Transforming Selves

Transformative education is aimed it promoting awareness and fundamental change at the personal, relational, institutional, and global levels. In doing so, it deploys a range of techniques, processes, and practices aimed at assisting learners to work on themselves. Such practices, or technologies of the self, contain within them assumptions about self and identity and the relevance of society to personal formation and change. The purpose of this article is to examine the various conceptions of self and identity apparent in the language of transformative learning designs and subsequently, the various technologies of the self deployed for the purpose of transformative change. Four broad categories of technologies of the self are identified: knowing oneself, controlling oneself, caring for oneself, and recreating oneself. These categories cut across the various conceptions of self and society, but they can be usefully used in conjunction with them to critically analyse different designs for transformative learning.