Teaching for democracy: Transformative learning theory mediating policy and practice

Abstract

The context of this article is the on-going renewal of the Norwegian curriculum. Our point of departure is the challenges that arise when implementing policy into practice. One of the traditional aspirations and goals of the Norwegian education system is to foster democratic citizens. How to implement democratic practices into the classroom is a challenge faced by politicians, academics as well as practitioners. One obstacle might be the lack of theoretical resources that can help translate policy in to practice. We argue that theory can be used for contextualising pedagogically grounded ethics on what goes on in the classroom. Theory can be used for translating policy into pedagogy. In this article, we propose transformative learning theory (TLT) as a possible resource for negotiating the gap between policy and practice.

Keywords

• Democracy
• citizenship
• education
• policy
• transformative learning