Student Readiness for Transformative Learning: A Case Study in a Vocational College

Abstract

Transformative learning, as a theory, is an action that people take to become more self-motivated, self-governing, logical, collaborative, and sympathetic. Individuals, in essence, develop the ability to think on things they may have taken for granted or were unaware of in the past, and to make deliberate decisions about them. This is referred to as a transformative experience in the transformative learning paradigm. The key to transformative learning is to engage students as active learners. Realizing the values of this learning theory to students, the authors conducted this study to examine student readiness for transformative learning. The participants of this study were 194 students from various majors in a vocational college in Vietnam. The results show that a number of the students at the studied context have had some exposure to transformative instructional strategies, and many have likely not been exposed much to these learning strategies since the percentages of disagreement and neutrality account for about 40% to 50% of the total. The findings are valuable for the stake holders of the studied context when transformative learning theory is applied.