Critical policy inquiry and transformative learning: Reflexive deliberation as problematization

This chapter takes up the important question of policy learning. Challenging the technocratic biases of conventional approaches to learning, the discussion offers the theory and practice of transformative learning as a way to better think critically about problems that need to be solved and what needs to be known to go about that. Addressing the limits of techno-empirical knowledge, the approach interpretively examines how social and political assumptions, largely unacknowledged, are embedded in conventional approaches to policy leaning. Through critical reflection, transformative learning draws out these assumptions, often tacit, and seeks to subject them to a participatory form of dialectical deliberation. The process requires the expert, as educator, to not only impart knowledge, but also to shape and mediate deliberation in ways that can extend opportunities for reflexive policy learning. In the process, the participants, as co-learners, seek the knowledge needed for critically understanding, both personally and politically, contemporary policy problems. They need to deal with both their own political questions and those of the society more generally.