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The disorienting dilemma: the senior capstone as a transformative experience.

Article Excerpt
UNDERLYING MUCH of what we do in higher education is the often unstated assumption that a college education is a transformative experience. One hundred and fifty years ago, John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University pointed out that education stretches beyond knowledge and skills: "education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of character; it is something individual and permanent." Newman places transformative education in contrast with instruction, which has "little or no effect on the mind itself," and teaching methodologies, "which are contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition, or to use" (1982, 86). Reflecting Newman's distinction between education and instruction, Robert Kegan (2000) distinguishes between transformational learning and informational learning, and then asks "what 'form' transforms?" He argues that transformational learning involves an epistemological change, a new way of knowing, or what Jack Mezirow (1991) calls a new frame of reference. Transformational learning, to have an "effect on the mind itself," to change ways of knowing, can be discomforting. Kegan points to the importance of contradiction, paradox, and oppositeness in transformational learning. Mezirow argues that a disorienting dilemma is the first step in transformational learning.

Transformation in a university occurs at all levels--student, faculty, programmatic, institutional, and social. Indeed, Paulo Freire argues that the proper purpose of education is cultural transformation for both the individual and society:

Women and men that we are, we are the only beings who have socio- historically developed the capacity for 'seizing' substantively the object of our knowing. For that reason we are the only beings for whom learning is a creative adventure. Something much richer than the simple repetition of a lesson or of something already given. For us, to learn is to construct, to reconstruct, to observe with a view to changing--none of which can be done without being open to risk, to the adventure of the spirit. (1998, 67)

There is considerable evidence that a senior culminating experience can play a transformative role in student learning. The senior culminating experience is identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement (2007) as one of four high-impact activities with demonstrable results. Arthur Levine (1998) identifies four general purposes of the senior capstone: integration (pulling together the four years of college), breadth (taking students beyond the increasing specialization of the major by offering a final general education experience), application (using student expert knowledge to examine a discrete issue and produce a substantial product), and transition (preparing students to move from college to the world beyond). Of these...

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