Transformative Learning Reconceptualized: Integrating the Arts and Social Imagination

This paper reconceptualizes Transformative Learning (TL) by foregrounding the neglected role of the sociological imagination and the transformative potential of the arts. It critiques the prevailing psychological emphasis in TL theory and calls for a renewed focus on social structures, historical context, and imaginative engagement. Drawing on the foundational ideas of John Dewey, Maxine Greene, C. Wright Mills, Alfred Schutz, and Oskar Negt, the paper explores how the arts—especially literature, music, and visual art—support the imagination, empathy, and emancipatory action. Works such as The Handmaid’s Tale, King Lear, and The Mill on the Floss are analyzed to demonstrate how art reveals the dialectical relationship between personal experience and societal structures, fostering the imaginative re-visioning of possibilities.The concepts of rupture, typification, and in-between spaces are employed to deepen understanding of how learners can be facilitated toward transformative engagement. Negt’s ideas of exemplary learning and "imploitation" are used to highlight how capitalist systems can colonize imagination, making its recovery central to education for social change. By integrating aesthetic experience with critical pedagogy, the paper argues that TL can reclaim its social justice roots and become more responsive to today’s complex realities. The arts are presented not as mere enhancements to learning but as vital, dynamic forces capable of awakening wide-awakeness, fostering empathy, and enabling learners to imagine and act toward a more democratic and inclusive society. This rethinking of TL calls educators to highlight the imagination, as a change of direction from a highly rational critical reflection, as central to processes of personal and collective transformation.