Antioch University’s School of Education recently launched a new specialization in Transformative Education. This program is available as a concentration in the MEd for Experienced Educators and as a standalone certificate. Transformative Education is an approach that aims to put learning first, and its champions understand that by changing the way that students are taught, the students will approach problems differently and begin to question themselves, the world around them, and their role in society. It addresses diversity and equity by changing the role of the teacher and changing how learning looks. The Founding Director of the Transformative Education program, Gopal Krishnamurthy, explains that this will have a lasting impact on our notion of leadership, which is crucial to creating change in the world.

“It isn’t a different style of teaching,” explains Krishnamurthy. “It’s an outlook that meets issues differently.” He explains the typical approach to teaching often separates students into boxes or “tracks”: gifted and talented, average, learning disabled, and other learning styles. He says that each of these fails to meet a student where they are at. To counteract this pattern, transformative education embraces the diversity of learning by addressing how learning actually unfolds individually and together.
Krishnamurthy is quick to point out that Transformative Education is different from child-centered learning. “It is not putting the child on a pedestal,” he says. And at the same time, “It’s not putting the adult on the pedestal.” Instead, he explains, “It’s really this dynamic process of teaching or leadership that means we are shoulder to shoulder, looking at the world and participating in the world.”
As Krishnamurthy sees it, many of the problems that arise in schools have less to do with the student’s ability, behavior, the student’s background, or even larger societal issues. Instead, many problems come from institutional structures and the way they thwart education, putting either the student or the teacher first.
“Changing the perspective of how we learn, changing how we are taught—the beliefs and constellation of assumptions, and our daily behavior—that’s what creates systemic change,” says Krishnamurthy. He believes we must change “the structures and processes of the world.”
The Transformative Education program has three standalone courses: “Freedom and Responsibility” (watch our Cool Course video about it), “Teaching and Learning,” and “Transformative Teaching and Leadership.” These can be taken online on an ad-hoc basis by students in the education programs on the New England campus or for professional development anywhere in the country. When completed together, they form a certificate, or, for those in the MEd for Experienced Educators, it can serve as a degree concentration. While these programmatic pathways at Antioch may be new, this approach to teaching and learning has been practiced for years in Krishnamurthy’s MS in Teaching and Learning Program and internationally in schools around the world.
Krishnamurthy hopes that this program will help to make transformative education accessible to educators throughout New England and the wider world, who can take it with them into their own careers and to their students. He foresees a deep transformation where this education affects wider groups of people, having a ripple effect that alters how people interact with each other and with the planet.