Synonyms

Epistemology; Experiential education; Experiential learning theory; Human relations; Psychology

Introduction

Experiential learning is notoriously difficult to define and even harder to accomplish in mainstream educational settings given myriad institutional constraints and the inertia of tradition. Experiential learning is said to have existed as a pedagogical concern since Plato’s era (Stonehouse et al. 2011), but John Dewey is often regarded as the idea’s modern founder (Miettinen 2000). Throughout the twentieth century, various reforms promoting experiential learning in one form or another have ebbed and flowed, exerting influence for a time but often succumbing to curricular or logistical pressures from other areas. Dewey’s lab school at the University of Chicago was one exemplary case, and manual training and the experience curriculum provide two other early examples. Today, service learning, outdoor and place-based education, study-abroad, internships, and capstone experiences serve as more recognizable contemporary instances. In all these cases, “experiential learning” is believed to be superior to whatever kind of learning happens during didactic forms of instruction.

Experiential learning is presently enjoying a surge as colleges and universities clamor to distinguish themselves in the higher education marketplace and as competency-based frameworks become more widely applied in K-12 schools. These are positive developments. Somewhat ironically, however, while experiential learning has risen in popularity, it has started falling apart conceptually. Tara Fenwick’s seminal 2001 monograph attacked the dominant constructivist perspective of experiential learning, which imagines it as a series of experience-reflect sequences carried out by an individual learner; Fenwick systematically presented a range of alternatives to the constructivist view. Miettinen (2000) provided a methodological critique of the idea’s founding and questioned its status as a general model of learning. These themes were recently extended by Seaman et al. (2017), who, like Miettinen, argue that the idea’s origins reside in mid-twentieth century humanistic psychology, not in classical Greek or Deweyan thought as is often asserted. Each of these portrayals represents a fundamentally different way of approaching experiential learning: as a culturally and historically specific ideology, not as a basic psychological process that directly entails specific pedagogical prescriptions (e.g., “reflection”). This shift in thinking carries important implications for how practitioners and researchers understand, study, and apply so-called experiential learning in formal and informal educational settings.

Experiential Learning: History of an Idea

Miettinen (2000) and Seaman et al. (2017) argue that experiential learning should not be understood as a general theory of learning but rather as a historically specific ideology that became popular in the 1970s following the rise of T-Groups and humanistic psychology in adult education. Understanding how such a specific kind of social practice – T-group training – was transformed into a theory of learning requires a brief historical overview of related adult education practices in the USA between 1946–1975 (see Seaman et al. 2017, for further discussion and supporting references).

In 1946, a team of researchers led by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin organized a training in Connecticut, USA, to help community leaders devise more effective ways to combat racism and antisemitism in their communities. They called their program a laboratory in human relations training. Lewin’s team consisted of his academic protégé, Ronald Lippitt, adult educator Leland Bradford, and Kenneth Benne, a social philosopher interested in civic decision-making. Lewin and his colleagues decided to incorporate small group techniques developed by the Austrian psychotherapist Jacob Moreno, who was then practicing his unique theatrical methods in New York and had met Lewin and Lippitt on prior occasions.

The initial training was successful. One of its most significant developments happened serendipitously:

The two-week training program began with an experimental emphasis encouraging group discussion and decision making in an atmosphere where staff and participants treated one another as peers. In addition, the research and training staff collected extensive observations and recordings of the groups’ activities. When the participants went home at night, the research staff gathered together to report and analyze the data collected during the day. Most of the staff felt that trainees should not be involved in these analytical sessions where their experiences and behavior were being discussed, for fear that the discussions might be harmful to them. Lewin was receptive, however, when a small group of participants asked to join in these discussions. (Kolb 1984, p. 9)

This development became the training’s most lasting legacy: as a model for experiential learning. This new format, in which participants engaged in a training exercise and then discussed their own conduct in the exercise, was retained in 1947, when the operation moved to Bethel, Maine, USA, and incorporated as the National Training Laboratory. The organizers refined the format, dubbed it a “Basic Skills Training” or BST group, and scheduled it as a central feature of the training. The purpose of the BST group was for participants to learn about their habitual approaches to interpersonal interactions so they could become more effective at achieving their desired policy outcomes when they returned to their home communities, the specifics of which were discussed in other sessions.

Between 1947 and 1955, the NTL grew in popularity and the BST group – which quickly was shortened to “T-Group” – played an increasingly prominent role at the NTL and elsewhere. As the human relations training laboratories expanded, staffing needs correspondingly increased, and the organizers hired psychotherapists trained in group methods, including those advocated by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers. Unsurprisingly, the new trainers introduced a heavily therapeutic focus to T-Groups, which also took on an increasingly humanistic flavor. T-Groups became a venue for learning about yourself, studying group dynamics, and committing to a long-range project of personal growth.

