Disorientation in Community Service-Learning: A Phenomenological Inquiry

Abstract

Community service-learning (CSL) is commonly featured in health promotion curriculum. Lauded for its pedagogical richness and transformative potential, CSL is also pedagogically messy and often experienced as a struggle. And yet, the content, contexts and conditions of that which students find disorienting in CSL have garnered little attention in the literature. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, we explore the “disorienting dilemma” as an understated concept in CSL. Our aim is to better understand the disorienting dilemma to “make CSL a smoother experience for everyone.” We draw upon reflections from 39 students enrolled in a full-year undergraduate health promotion CSL course. Using directed content analysis, we read and coded 390 reflections. In mapping the codes (n = 2104), we found them to cluster around three domains: (i) aspects of the CSL learning experience that were most disorienting, (ii) course aspects that enabled students to navigate their disorientation, and (iii) how students relate their learning to the disorientation. Students often shared their emotional experience of CSL as a pedagogy, and that they struggled with the process of real program planning, and uncertainty with how they related to the community. Often, it was the practical, social, and relational content that students struggled with that morphed into support for students to navigate their disorientation. We found students to relate their disorientation to new self-learning, a changed and more collectivist criteria of success, and an altered sense of self in relation to community. We discuss theoretical and pedagogical implications of the disorienting dilemma.

Introduction

Health promotion has been described as a highly applied field of action (McQueen, 2001; Potvin & McQueen, 2007). Working in and with the community are core features of health promotion competencies, for example with participatory and community-based approaches to identifying needs, setting priorities, planning, implementing and evaluating health promotion programs (International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE), 2016). Pedagogical methods that bring learning outside of the classroom—or brings the community into the classroom—are common across health promotion curriculums. Community-service learning (CSL) is one such pedagogical method. Considered a high-impact educational practice (Kuh, 2008), CSL is lauded for its transformative potential.

There exist different and sometimes contradictory approaches to CSL (Butin, 2012, pp. 3–22). “Service” and “learning” can be dialectical concepts in practice, where there is perpetual tension in balancing priorities of learning with priorities of the community (Butin, 2012, pp. 4–14; Eyler et al., 2001). Engagement scholars are critical of the role and relevance of CSL to academic institutions, for example, when the community is drawn upon to curate particular learning experiences for students without consideration of reciprocal benefits or power differentials (Mitchell, 2008). For this reason, a hyphen is sometimes used to connect these concepts (i.e., “service-learning”) to emphasize that all CSL participants—students, instructors, and community members—are engaging in relationships for learning and service (Bringle & Clayton, 2013). The tenuousness of facilitating this relational arrangement demands reflexivity and humility to such an extent that some CSL scholars rather refer to themselves as “CSL practitioners.” In practice it is difficult to achieve deeply embedded and consequential learning and service, and when set up this way, by design CSL introduces an open and uncontrollable learning context. Deemed “pedagogically messy,” the learning processes in such CSL contexts are assumed to extend outside of and beyond intended learning objectives. Discrepancy between intended learning and actual learning in CSL has been referred to as “slippage,” or “remainders” of a course (Butin, 2012, pp. 45–46). Other scholars have described the “ill-structured problems” of CSL, where CSL participants are expected to engage in situations which are inherently ambiguous, entail time-consuming thinking processes, and hold many possible solutions. This contrasts with traditional approaches to education, that contain tight and reductive learning objectives, where students are presented with “well-structured problems” and are assessed on their ability to efficiently arrive at a single conclusion.

Unsurprisingly, CSL literature is marked by various presentations of student experiences of struggle (H. C. Giles, 2014; Holmes, 2015; Rosing et al., 2010). For example, community partners describe the intensities and challenges for students engaging in CSL, likening it to being “immersed in the fire” where students can “sink or swim” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 25); where students will “flounder” if we don’t know what we are going to do (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 155); where students “need to be able to roll with the punches when things change” (Kimme Hea & Wendler Shah, 2016, p. 60); and where it can be “difficult for students to get into the swing of things” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 122). Community partners describe their own experience of student struggle, where students may require “patience” and some “hand-holding in the beginning,” but “once students come to trust in their own creative thinking and build a commitment to the organization in which they work, they are an invaluable resource” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 143). When the struggles are not resolved, community partners might interpret a student as being “not a good match” (Gillis & Mac Lellan, 2010, p. 21) or “not having worked out” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 127).

