11 Similarly for Freire liberation is a continual unfolding social dynamic, “ ...akin to a painful childbirth that never completely ends, as oppression continuously mutates and morphs into unprecedented forms in new epochs”.10 This continual process infers that agency is not a fixed quantity either – it grows and morphs in response to the challenges at hand. In addition, to be able to shape the agendas of the groups themselves - as indicated by one response above - allows for the collective space for people to develop critical consciousness through their own dialogic processes. In contrast, if groups exclude genuine participation and input, then it they approach the same disempowering logic of mainstream society that they are actually seeking to transform – the ‘banking method’ where knowledge (or cultural conditioning) is depositing in the passive learner. Some of the negative reactions to group involvement above can be read as an outsider disturbing the group’s well-defined internal educational or social norm forming processes, from the boys’ bike club to the police workshops. In looking at participant reflections on transformational events, many people nominated time periods where change occurred, alongside discrete events. Although I had framed the question to focus on the latter - intending to use a similar specific event methodology such as Ligon’s study 11 - the responses forced me to reconsider the primacy of the discrete transformational event. This focus on the period time as opposed to a catalytic event to is present in numerous other studies in the transformational learning literature, as reviewed by Taylor.12
10
Kincheloe (2008, p.71) Ligon (2008) used life narrative approach in the context of leadership development, but its event taxonomy is indicative of a possible further direction for investigation in the agency context. 12 Taylor (2007). 11