Disorienting Dilemmas: Their Effects on Learners, Impact on Performance, and Implications for Adult Educators

Disorienting dilemmas induced by adult educators have varied and often adverse effects on learners. Although this may lead to transformative learning, it can have both positive and negative impacts on their performance. Adult educators need to be wary in their efforts to foster and facilitate transformative learning. Learning is the relatively permanent change in human capability or disposition that is not ascribable simply to the processes of growth (Gagne & Medsker, 1996). It can be simple, or it can be transformative. Simple learning merely elaborates the learner’s existing paradigm, systems of thinking, feeling, or doing, relative to a topic (Robertson, 1996). Transformative learning involves “critical self-reflection, which results in the reformulation of a meaning perspective to allow a more inclusive, discriminating, and integrative understanding of one’s experience ” (Mezirow, 1990, p. xvi). It begins with a disorienting dilemma which leads to critical reflection and then to a perspective transformation which the individual acts upon. Disorienting dilemmas affect adult learners in many different ways and impact the performance of the individual. Since the effects on learners are often adverse, many adults are reluctant to