While evidence of student struggle is omnipresent in various CSL literature, CSL inquiries have rarely explored this struggle directly, having rather focused on student learning outcomes including academic performance as well as the development of personal social values, civic attitudes, and future plans for service (Eyler et al., 2001). Such research emphasizing the “value added” of CSL, where students have new experiences that ultimately change how they learn and how they view the world and the people around them, tends to be undergirded with theoretical propositions of transformation.

Indeed, elements of transformation are recognizable in many definitions of CSL. The value of encountering something new and unfamiliar, working through it and emerging changed in some way harkens back to Dewey’s educational philosophy of “learning by doing,” Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, Schon’s “reflection-in-action,” and later, Mezirow’s transformative learning (TL) model (Mezirow, 2000). In general, there seems to be ambiguity in how TL might exist with CSL, with few research inquiries directly exploring processes or outcomes of TL within CSL (Kiely, 2002, 2004, 2005). Mezirow’s concept of the “disorienting dilemma” may be especially apt when considering the tensions that exist when bringing together service and learning, and the ways that students are known to struggle in open, uncontrollable, and “pedagogically messy” learning contexts.

Thus, the imperative of the current study is to address the theoretical and practical gap of the disorienting dilemma by examining more closely how students experience struggle in a CSL context, with the aim to “make CSL a smoother experience and in that way doing some good in the community” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 18).

Methods

Learning Context

The student TL processes to be examined arose out of the pedagogical context of a full-year undergraduate Health Studies capstone CSL course. Students learn principles of program planning and evaluation, and work with a partnering community organization in groups of 4 to 6 over the course of a full school year to design, implement and evaluate a program in response to a community-identified need. Community organizations and health issues of interest are varied, tending toward recognizing structural and social determinants of health issues over behavioral ones. As much as possible, the course design integrates classroom content with community work. Community partnerships are set up prior to the start of the course during which time the community-identified need is determined and discussed according to potential program ideas and course parameters. Students are encouraged to self-designate into groups of their choosing and are assigned to a program in terms of their personal or group preferences.

In creating an “environment of challenge,” several supportive instructional practices were deliberately leveraged to foster transformative learning, including: embedding many opportunities for formal and informal reflection, sharing resources and ideas at key junctures, and maintaining an open-door policy, whereby students have the flexibility to seek support and instructional input as much and as often as they find necessary.

Research Context

Research Methodology

Phenomenology was determined to be the most fitting approach for this study in order to arrive at a structural description of the disorienting dilemma and expose the underlying and precipitating factors that account for what is being experienced (Creswell, 2013). In wanting to explore students’ lived experiences and how they interact with or experience the phenomena within a given context, we drew upon weekly student reflective journal entries as a window into student perceptions of how particular activities, events, and/or interactions in the classroom and in the community affected their overall learning experiences.

Data Gathering

Self-reflection literature was used to design a series of purposefully scaffolded prompts for the student journal entries to encompass a mixture of reflection forms (Ash et al., 2005). Planning and evaluation concepts were embedded therein, purposefully drawing parallels between constructionist aspects of program planning and the self-deterministic qualities of a CSL course. Entries were encouraged to be bi-monthly, as a means of facilitating TL as well as documenting struggle over the course of the year. The parameters of the reflection were intentionally loose (in as few or many words as they would like, with no specific format, reflection content or form). During the year, student reflections were kept confidential between each student, the teaching assistant, and the instructor.

At the end of the school year, students were invited to have their reflection products included in the current research study after their grades had been submitted to the university registrar. This research was granted clearance by the General Research Ethics Board at Queen’s University according to the Tri-Council Policy Statement (Tri-Council Policy Statement, 2018).

Explicitation of the Data

We adapted the following steps for the analyses: (1) reading all student journal entries in order to comprehend them thoroughly; (2) using directed content analysis to convert experiences into a coding schema within the study scope; (3) identifying commonalities in student experiences.

Directed Content Analysis

We drew upon directed content analysis, as an inductive and systematic method to support our investigation (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Through independent coding, we were able to better “suspend preconceived notions,” in order to fully engage with the phenomenological essence of the disorienting dilemma.

