Experiential Learning: A Theoretical Critique Explored from Five Perspectives, Information Series, No. 385 by Tara J. Fenwick Order No. IN 385, Price $9.75 Ordering Information Full text available online
What does it mean to learn from experience? And, what, if any, is an appropriate role for educators in this process?
The dominant approach to understanding experiential learning in adult education has revolved around cognitive reflection upon concrete experience, an orientation commonly known as constructivism. Educators have developed a variety of ways to enhance this process, by facilitating adults’ critical reflection on experience, by instigating holistic “experiences” in instructional settings, by coaching and mentoring adults to enhance their learning in the midst of experience, and by assessing adults’ experience. Critiques of these educational practices have attacked educators’ movement toward “managing” adults’ experience. Criticism has also been leveled at the focus on mental processing, the unproblematic view of identifiable “concrete” experience, the assumption that individuals engage in and reflect upon their experiences as unitary independent selves, and the assumption that individuals are split from their contexts.
Four alternate orientations on experiential learning have emerged in theories of learning, cognition and pedagogy in the recent years. These perspectives are useful for educators in shedding light on complex dimensions of the learning-in-experience question. They also help educators with different responses to the question about the most appropriate role for educators in working with adults’ experience.
Psychoanalytic perspectives illuminate desires and resistance emanating from unconscious dimensions of experiential learning.
Situative perspectives emphasize the connection between individuals and their communities of practice in a collective explanation of experiential learning.
Critical cultural perspectives focus on how power and inequity structure experience, and promote social transformation through experiential learning.
Enactivist perspectives uphold an ecological systems understanding of experiential learning co-emerging in systems of human action, organizations, cultures, and nature.
These orientations each have their own blind spots and have been debated at length. These debates focus on the way knowledge and human experience are understood, the way the person doing the experiencing is represented, the definitions of learning and the conceptualizations of desirable learning outcomes, the role of power and language in learning through experience, and of course, the role of an educator, if any. The five orientations cannot be synthesized, but they do offer insights for one another. Dialogue between and within them is the most valuable legacy for the educator, who ultimately must read across these perspectives and find a path for philosophy and practice that has the greatest integrity, defensibility, and efficacy for his or her own particular context.
Information on the issues of experiential learning may be found in the ERIC database using the following descriptors–*Adult Education, Adult Educators, Autobiographies, *Constructivism (Learning), *Educational Environment, Educational Philosophy, *Experiential Learning, *Power Structure, *Psychiatry–and the identifiers *Complexity Theory, *Critical Pedagogy, Reflective Thinking, and *Situated Cognition. Asterisks indicate descriptors that are particularly relevant.
