Allyson M. Washburn

An Empiricist's Musings About Reality, Evidence, and Data: Accumulating Support for Transformative Learning

I became an avowed empiricist at the age of 6 after evaluating the evidence for the existence of the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny—and finding it lacking in each instance. Although to my mind the evidence for God was also thin, I did not voice this to my parents because their beliefs about the existence and nature of a deity seemed to be serious and firm. I have continued to favor the sense data of my day-to-day experience but tend now to be an empiricist of the “Pittsburg School” of Sellars and Haugeland.

Editor's Perspective: Observations at a Coffee Shop, Gleanings From a Think Tank

Several months ago, I sat working in a coffee shop. A man and a woman directly in front of me were conversing in French. I had seen them once before in the shop, and my impression was that one or both were language students from the nearby Alliance Française de San Francisco. Three 30to 40-something-yearold men with British or Australian or Canadian accents had sat down across the way from us. Before long, girls from what I thought was probably a private middle school started arriving to occupy the largest table. Two were European American; one was East Indian or Pakistani; three were Asian, probably Chinese; and I could not determine the ethnicity of the seventh girl. Each had brought a lunch from home, none ordered anything to eat or drink from the shop, and they were fairly quiet. The girls were, however, blocking my view of the remaining customers in the shop, but I later saw that this trio was one part Latino, one part European American, and one part mixed ethnicity. I probably would not have taken particular notice of this international scene had I not been reading a research report from a Nigerian student of mine that had a lengthy section on the demographic characteristics of his participants. San Francisco is a city of minorities, WASPs included; and I rarely find myself in an ethnically homogenous gathering. Actually, what was truly odd about the scene in the coffee shop was that no one was on a cell phone—at least during the 20 or so minutes of my informal field study. Oh, and this wasn’t a Starbucks. What I’ve realized since is that this gathering that I witnessed in the coffee shop was not as diverse as it appeared. I imagine that it was fairly homogeneous in its socioeconomic makeup; this has certainly been the case with the multiethnic groups to which I have belonged in past 20-some years I’ve lived in San Francisco. A major divide here, as in many places around the world, is economic as well as educational. These are vast gaps to bridge.

Education for Exponential Times

The title is ‘‘Did You Know?’’ and, as the edgy, hip music plays, we learn that: The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38 . . . There are over 200 million registered users on MySpace. If MySpace were a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world (between Indonesia and Brazil) . . . We are living in exponential times. There are 31 billion searches on Google every month. In 2006, this number was 2.7 billion. To whom were these questions addressed B.G.? (Before Google) The first commercial text message was sent in December of 1992. Today, the number of text messages sent and received everyday exceeds the total population of the planet . . . Journal of Transformative Education Volume 7 Number 1 January 2009 3-7 # 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1541344609338052 http://jted.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Editor's Perspective: The Change We Need

The general theme of the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States was change. “Change” was Barack Obama’s mantra for the nearly 2 years of his campaign. In one of the innumerable “debates” during the primaries, Hillary Clinton countered that “Change is about working hard.” During the general election campaign, one of the slogans of the McCain–Palin ticket was “Change You Can Believe In.” It was the Obama–Biden platform, however, that outlined “The Change We Need,” with fairly sweeping reforms in every major sector of our civil society:

Editor's Perspective: Theories-in-Use

I have been teaching Saybrook’s two-course sequence “Research Methods and Disciplined Inquiry” for the past 5 years. These required courses for doctoral students address the conceptual and methodological foundations of a broad range of approaches to research including phenomenology, grounded theory, participatory action research, case study, heuristics, and controlled experiments. At some point in the sequence, I lecture on “The Importance of Theory in Disciplined Inquiry and Research.” I’ve switched the order of discipline inquiry and research from the title of the course sequence because not only do I believe that the former subsumes the latter but also my doctoral program in experimental psychology at Johns Hopkins emphasized theory and inquiry, not method. There were no methods courses, and although I had extensive training in statistics and the principles of strong inference (Platt, 1964), all of my research there was qualitative—and we were encouraged to develop our own methods for answering research questions. For my dissertation, I fashioned a phenomenography of sorts to investigate novice users’ mental models of computers, but not until I had constructed the conceptual framework—from what little relevant theory existed at the time—that suggested the research questions. Yes, theory drives the questions, which drive the method. (I give another lecture on research questions: “From Vague Research Problem to Answerable Research Question.”) The impetus for this lecture on the importance of theory that I give midway in the course sequence came from my experience in working with Saybrook students well along in their program. I have found that they, tending to adhere closely to their narrow—or, in some cases, not so narrow—topic of interest and to their data, often fail to bring formal theory to their work, and they are even less likely to voice their own tacit theories or “theories-in-use.” I explain in the lecture that a particularly good source of theories is our own experience and understanding:

Editor's Perspective: Continuity and Change

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.

Editor's Perspective: Rummaging for a Metaphor

In the mid-1990s, after first serving as a program director and then vice president, I was elected president of the League of Women Voters of San Francisco. For the next 5 years, including the year that I was a program director for the League of Women Voters of California, my dining room table was buried under manila folders, books, and journals for the many issues the organization was supporting: campaign finance reform, reform of San Francisco’s charter, improving public transportation, increasing the stock of affordable housing, reforming the juvenile justice system, school bonds, library bonds, and so on. As the spokesperson for the San Francisco League, I appeared before numerous public bodies to advocate for these and other issues, as well as to voice opposition to others, including term limits for elected officials and cuts in the public health budget. This was an exciting and rewarding experience; but as the piles grew taller and proliferated in number, I sometimes felt that I was wrestling with . . . well, a kettle of eels. This metaphor was first used to describe the advocacy agenda for the National League of Women Voters in 1920 when suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt asked women “Now you have the vote, what are you going to do with it?”(Wenig & Bridgman, n.d.). This new organization, formed after passage of the 19th Amendment and its narrow ratification by the states, adopted 69 action items ranging from support for United States’s participation in a League of Nations to legislation to limit child labor and to protect women in industrial jobs. The League’s first president Maud Wood Park dubbed this ambitious program a “kettle of eels.” The 20 million newly enfranchised women were to voice their support for these issues at the ballot box, and the League would then disband in 1925 or so. Well, it is not so easy to wrangle a kettle of eels; and the organization continues to be a force for change on progressive issues ranging from single payer health care to public financing of campaigns. (There, now you know quite a bit about my politics.) Since assuming editorial responsibility for this journal, the kettle-of-eels metaphor has occasionally wiggled into my consciousness. How could it not? The Journal of Transformative Education invites contributions from such diverse disciplines as adult development and adult education; change and transformation in individuals, communities, and organizations (where my work is situated); experiential education; holistic education; lifelong learning; rehabilitation; social change; and transformative learning. Authors review this list in the submission guidelines and send us an astounding variety of articles, most of which are appropriate for the journal.