Upon completion of the course, responses from consenting students were imported into Dedoose version 7.1.4 (Dedoose, 2016), a qualitative data analysis software program. All three authors undertook coding, independently, sentence-by-sentence for all reflection pieces. We came together intermittently throughout the process to discuss our approaches to coding. Codes were created and assigned to be as descriptive as possible, and as closely representing the original text as possible, without introducing or assigning ideas different from the ones presented by the student. Text fragments that were assigned more than one code were treated as distinct fragments for each code assigned—so that different codes could yield different phenomenological insights. While the entirety of student submissions were coded, not all codes fit within a struggle, change, or learning lens. For example, some student reflection included purely descriptive recounting of program planning work. We did not include these segments, though we repeatedly revisited these codes as they contributed to our contextual understanding of the ways that students interpreted and experienced their service-learning.

We then undertook a visual mapping exercise (Hays & Singh, 2011), where we viewed and reviewed all codes as they tended to relate. Codes were found to cluster into three large descriptive categories, which we termed domains. Within each domain, several distinct themes relating to student experiences of struggle emerged and were recorded. Using a phenomenological frame to explore in-depth the structural descriptions of the qualities and processes of struggle within each domain, we then devised three “how” questions to help illuminate the essential properties of the disorienting dilemma in this particular learning context: (1) how do students describe their disorientation? (2) how do students navigate their disorientation? (3) how do students relate their learning, transformative or otherwise, to the disorientation?

Practices for Dependability and Trustworthiness

In recognizing that one is never able to fully suspend their subjectivities, we adopted several methodological practices to strike a balance within the tenuous but opportune roles of participant, observer, and researcher. To increase the dependability of the descriptions, the reflection responses functioned as a private communication channel with the course instructor and teaching assistants. By assigning a grade for completion and not content, and deferring invitation into the study until after the completion of the course, students were encouraged to reflect and share without a sense of surveillance for assessment or coercion into research participation. To promote trustworthiness, we undertook a thorough and robust directed content analysis, which allowed for independent coding and a deep engagement with the data.

Results

Of the 52 students enrolled in the course, 39 students consented to participate in the study, resulting in a minimum of two students participating per group. All students completed at least 10 of the 12 reflection prompts, for a total of 390 responses. Submissions totaled between 50 and 500 words (200 words on average). A combined total of 2,104 unique codes were identified and assigned by all three authors. These codes clustered unevenly around three domains: 928 codes fell within the “disorienting dilemma” domain, 681 codes fell within the “helps navigate” domain, and 495 fell within the “transformative learning” domain. Themes relating to each domain, along with the structural descriptions and essential properties of the experiences of disorientation derived from the “how” questions are shared below.

Domain 1: Disorienting Dilemma

Theme 1: Experiencing Unfamiliar Pedagogy

Early in the course, students framed their unfamiliarity with CSL as a pedagogy—including the self-directedness and experiential learning—as uncomfortable. They shared a desire for more structure and certainty, a preference for pre-determined individual work, and assessment that was familiar and straight-forward where they could square their efforts and learning with success. Students voiced their struggle with “not knowing what we should be doing, or what is expected of me.” Students also shared apprehension with undertaking a year-long group-based project, and described anxiety as well as a lack of confidence that stemmed from previous experiences of inequitable effort and contributions in groupwork. Frustrations with sustained groupwork recurrently surfaced and were particularly heightened by a perceived lack of progress.

Theme 2: Doing “Real” Program Planning

Students shared their experiences of feeling overwhelmed with the process of working on something real and uncontrollable. There was a tension that existed, where students shared feeling a sense of loss of straight-forwardness and predictability to the non-linear and emergent qualities of working on a real issue within the community. Resistance to change and resentment toward the disruption that it represented, was something that students grappled with in the context of their program work. Feedback, newly realized expectations, and changes in resources or program conditions were often framed as a loss of time, a misplacement of previous effort, a loss of momentum or sense of direction. Even moments of opportunity could be perceived as deviating from original plans, contributing to a sense of loss of control.

Theme 3: Working With a Community Partner and in the Community

It was not uncommon for students to share uncertainty and exasperation when describing their experiences working with a community partner. Beginning early in the course, the relationships between students and community partners drew considerable scrutiny and inter-group comparisons on the intensity of involvement of community partners. For example, many students equated the quality of their relationship with their community partner with the regularity of meetings, the amount of time and attention and specificity of direction they were given. For students that would describe their community partners as being “hands-off,” there was a paradoxical tension between appreciating the autonomy given by their community partner, and a desire for prescriptive directions. In contrast, students that described their community partners as more “hands-on” would lament their frustrations at not being able to meet expectations, perceiving the community partner’s input as being confusing, difficult to decipher, unreasonable, and adding unnecessary changes to program activities or tasks.

