Transpersonal Education:
Content, Skills and Learning Environments

Joseph McNair (2002)

The transpersonal approach to teaching and learning can be applied to the content of courses, the skills taught in courses, and the structure of the classroom, school or college itself.

As to content, relevant courses or specific content areas within courses where transpersonal education principles and practices can be applied are those

• which have directly to do with the lives of the students or trainees involved, and
• which they perceive as relevant to them, especially with regarding to satisfying their perceived or felt needs.

Education courses, particularly those dealing with multicultural education, social justice education, anti-bias education, exceptionalities and learning styles are especially relevant. The social sciences, specifically adjustment psychology, human growth and development, social problems, human sexuality, marriage and the family, substance abuse and recovery, aggression and violence are excellent examples of courses where the principles and practices of transpersonal education can be applied. Communications courses, especially composition and creative writing, reading and literature are also excellent contexts for transpersonal principle as and practices. Even math and science courses can become transpersonal education experiences when they are designed in such a way that students perceive content and course activities as "real" and "important" to dealing with life on its terms and relevant to satisfying perceived or felt needs.

Specific skills emphasized in transpersonal approaches to teaching and learning include

• learning about one's identity (who am I)
• learning about power (what it is, what forms it takes, how to acquire it or tap into it, that one is entitled to a proper measure of power and how to use it appropriately);
• experiencing connectedness (with other human beings, animals and the environment) e.g. meditation, concentration and contemplation
• values clarification, e.g. evaluating, validating, choosing and acting.
• communication skills, including listening, speaking, writing. giving directions, asking questions, talking about one's feelings, speaking one's truth, acknowledging another's truth
• group work, e.g. breaking down the isolation which some learners feel through cooperative learning activities, group projects, and group processes which give support, sharing.
• Role play including the enactment of rites of passage and personal rituals
• co-counselling or peer counseling e.g. specific slills on how to be emotional resources for each other, identifying peak experiences and/or persnal or spiritual emergencies and how to help another through them.
• assertiveness training including skills of impression management, giving and receiving feedback, handling conflict
• achievement motivation emphasizes goal- setting, moderate risk taking and achievement planning,

Each of these skills should be taught and developed in an experiential way, using well worked out exercises which involve the learner's body and feelings as well as the intellect.

The learning environment is designed to emphasize self- choice on the part of the student, and de-emphasize marks and grades. The teacher facilitates and directs depending on student knowledge and skills and is a resource. Students have a voice in the decisions which may affect them. All those places which have learning contracts, negotiated study or student-led project work are humanistic and transpersonal to that extent.

Transpersonal learning environments may be characterized as places where the following processes are at work

• CHOICE OR CONTROL: Learners are encouraged, as time goes on, to exercise more and more control and choices concerning the course of their education - both their education goals and their day-to-day activities
• FELT CONCERN: As education becomes more humanistic and transpersonal , the curriculum tends to focus more and more on the felt concerns and interests of the students.
• THE WHOLE PERSON: Attention is paid to feeling, choosing, communicating and acting. Learners are regularly asked about their dreams as well as their thoughts and actions.
• SELF EVALUATION: Learners more and more are encouraged to evaluate their own learning progress, occasionally choosing to take tests, or asking for others' feedback, or gathering data about themselves.
• SELF TRANSCENDENCE OR PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION: Learners recognize that they change with each learning, and with each skill acquired -- that they become different with each transformation, more than what they were
• TEACHER AS FACILITATOR: The teacher tends to be more supportive than critical, more understanding than judgmental, more genuine than playing a role.