As Seaman et al. (2017) describe, the intense interpersonal interactions that facilitated self-awareness in T-Groups came to be known generically as experiential learning. The phrase provided a shorthand way to refer to the T-Group format, the emotionally laden style of interaction common to it, the introspective posture it cultivated, and the humanistic ideal of boundless personal potential. This was fine as far as it went; however, these elements became collapsed into one singular notion that started circulating in academic and popular circles in the mid-1970s, contributing to the popularization of both the phrase and the humanistic values it represented. Experiential learning soon provided a seemingly empowering way to think about learning itself. It also narrowed the meaning of both experience – an episode of small group interaction – and learning – whatever insight gleaned during subsequent reflection one deems significant. So-called experiential learning, in other words, made learning immediately meaningful to the learner. These qualities of subjectivity and immediacy underwrote experiential learning’s assumed superiority over learning as traditionally managed in formal settings. But, the qualities of subjectivity and immediacy also reflect the concept’s origins in humanistic psychology, directing attention to specific methods and learning processes and away from broader educational aims, subject matter content, and ordinary life experiences (Miettinen 2000). In any event, experiential learning became widely adopted as a general model of learning, especially after 1976 when schematic diagrams based on the T-Group format started circulating in the training literature.

How early schematic models, particularly Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle, were devised and justified is the focus of Miettinen’s (2000) critique of experiential learning. Miettinen focuses on the epistemological basis of the experiential learning cycle and the “eclectic” manner in which it was established, as “theoreticians with quite different backgrounds, motives and incompatible conceptions [were] used as founders and ‘supporters’ of experiential learning” (p. 56). He illustrates how Kolb’s model was developed by selectively abstracting from events at Lewin’s 1946 human relations training laboratory – specifically the “experience” and “reflect” phases of a T-Group. He then analyzes the epistemology presumably underlying their interconnection and finds it wanting:

The four steps characterized above in the elaboration of the concept of ‘immediate experience’ imply a radical impoverishment of the concept of experience. This kind of experience is based on the generalization of a very specific mode of action, a feedback session, which developed into a key procedure in the T-group training – combined with a highly individualistic and normative humanistic-existential anthropology. The rich variety and modes of human experience characteristic of various human activities are replaced by a narrow and particularistic conception of experience. (p. 61)

Miettinen concludes that “the belief in an individual’s capabilities and his individual experience,” which experiential learning tacitly promotes, “leads us away from the analysis of cultural and social conditions of learning that are essential to any serious enterprise of fostering change and learning in real life” (p. 71). Miettinen’s (2000) analysis therefore implies that identifying alternatives to conventional models of experiential learning will benefit future applications and research agendas.

Alternative Perspectives on Experiential Learning

Fenwick’s (2001) contribution to current scholarship on experiential learning was to examine how theoretical perspectives other than humanistic constructivism – discussed above – conceptualize the relationship between experience and learning. Using the methods of critique and systematic comparison, Fenwick illustrated how different theoretical perspectives on this relationship depart from one another in substantial ways. A key part of understanding the different perspectives is to examine the metaphors they employ to understand the relationship between experience and learning, which also informs their implications for practice. The four additional perspectives, and their root metaphors, are summarized below (see Fenwick 2001 for further detail and discussion of each perspective’s specific implications).

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

The root metaphor within the psychoanalytic perspective is interference (Fenwick 2001). The psychoanalytic perspective derives from Freud’s theory of unconscious desire which affixes on objects in the world. The psychodynamic perspective poses several central questions: “How did we learn to desire the knowledge that we currently pursue in our learning endeavors? ... What are these dynamics of longing? How do desires configure limits as well as possibilities for individuals’ participation in new knowledge?” (p. 29). Resistance to learning is important to consider, since it reveals the particular way in which the ego beholds a possible object of knowledge – as integrating or threatening the self. Experiential learning from a psychoanalytic perspective departs from the constructivists’ emphasis on rational control through reflection, which is just as likely to mislead as to reveal; it means “coming to tolerate one’s own conflicting desires, while recovering the selves that are repressed from our terror of full self-knowledge” (p. 31). Pedagogy involves supporting students’ “working through” (p. 32) the psychic dilemmas that arise when new experiences are encountered, rather than aiming for any ideal outcome.

The Situative Perspective

The root metaphor within the situative perspective is apprenticeship. Learning, from a situative perspective, is synonymous with changing participation in a community of practice; mastering new techniques, gaining dexterity with new tools, aligning with a community’s subtle norms, and assuming increasing responsibility. “The objective is to become a full participant in the community of practice, not to learn about the practice,” Fenwick writes (2001, p. 34). Experience and learning in situative views are coextensive, rather than positioned as separate phases in a cycle as in constructivist models. Consequently, reflection on experience is nonsensical, since reflection is an experience and has value only insofar as it figures into a particular practice. As with apprenticeships, “the emphasis” in situative views “is on improving one’s ability to participate meaningfully in particular practices and moving to legitimate roles within communities” (p. 35, emphasis in original). As a consequence, pedagogy generally involves simulating “real world” conditions as closely as possible, supporting learners as they assume increasing responsibility, and rewarding their accomplishments with authentic forms of recognition.