Students also shared feeling uncertain and apprehensive about “actually doing” program related information-gathering or tasks within their partnering organizations or with the community. Students shared reluctance and uncertainty about their proficiency in undertaking tasks—such as informational interviews with key stakeholders, connecting with relevant offices or organizations, participating in various events, programs or meetings, or delivering presentations –stating a preference for classroom-based course work.

Phenomenological Question 1: How do Students Describe Their Disorientation?

We found the disorienting dilemma was unavoidable, in that all students struggled, albeit with different aspects of their experience, where at times there were overlapping and competing forms of disorientation. Overwhelmingly, the students shared their emotions in relation to CSL as a pedagogy, the process of real program planning, and their experiences within the community. Affective experiences tended to be described as “stress,” “frustration,” “anxiety,” “worry,” “unnerving” and “tension,” which were frequently later juxtaposed with “hopeful” or “optimistic” descriptions.

Domain 2: Helps Navigate

Theme 1: Taking Tangible Action

Most consistently conveyed, was not the reflecting or discussing, but the actual “doing” of work that helped them to navigate the tenuous and uncertain processes of community program planning. Moving from abstract to practical was a shift, and students spoke to the value of small but concrete actions and an approach that allowed for recursive micro-adjustments through small trial-and-error.

Theme 2: Valuing Working Relationships

The social relationships within the students’ CSL experience emerged as critical to students accepting the ways that programs unfolded and contributed to a shared sense of progress. For example, when talking about the role of group work, many students shifted from focusing on fairness and allocation of work to placing value on group processes. The perception of groupwork shifted from being a barrier to success, to being discussed as instrumental to moving beyond the uncertainty of program planning in the community. This was particularly evident when students transitioned from referring to their peers as “my group” and began to use collective pronouns (“we/us”). Like their peer relationships, the development of a working relationship with their community partner also emerged as being invaluable for students navigating uncertainty. As students were welcomed into new community settings, the insights gained were understood to be important to refining their ideas and helping to validate their decision-making. As students established their working relationship with their community partners, the guidance that initially might have been perceived as shifting or fickle changed to being viewed as valuable and dynamic input that enriched their program work.

Theme 3: Changing Self-Perception in Relation to Others

Students reflected upon the ways that they perceived themselves in relation to the community and the people they were working with. Students described a different sense of accountability to their community partner, group members, the issue they were working on, or the community groups they were working with. Especially as the course progressed, students tended to describe how their increasing involvement with the community helped them relinquish control over their own personal or emotional experience of the uncertainties they were facing.

Phenomenological Question 2: How do Students Navigate Their Disorientation?

We found that disorientation was not a fixed state, but rather dynamic and shapeshifting. Students were found to frequently loop back into disorientation when they encountered new uncertainty, or if they were sensing a lack of progress. Student dilemmas were not passively resolved, in that the passage of time did not equate to moving out of a space of disorientation, and rather required some sort of intervention or external input. Students were found to navigate their disorientation through practical, social, and relational processes. And often, it was the very content that students struggled with that morphed into that which supported students through navigating their struggles.

Domain 3: Transformative Learning

Theme 1: Relating Disorientation to New Self-Learning

Students shared what they had learned about themselves over the course of the year, with some of these reflections suggesting a profound change in how they viewed their ability to negotiate through a disorienting experience more generally. Students shared feeling a greater capacity to cope with feelings of uncertainty and challenge, and that they had developed new approaches to problem-solving and reflexivity in terms of how they work with others. Students made an explicit connection between their discomfort in the course and how it related to their learning, placing value on the experience of disorientation. Many students reflected on “not regretting” their disorienting experiences within the course, because of the learning and growth that came as a result.

Theme 2: Moving Toward Collective Criteria of Successful Program Work

Especially when reflecting on their group work, students shared gaining a stronger appreciation for other peoples’ experiences and contributions, and a relinquishing of control that allowed for better ideas and stronger work. Overwhelmingly, later reflections suggested a shift in learning priorities in the course. For example, early on, students tended to share concerns about assessment and group work, and a desire for specifics on “what they were supposed to be doing,” whereas later in the course the emphasis shifted to their work in the community. The ways that students struggled with their idea of progress and “lost time,” a source of tension within their groups, shifted to be reflected upon as a loss of program potential.

