Transformative Reading Programs

Learn more about our programs in the fields of Education, Business, and Medical Ethics.

Education

Transformative Reading is an innovative program originally developed for higher education. It has been taught at the University of Oslo both as Psychology (BsC level) and as Literature (MA level) courses. It has also been taught as part of the Honours Leadership Program at Utrecht University.

It has been adapted to secondary education, resulting in ‘Transformative Dialogic Literature Teaching’ (TDLT,
Schrijvers, 2019, University of Amsterdam), a program for literature teaching at HAVO/VWO level (10th grade) in the Netherlands.

Transformative Reading is also a program designed for primary education. It has been implemented at Colégio de São José – Ramalhão, in Sintra, Portugal, for third-grade students since 2020 (dos Anjos, 2024).

Business

In recent years, the Transformative Reading Model has inspired evidence-based workshops aiming to promote meaningfulness, empathy, and authentic leadership, making scientific findings applicable to the corporate sector. I have been working towards building bridges between academic and non-academic contexts. For more on transformative reading workshops on the awareness of empathy in fiction and in life in business settings, see LINKS.

Medical Ethics

As part of the ERC-Advanced project Moral residue – epistemological ramifications, ethical implications, and didactic opportunities (MORE), I collaborate with a group of philosophers and medical ethics specialists adapting the Transformative Reading Program to help health care practitioners live with and through moral residue, which are situations of unavoidable and unblameworthy moral failure, leaving health care practitioners with self-directed negative feelings, such as an anguished sense of regret. TR-MORE (Transformative Reading for Medical Ethics) revolutionizes training of health care practitioners by utilizing literary texts. To know more, click here.