Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education by Charity Johansson and Peter Felten (review)

In Transforming Students: Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education, Charity Johansson and Peter Felten explore the concept of transformative learning and the impact that institutions of higher education have in creating meaningful and permanent change in the lives of students. This book is particularly relevant as the idea of a university and the fundamental purpose of higher education continue to be challenged and redefined.

The authors primarily draw their conclusions on interview data from students, faculty, and staff from Elon University, a private, residential institution in North Carolina that focuses on engaged learning and experiential approaches such as study abroad.

While Johansson and Felten acknowledge that this work emphasizes the enrichment and engagement that residential colleges can provide, their focus on the traditional college experience is not a limitation of the book. If anything, the testaments of transformation in individuals’ stories at Elon and other examples of successful collegiate interventions across the nation offer support for the power of engagement that the traditional university can still deliver, especially in a rapidly emerging era of for-profit institutions and online learning.

The authors of this work outline the process of transformative learning as guided by four steps: disruption, reflective analysis, verification/action, and integration. Six chapters illustrate the collective progression of these four phases that students travel through as related to their experiences in the “practicing room” of the university.

Chapter 1 addresses the sense of comfort that a university affords students during their first year of college as they are exposed to new ways of knowing. The culture of a university that sets the stage for students to embrace change and a willingness to engage in transformation is the focal point of Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 delves into the process of critical reflection that enables students to internalize and embrace new ways of thinking. Chapter 4 moves reflection into action by giving voice to the verification and confidence conveyed to students through the support of peers and faculty on campus. The impact of the relationships students build in the process of self-authorship as essential in the transformative process is explored in Chapter 5.

Chapter 6 is vital to implementing the process of transformative learning as it shifts the conversation to the role that the institution plays in facilitating lasting student change. This straightforward structure allows the authors to refocus the goal of undergraduate education on cultivating students, as universities themselves must adapt to such a transformational time for higher education as a whole.

Because students often choose a university based on feelings of comfort as they transition into adulthood and cling to their established identities, Chapter 1 highlights the importance of institutional support and the influence of a collegiate space that constructs a safe environment in which students can slowly consider new viewpoints. However, the authors point out that students expect to enhance their existing identity rather than being fully open to their possible selves, which presents the greatest challenge to the process of transformation. They refer to the assertion of Clydesdale (2007) that students often enter their collegiate experience with an “identity lockbox into which they can place their critical religious, political, racial, gender, and class identities for safekeeping” (p. 8). This is all the more reason for higher education professionals to grasp student development theories as outlined by such scholars as Perry (1970) and Chickering and Reisser (1993) and to apply new concepts such as the intersectionality of student identity as shifting, situational, and socially constructed (Bowleg, 2008).

Although the accounts of Elon’s first-year experience courses and residential learning communities stand as fundamental examples in the facilitation of transformative growth, there is little discussion of growth based on exposure to campus diversity in the form of race, religion, sexuality, etc., as separate and also intersecting influences. The authors, in their attempt to explicate full integration, make a generalized statement...