Theme 3: Altered Sense of Self in Relation to the Community

Students commonly referenced extending past their “comfort zone” in reflecting on their personal growth and learning within the community, attributing their new sense of self with respect to the community to “new” and “real world” experiences. Important “inner” changes had to do with developing self-identity as a community member, and a growing sense of humility with respect to bringing about change. Many students shared reverence for their community partners once they had established working relationships and had the opportunity to observe them in action, describing how their relationships with their community partners fostered a shared commitment to their programs.

Phenomenological Question 3: How Do Students Relate Their Learning, Transformative or Otherwise, to the Disorientation?

The learning processes that emanated from students’ disorientation appeared to be irregular and boundless rather than phasic or even progressive. We found students to undertake meaning-making at all stages of the course, and that the pacing of meaning-making was erratic and recursive for some students and sustained and latent for others.

Discussion

In this study, we used a phenomenological approach to illuminate some of the most salient aspects of the CSL learning experience that students found to be disorienting, within the transformative learning context of a full-year undergraduate Health Studies capstone CSL course. Here we discuss the theoretical and pedagogical implications of our findings.

Assumptions made around the temporality of the disorienting dilemma, for example the transientness of the struggle and time to resolution, can create unrealistic expectations for students, instructors, and community partners. In our study, we identified several qualities of the disorienting dilemma that do not necessarily fit with existing descriptions within the expansive TL literature, where the disorienting dilemma is variously described as a “critical incident,” “triggering event,” “incident or experience outside of one’s control” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 482), or “epochal, a sudden, dramatic, reorienting insight, or incremental, involving a progressive series of transformations in related points of view that culminate in a transformation in habit of mind” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 21). Rather, students in our TL study context experienced disorientation as dynamic and shapeshifting, erratic, recursive, not self-resolving, sustained for some and latent for others. We also found the disorienting dilemma to be navigated through personal, social, and relational learning.

These findings have implications for student learning assessment. Assessment drives learning, and conventional designs follow a uniform and often regular schedule within a course timeline. When learning is assumed to track onto a predictable, regular, and incremental progression, structured learning is privileged over learning that is “messy,” incidental, and broader than pre-planned learning objectives. Further, many assessment models construct grades as relative, competitive rather than cooperative, and students are assessed in terms of their ability to demonstrate their own individual learning. Without designing assessment to account for disorienting experiences in a CSL course, students could be penalized for non-homogenous and extra-individual learning trajectories, dissuading them from fully engaging in their CSL experience, which thus diminishes its transformative potential (Bandy et al., 2018).

It remains unspecified in the literature that which precipitates the transformation, where the content of the disorienting dilemma has been described as an “emotional upheaval,” a “painful, confusing space,” a “disconfirming experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 349), or as an “eye-opening experience” (Shor et al., 2017). We too found that students experienced their disorientation as emotional, and the meaning-making of their learning was likewise emotional. Indeed, TL scholars emphasize the value of extra-rational processes, including affective ways of knowing (Cranton, 2006a, 2006b; Hoggan, 2016; Mezirow, 2009). CSL is an example of a uniquely powerful learning context that brings together cognitive, affective, emotive, visceral and social forms of experience, reflection, meaning-making, and perspective transformation (Cranton, 2006b). However, ethical tensions emerge when there are assumptions around the qualities and conditions around that which would be disorienting in particular epistemological contexts. For example, the disorienting dilemmas in familiar and less shocking environments are likely to hold different qualities than the “life changing experiences” of students who are confronted with social injustices in foreign environments. For students in health promotion, seeking out transitory shock rather than a sustained discomfort, is less practicable for developing teamwork and communication skills, or adapting and responding to changing conditions, with an emphasis on creativity and innovation—all of which are cursory to health promotion competencies. The possibilities CSL might present for health promotion curriculum will be limited if only “othering” exposures are understood to hold transformative potential. Critical CSL research could explore the assumptions surrounding the content of the disorienting dilemma and thus the privileging of transformation in different disciplinary contexts.

