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fulfilling the promise of higher education
The central purpose of a college or university, argues Charity Johansson and Peter Felten, is to transform students. For a student this process is an ongoing one of intentionally aligning one's actions and behaviors with one's core sense of identity, and it is a university's mission to help students both transform themselves and understand the process of transformation so that they are well-equipped to flourish after they graduate. Transforming Students is a sequel of sorts to George Keller's top-selling Transforming a College, which focused on the community-wide effort to remake Elon from a struggling college to a top regional university. In it, Johansson and Felten address the educational mission of Elon to shape students into intention, critical, engaged individuals. Transformative learning for them is characterized by a deep and enduring change in thinking that is seen through changed ways of being in the world. It also generally reflects a new connection to some larger goal or purpose. Drawn from extensive interviews with Elon students and alumni, and with a dozen faculty and staff, this book gathers diverse stories to show how students experience the transformation process, one that rarely follows a neat or linear path. The authors also use these stories to illustrate central themes from the literature on transformative learning and the undergraduate student experience. This book echoes much of what Andrew Delbanco said in College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton, 2012), that the traditional four-year college experience is both vital to human development and endangered. Johansson and Felten approach the story from the students' perspective to provide a deeply humane book about the value of higher education.
Includes bibliographical references (pages [105]-111) and index.