Transformative Learning and Experience: Forging New Learning Links Between the Personal and Political

Protests And The Public Sphere

Public protests are frequent events around the world. There are protests against raising the retirement age for workers in France, protests against the Supreme Court decisions in Washington DC. Experiences prompt protests. Other protests in Syntagma Square (in 2011) and in Plaza de Catalunya, Barcelona (also 2011) expressed the indignation of citizens against austerity. Similar protests have sparked revolutions – the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia (1989) and the Purple Revolution in Iraq (2005). These are public spheres that are of interest to adult educators (Fleming, 2023). Of course, we want to distinguish these protests from the reactionary, racist, homophobic interests in society. A proclamation by the protesters stated: ‘They thought we were asleep…But they were wrong’ (see Pellicer, et al., 2021). Public protests are profound democratic events in which protesters fill public squares with their voices and the public sphere with their experience. They intend bringing about policy and political change. A vibrant public sphere is essential for democracy. Street protests are a form of politics from below in which the experience of workers, or students, or other citizens is expressed in the form of critique. Their experiences are a counter epistemology, the protests a counter public to that of dominant interests. The epistemologically marginalized (those who in the opinion of the powerful may not know all the facts or understand the context) attempt to trigger a crisis in the knowledge of the socially and economically powerful in society. Transformative learning points to such crises as potential disorienting dilemmas for society.

Usually, transformative learning (TL) refers to crises or dilemmas as being within individual experience, but in these public moments of protest, the dilemma is a social, political or economic one: Whether old frames of reference will remain in command or whether new ones emerge based on the critiques and experience of protesting citizens.