Victoria J. Marsick is Professor of Adult Learning &Leadership at Columbia University, Teachers College where she directs academic programs in Adult Learning and Leadership. Before joining Teachers College, Victoria worked extensively in Asia and other countries with not-for-profit organizations, and directed staff development and training at UNICEF.

While at Columbia, Victoria has worked with organizations to design, develop and implement informal learning and leadership interventions. Her research examines naturally occurring, informal learning at work, rather than learning through formal training programs, for example Action Learning, which brings together small groups of peers to learn together over a period of months, helping each other address problems they face in their work.

Her interests include why and how reflection matters in workplace learning as well as creating strategies to operationalize reflective learning. She has co-authored well known research-based assessment tools for team and organizational learning.

Along with her longtime colleague, Jack Mezirow, Victoria established the field of transformative learning which bears many similarities to dialogue. Individual transformation is triggered by an experience that cannot be accommodated by our current frame of reference. When we encounter such an experience, it is either rejected or our frame of reference must be transformed to assimilate it.

Transformational learning stresses critical reflection on assumptions, value judgements, and normative expectations that have been unconsciously assimilated as the key enabler for fostering transformative learning. Rational discourse, a dialectical process with others, is viewed as the mechanism to arrive at a more inclusive, dependable and consensual form of reference.