The Critical Cultural Perspective

The root metaphor within the critical cultural perspective is resistance. This perspective criticizes other perspectives for the presumed innocence of learning from experience, for it sees experience as always constituted by uneven power relations that are encoded into institutional and societal arrangements. Therefore, “we must, from a critical cultural perspective, analyze the structures of dominance that express or govern the social relationships and competing forms of communication and cultural practices within that system” (p. 39). These forces constitute experience and can become conscious through pedagogic activity designed to reveal and generate agency to alter them. Like the situative perspective, the critical cultural perspective views learning as a community effort, not an individual, psychological process. Critical cultural pedagogy involves identifying and naming sources of oppression, forging relationships across boundaries, and undertaking political projects that redress historical injustices.

The Enactivist Perspective

The root metaphor within the enactivist perspective is co-emergence. The enactivist perspective is based on ecological models of organisms in context, which are mutually constituting. It presumes that a change in one produces a change in the other. “Enactivism considers understandings to be embedded in conduct … Learning is thus cast as continuous invention and exploration, produced through the relations among consciousness, identity, action and interaction, objects, and structural dynamics of complex systems” (p. 48). Learning experiences are structured in ways that allow possibilities to emerge without privileging cognition (i.e., reflection), allowing learners to explore both their environment and their reactions to it. Fenwick (2001) offers communicator, story-maker, and interpreter as ways to understand a teacher’s role in enactivist pedagogy.

Fenwick’s (2001) monograph offers two significant contributions to experiential learning. First, it illustrates the close, if not tautological, relationship between “experiential learning” as a phrase and the tendency to understand the phenomenon itself through the lens of the constructivist perspective. Alternative frameworks imagine the phenomenon of learning from experience in fundamentally different ways. Second, it provides several promising frameworks for future research and application across a range of disciplines, contexts, and age periods. For example, the psychoanalytic perspective is useful for thinking about the identity implications of learning experiences; the situative perspective is particularly well suited to designing and facilitating internships; the critical cultural perspective is applicable to any kind of social justice pedagogy at any level; and the enactivist perspective could be fruitfully applied to highly sensual practices like outdoor adventure experiences or cultural exchange programs. Fenwick (2001) summarises,

The five orientations cannot be synthesized, but they do offer insights for one another. Dialogue between and within [diverse perspectives on experiential learning] 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. (p. viii)

Conclusion and Implications

Several conclusions can be drawn from the foregoing discussion. First, Seaman et al. (2017) and Miettinen (2000) help to show that the constructivist perspective of experiential learning (Fenwick 2001) derives from a historically specific set of social practices popular within adult education in the middle twentieth century. Unfortunately for scholars, the phrase “experiential learning” itself also derives from these same social practices, which can compromise efforts to imagine experience and learning in other ways. This means that research on the phenomenon of experiential learning and the theory often used to study it may be caught in a mutually reinforcing relationship that will limit future findings to anything more than low-level description that will lead to increasingly incremental insights and the repetition of practices that may or may not support one’s pedagogical aims. To Fenwick’s point, new theoretical perspectives are essential to disrupting this tautology.

Second, the diversity of perspectives Fenwick (2001) outlines indicates a broader availability of theories than what might be immediately apparent to emerging scholars and practitioners approaching experiential learning for the first time. Given the constructivist perspective’s dominance in how experiential learning is understood, it is easy to default to that perspective when planning curriculum, developing research questions, and designing studies. But, the constructivist perspective – the tradition most directly aligned with humanistic psychology and human relations trainings as a model for practice – is not the only and may not be the best perspective to take on the range of educational experiences available to support learning in or out of schools, across different age ranges. In the future, practitioners and researchers should feel free to deviate from experience-reflect cycles both as a curricular template and as a research expectation, so long as they are able to articulate the theoretical basis for designing learning experiences that support learning.

Finally, given the issues discussed above, it is not entirely clear how useful the phrase “experiential learning” will be in future research on the plurality of ways experience is used educationally to promote learning. The historical association with humanistic psychology and T-Groups might be unhelpful except in very specific and narrow applications where their ideological assumptions are demonstrably more appropriate and insightful than alternative theories that are now available. Worse, researchers risk imposing the constructivist perspective when its use is not warranted, potentially constraining practice and limiting research. In these instances, the humanistic assumptions embedded in the constructivist perspective may be exerting a kind of hegemony over learning, which is contrary to their professed qualities. Researchers and practitioners should feel satisfied designing and studying environments that support learning, without feeling the need to promote “experiential learning” as such, focusing instead simply on learning, and adopting a theoretical perspective suited to the task at hand.