Welcome to the Transformative Inquiry Website

This site acts as a web version of the companion book for anyone using Transformative Inquiry as a teaching approach. The navigation on the top right indicates chapters and sections. Some of the interactive features are not available on the website in the same way that they are in the iBook. Download the iBook for an iPad or MacOS and other resources from the downloads section of this site.

Transformative Inquiry is a dynamic process that helps educators negotiate the complex and vibrant terrain of learning~teaching as they ask:

  • What do I really care about as an educator?
  • How can I nourish and maintain my energy as I teach?
  • How do my attitudes, beliefs and values affect my teaching?
  • What do learners really care about?
  • How do I~we build a healthy learning community in my classroom?
  • What matters in our broader communities, both local and global?
  • What is my responsibility in tending to our environmental crisis?
  • What solutions do my students offer resolving environmental dilemmas?

Transformative Inquiry is a way of taking time and space to draw on personal passions and put that energy to use within a relational framework in order to address burning issues.
When teachers step out from behind the façade of consistency, certainty, and coherence that has taken on almost sacred importance in modern pedagogies, even for a moment, they may initiate productive forms of confusion that can bring into empathetic inquiry the myth at the core of modern reason. This is a form of transformative inquiry capable of reconstituting teaching as a craft for facilitating human encounters with a knowing reality, an eloquent reality, a good reality.
Aidan Davison
References:
Davison, A. (2008). Myth in the practice of reason: The production of education and productive confusion. In T. Leonard & P. Willis (eds.), Pedagogies of the Imagination, pp. 53-63. NY: Springer Science + Business Media.