Jack Mezirow

Jack Mezirow was an American sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Adult and Continuing Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, widely credited as the founder of transformative learning theory. Drawing on Paulo Freire and Jurgen Habermas, he began developing the theory from 1978, after studying women returning to community college, arguing that adults do not simply apply old ways of learning to new situations but instead discover a need for genuinely new perspectives when their existing frame of reference no longer explains what is happening to them. He established the Adult Education Guided Intensive Study doctoral program at Teachers College, which trained generations of adult educators in the theory. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/