We found paradoxically, for many students that which was specifically disorienting would in turn serve them in navigating their disorientation, and later served to form the basis of their meaning-making. In the current study, it was the people that students were working with and the real-ness of the program work that emerged to be disorienting. These were also what helped pull the students through to the point where, amidst their challenges, they began recognizing that they were in the process of developing new skills and knowledge. Even when the disorientation was personal, the learning and growth that students experienced was not an individual experience, but rather revealed considerable collective underpinning. Much of what students reflected upon involved relationships and divulged relational learning. Relationality is part of a connected approach to transformative learning, where learning happens within and alongside the building of relationships with others (Cranton, 2006a). Relational ways of knowing transcend cognitive tasks and rather involve creative capacities (Gardner & Kelly, 2008)—of which students spoke to in their renewed approaches to solution-finding– where they relied on connecting their ideas in dialogic-relational ways. Furthermore, learning relationships are mutually transforming, broadening what is “know-able, do-able, and be-able,” and not about convergence onto a pre-existing truth (Davis, 2004, p. 184). Students frequently reflected upon a multiplicity of ways of doing and knowing and conveyed a shift, first into an acceptance, and later into a valuation of others’ contributions, perspectives and gifts. Mezirow (2000, p 12) also describes intellectual openness in his descriptions of transformative learning, where learners shift from “self-serving debate to empathic listening and informed constructive discourse.” Students often reflected upon their responsibilities to themselves, their group members, their community partners and the community issue at large with a sense of reciprocity that threaded throughout the reflections. CSL scholarship is indeed premised on the value of community, partnerships, and relationships in bringing about action and change. Rather than attempt to simulate experiences, by giving hypothetical case studies or programs, or lessening community involvement to un-complicate the CSL partnership, our findings suggest that it is the formation of relationships within the classroom and community that hold the transformative potential along with the disorientation.

Further, our findings validate the emotional and relational labor that may underpin the transformative potential in CSL. In our study and in other literature, such support is commonly referred to as “hand-holding” from partners and instructors, and the students’ perceived lack of support is conversely commonly referred to as “hands-off.” Indeed, tending to student disorientation is caring work, the labor of which is personal, ongoing, time consuming, and not replicative between students and community partners. However, while the disorientation of CSL may belong to the student, it is everyone’s responsibility. Thus, the focus of the content or premise of the disorientation is not locked in the psyche of the student, nor can its resolution solely rest on the shoulders of the student, with expectations of resolution simply deriving from rigorous self-examination and critical reflection. Rather than viewing disorientation as artifactual to transformative learning, or a personal struggle, a better grasp on the disorienting dilemmas of CSL can pull all CSL participants into the real-time and relational work of negotiating that which is disorienting (H. C. Giles, 2014). In this way, “infrastructures of care” in CSL might look like reinforcing students’ sense of support as they move into new and unfamiliar experiences of CSL, helping to establish mechanisms of self- and group-reflection, along with the hand-holding that “comes in the form of asking lots of questions, expressing appreciation for their work, and gently encouraging them to keep thinking deeply and strategically” (Stoecker & Tryon, 2009, p. 138).

Strengths & Limitations

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that has specifically focused on examining the disorienting dilemma in a health promotion CSL context. Of all the learning processes in TL theory, the disorienting dilemma is the most poorly understood. As such, this study also responds to criticism of TL literature as remaining in the abstract and not offering practical classroom applications more broadly (Cranton, 2006b; Fisher-Yoshida et al., 2009). However, by focusing on disorientation rather than on transformative learning outcomes, we may have attributed other learning as being transformative.

Phenomenology involves a great deal of reflexivity on the part of the researchers. By designing a study that involved three researchers coding independently, we were able to better account for our individual biases (Barry et al., 1999). Throughout the project in its entirety, we undertook deliberative and reflexive practices of memo’ing, regular meetings, and record keeping of discussions to promote transparency of our process. This aided in maintaining a record of our analytical decisions as well as the rationale and context of those decisions. This ongoing reflexive dialog between the three authors was vital to enhance the rigor of our study.

We did not follow up with students’ to confirm their experiences were reflected in our study findings and themes. While “member checking” is an important practice for ensuring credibility, we determined this would be impracticable given the logistical challenges and finite resources unique to this research project (i.e., tracking down already graduated students).

Conclusion

Transformative learning is founded on critical pedagogy, where knowledge is understood as inherently value-laden, and society is a locus for change to become more democratic and less oppressive. Indeed, there are many parallels between teaching for transformation, the transformative goals of CSL, and the imperative of health promotion curriculum to prepare students for a “field of action.” Taken together, our findings suggest that TL and specifically the disorienting dilemma is a useful frame to begin to de-mystify the ways that students struggle in CSL experiences.