on the analysis of the characteristics of adult students, I proposes to build a transformative learning teaching mode for adult students to cope with the existing problems in adult higher education. This model includes three stages: teaching preparation, teaching activity design and teaching evaluation. During teaching activity design, students can finish transformative learning through motivating student’s enthusiasm for learning, dialogue-teaching, learning reflection. This mode is suppose to make up for the deficiencies of the current teaching, it’s based on adult students’ learning characteristics and absorbed the essences of transformational learning.