Transformative Education in the Jesuit Tradition

Commitment to excellence.   Faith in God and the religious experience.   Service that promotes justice.   Values-based leadership.   Global awareness.

IGNATIAN METHODOLOGY

Transformative education is not simply a content; it is also a method designed to foster continual growth in the hearts, minds, and will of the students. This method bears no resemblance to an older approach that stressed dissemination where instructors merely relay or convey information. Rather, Ignatian pedagogy aims at assisting learners to undergo a series of internal transformations in how they go about understanding themselves vis-á-vis their own inclinations, passions, biases, and spontaneous reactions. Hence, the need arises to learn how to make one's own internal operations more discerning.

In short, an Ignatian pedagogy is one in which the student is challenged to appropriate his or her own process of knowing. The first step in any process of knowing is experience, and the advice of Ignatius would be to become attentive to what one is experiencing, either the experience going on in oneself or in the reality around one. The second step in this process of knowing involves reflecting back on one's experience and on what has been triggered by way of questions that emerged from such experience. The goal is always to grow in understanding about the questions one is seeking to answer. One is going to have to come to some conclusion about the matter being mulled, including a conclusion about whether an insight that came from one's understanding holds up under further scrutiny. The third step in this process of knowing is judgment: "yes, this is so" or "no, this is not so" or "I do not know yet what to think." Finally, the fourth step in the process of knowing seeks to determine what this judgment might call for by way of choice or action and commitment.