Royal Roads University’s learning and teaching practices explicitly aim to create “a learning context that facilitates and promotes personal and professional transformation” (Hamilton, Márquez & Agger-Gupta, 2013).  While many students have told us that they were initially drawn to the RRU’s learning approach, they soon realized that their previous educational experiences and the way they had learned to learn did not prepare them for RRU’s learning environment and practices. For instance, how does one co-create knowledge when he or she has primarily experienced learning as transmitted from teacher-expert? How does one learn with student-peers in community when, a students’ previous experience of learning was largely a process between teacher and student? Or, how does one translate the traditional conception of academic rigour into an applied learning and research context?

This narrative inquiry explored 93 students’ transformational learning experiences. We identified ways that students reconcile tensions, conflicting beliefs, assumptions and values in order to more fully and effectively experience and benefit from a transformative learning environment. We compared our students’ experiences with the literature on transformational learning, stages of change, change readiness, and transformative change facilitation models.  We found that the students experience disequilibrium as they struggle to make meaning in a learning environment that promotes questioning of assumptions and ultimately transformation. However, this state of uncertainty triggers deep learning, as predicted in the literature. For our participants, the resulting transformation was highly rewarding. This study both affirms the approach and helps us to understand in more detail the student experience.