Jack Mezirow

Mezirow is the closest thing this site has to a map of what it is trying to do to a reader, and he found it by accident.

As long as an experience fits the way you already make sense of things, you file it and nothing changes. Change starts with the experience that will not fit.

Where it came from

Mezirow watched his wife return to university in middle age, then ran a large study of women doing the same in the 1970s. He was not looking for a theory of consciousness. He was looking at what happened to adults who went back into education after a long gap, and found that a significant number did not simply acquire information. They reorganized how they read their own lives.

The disorienting dilemma

His name for the trigger is the disorienting dilemma: an experience that cannot be absorbed into the existing frame. Not new information, which is easy, but information that makes the frame itself look wrong.

The ten phases he set out run roughly like this. The dilemma arrives. You examine yourself, usually with some guilt or shame attached. You critically assess the assumptions you had been running on. You recognize that others have felt the same discontent. You explore what other roles are available. You plan something. You get the knowledge you need for it. You try it. You build competence and confidence in the new way. You reintegrate the whole thing into a life.

He was clear that these do not run in a fixed order, that people move back and forth, and that many stop partway.

The phase that matters most here

Phase four is recognizing that the discontent is shared.

That is not a motivational extra. In Mezirow's model it is load-bearing, because a person who believes their dislocation is personal has no route from self-examination into action, and usually converts the whole thing into private shame instead.

This is the strongest argument available for why a site like this one cannot only supply information. The evidence that other people carry the same concern does work that no amount of further explanation does.

Why he belongs on this site

Everything on these pages is designed to produce a dilemma that will not fit: that school sorted you before it taught you, that the assessment never ends, that the institution promising to help produces the opposite. Mezirow describes what happens next, and warns that the process stalls at phase four unless something carries the reader across it.

Serious objections

• Heavily rationalist. Mezirow treats critical reflection and reasoned discussion as the engine, and critics argue he underweights emotion, relationships and the body in how people actually change.
• The original study was women returning to American colleges in the 1970s. Generalizing ten phases from that group to everyone is a large step and the theory has been criticized for taking it.
• The phases are hard to falsify. A person who does not transform can always be described as having stalled at a phase, which means the model can absorb any outcome.
• It assumes transformation is good. A frame can be dismantled and replaced by a worse one, and the theory has little to say about that case.