Transformative can be Normative

So much excitement accompanies “going to school” for the first time. Learning to read; learning about the natural world; learning about myself and my country; learning about what adults get paid to do! So much to learn! But after awhile (how long depends on the student, but few survive junior high) enthusiasm lags. Education has been oversold. It’s mostly drudgery followed by forgetting what little I thought I had learned.

There is no reason that love for learning should ever cease to be a lifelong passion. Naive youthful enthusiasm for knowledge need never give way to a mature cynicism, if . . .

Enter transformative learning. Transformative learning confronts and shatters our expectations. It makes our head spin. It invites us to a world at once more complex and more wonderful than we can imagine. “Knowledge is power” we are told, but this is not an ability to recite facts. Knowledge is possessed only to the degree one understands. Understanding is worth fighting for; it is worth mental sweat that leads to mastery of powerful ideas.

I aim to give you the tools that will unlock the opportunities for transformation that surround you. The resources that will be cached here are just the beginning.

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Michael Gray
Founder and Director, Summer Institute in Teaching Science