The Ethical Knower: Rethinking Our Pedagogy in the Age of Trump

This article seeks to begin a conversation about pedagogical responses to the current moment. Specifically, I argue that two of adult learning’s most venerated practices—transformative learning and the use of personal narrative—are insufficiently nuanced to respond effectively to the political divisions and the epistemological chaos represented by the election of Donald Trump. I ask the adult learning community, first, to revisit the role of culture in our systems for making meaning and deepen our understanding of the relationship between personal identity, community membership, and attitudinal change. I then suggest that our focus on attitudinal change encourages us overlook aspects of our students’ lives out of which a more bracing pedagogy might emerge. I make a case for distinguishing between the hermeneutic self-awareness cultivated in transformative learning and attention to epistemological ethics as a response to “fake news” and “truthiness.” I argue for a move from Mezirow’s notion of critical self-reflection to Dewey’s positing of reflection as the active and careful consideration of truth claims, a form of reflection that Dewey himself saw as foundational to epistemological integrity