EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

It is seldom possible to probe deeply into our beliefs without confronting many facets of our psychological makeup that we may find difficult to name, face, and change. Others may not want us to think or act differently either, even if the relationship is dysfunctional.

Boud, Cohen, and Walker (1993) emphasize the affective side of learning from experience. Postle (in Boud, Cohen, and Walker, 1993), for example, draws on the work of John Heron (1992) on multimodal learning. The base of learn­ing is affective, contends John Heron, as does David Kolb (1984). By affective, they both mean that people learn from experience through a direct encounter with life that involves total immersion with all its attendant sensations and feel­ings. The affective dimension to learning includes emotions and also a deeper, nonrational understanding of the situation.

Boud, Cohen, and Walker (1993) legitimize feelings as grist for the mill of reflection. They do not shrink from feelings as might be so in a Model I world, in which the value placed on rationality can leave people ashamed or embar­rassed about emotions.

Some experiential learning theorists, such as Heron (1992), go a step further. Feeling precedes rational explanations and therefore can point the way to fresh insights when people revisit and re-interpret their feeling.

Experiential knowing is a prelinguistic form of knowing gained “through par­ticipation in, and resonance with, one or more beings in the unified field of being” (Heron, 1992, p. 162). This is conceptualized by Heron as a deeper formulation of the distinction made by William James between “knowledge of acquaintance” and “knowledge about.” For Heron, experiential learning is preconceptual, “acquiring knowledge of being and beings through empathic resonance felt participation” (p. 224).

Sometimes, experiential educators help learners to get in touch with insights that they normally filter out of their awareness (Davis-Manigaulte, Yorks, and Kasl, 2006; Yorks and Kasl, 2003). In essence, feelings and the experiential knowledge that they hold are brought into awareness through the use of various forms of expression that engage the learner’s imaginal and intuitive processes, which in turn connects these processes to new conceptual possibilities. Feeling can be opened up through anticipatory reflection and learning about future possible states enabling, what Fisher, Rooke, and Torbert (2003; Torbert, 2001; Torbert and others, 2004) refer to as the fourth territory of experience. The first territory of experience is composed of intentional purposes, intuitions, attention, and vision. People are helped to forge new experiences, and to use the feeling and emotion that these sit­uations evoke to challenge prior viewpoints. They are helped to reframe funda­mental viewpoints based on new feelings that are triggered by seeing, hearing, touching, or otherwise sensing the world in new ways. They are freed from the bonds of having to name and rationally explain what they may sense but have not yet fully experienced. Paying attention to feelings is important for establishing an empathic zone that can provide insights into the different lived experience of others that often blocks pathways to understanding through rational discussion as parties talk past one another.