Transformation of self: listener to learner to leader
A visit to California in 1993 disrupted the family script I had inherited: women cook and listen; men eat and talk. Mezirow, Cranton, Belenky, and hooks help me name the long movement from receiving knowledge quietly to speaking, learning, and leading.
At twenty-two, I did not know I was experiencing what Mezirow calls a transformation in a frame of reference. I was visiting relatives in a rustic California town in 1993. I had grown up hearing that they were the “weird cousins” from Detroit who had moved west in the 1970s. They were loud, opinionated, laughing, and full of stories. Two brothers and two sisters talked over one another equally. They intrigued me and intimidated me because their thoughts lived out loud.
Their table was unlike my own. In the family structure I knew, my quiet-as-a-mouse mother brought in food and listened while my father and older brothers filled the room. My sister and I watched. The frame of reference I absorbed was simple: women cook and listen; men eat and talk. Belenky and her colleagues, and bell hooks, later gave me language for the authority, silence, and submission built into that arrangement.
One of those cousins had parachuted into the fields behind our Michigan farm when I was about seven. I remember a floating wonder, first as small as a raisin and then as large as a man, landing inside my little portion of rural Michigan. The image made the world bigger before I had words for why. Years later, California did the same thing: it made a different way of speaking, belonging, and being visible possible.
I arrived there after earning a degree in French and history and receiving a scholarship for graduate study. Learning French had already changed my voice. Speaking through another language gave me a way to take up space that began to transfer back into English. Graduate school then demanded more: I had to speak, defend an idea with other ideas, and act as though I belonged in academic life before I fully believed that I did.
Transformative learning is not simply acquiring more information. It is recognizing the frame that has organized what feels normal, then testing and revising it. My movement from listener to learner to leader has not been a clean sequence. Listening remains one of my strengths. The transformation is that listening no longer requires disappearance, and leadership no longer has to resemble the loudest voice at the table.