Unfamiliar Terrain: Transformative Learning at the Crossroads of Habitus

Drawing upon autoethnographic experience as a music educator, I make the assertion that transformative learning is particularly amplified in locations where a person encounters the unfamiliar, for those are often the precise places where an individual’s habitus no longer holds efficacy. To build this argument, I propose that when inner consciousness intersects with place-shaping processes, transformative learning takes place in a connected, compassionate, and creative manner. I infuse this framework with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on habitus, in which he suggests that inner consciousness shapes, and is shaped by, a person’s social encounters. Thus, in this lived aesthetic inquiry, I propose that transformative learning has substantial intersectionality with socially constructed understandings of place.