Transformative learning: UAE, women, and higher education

Research on education for women in the Arab world is just beginning to unfold. In some countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, higher education for women has only been encouraged for the last few decades. Research that explores the perceptions of women in college learning environments is important to discover better ways of educating Emirati women for lifelong learning. This paper aims to address these issues.

An online quantitative survey (English and Arabic) was used to explore these perceptions, and 294 students participated.

The paper uses transformative learning theory to investigate potential influences or factors on the transformation of female Emirati students during their college years.

This and other research does support the assumption that transformative experiences for individual students within higher education can result in interest, intention, and action toward varying degrees of social transformation. Higher education, while having no explicit political or activist agenda, has resulted in some degree (among these respondents at least) of a redefinition of the role of work for women and their broader role in Emirati society, and in some ways have challenged prevailing social constructs based on male‐female stratification.