The document describes using structured journaling or personal transformative learning. Life history and focused journaling serve as the basis for a life planning workshop for women. Utilizing structured life history and framing a reflective process through journaling exercises and analysis, the workshop leaders encourage an examination of assumptions that may lead to personal transformation.

An introduction to a series of articles on transformative learning

A discussion of key ideas from Habermas that are important for delineating the social dimension in transformation theory.

An extension of transformative learning theory and consideration of collaborative inquiry as a strategy for facilitating transformative learning.

This case narrative describes how Cooperative Inquiry helped participants understand the dynamics of racism, transform personal consciousness about cultural imperialism, and change behavior.

A report on the use of transformative learning in collaboration with women in transition from situations of domestic violence.

In every field of endeavor each generation leaves a mixed legacy to the next. Along with the hard-won wisdom that comes from experience and the progressive accumulation of knowledge, collections of misinformation and misjudgments that can only be explained by understanding the temper and biases of the times are also passed along. As an antidote to any misplaced confidence that we at last have the tiger of education for the gifted by the tail, it may be useful to catalogue some unsolved issues or misguided efforts that have been created or accepted by the present generation and which we are in danger of turning over to the next generation.

For the purpose of this chapter, the term "programs for the gifted" will be used loosely to encompass a wide variety of means of providing learning experiences for children of well above average general intellectual and/or specific academic aptitude. In some cases the discussion is also relevant to specific nonacademic abilities that are provided for within the curriculum of many schools, by such offerings as art, music, and athletics.

In this concluding chapter the writers look at certain premises for approaching the future; at probable developments of the next decade that are relevant to secondary education; and at portentous social decisions that need to be made if an American secondary education program, designed for the 1980s as well as anticipating the next century, is to be moved from our ideological drawing boards to the oftentimes harsh world of reality. The writers also have chosen to explore some of the possible implications for tomorrow's education to be derived from cultural pluralism. The challenge of meeting the needs of our human subsets, we believe, is so important as to merit selection as an exemplar of the many decisions that are long overdue for attention and follow-up action in society and in secondary education.

In this commentary, the author reflects on what she learned from a note left for her by a custodian at her university.