Experiential Learning in Adult Education: A Comparative Framework

by Tara J. Fenwick, Asst. Professor
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA T6G 2G5
tara.fenwick@ualberta.ca

This is an early version of the article “Expanding Conceptiosn of Experiential Learning”, available in Adult Education Quarterly, August 2000.

Introduction

“Experiential learning” is, as Michelson (1996) suggests, arguably one of the most significant areas for current research and practice in adult education, and increasingly one of the most problematic. Much adult learning is commonly understood to be located in the workplace, family activity, community involvement, and other sites of non-formal education. The term “experiential learning” is often used both to distinguish this ongoing meaning-making from theoretical knowledge, and non-directed “informal” life experience from “formal” education. When brought into the purview of the educator the notion of “experiential learning” has been appropriated to designate everything from kinesthetic directed instructional activities in the classroom, to special workplace projects interspersed with ‘critical dialogue’ led by a facilitator, to learning generated through social action movements, and even to team-building adventures in the wilderness. Definitional problems continue when one tries to disentangle the notion of “experiential learning” from experiences commonly associated with formal education, such as class discussions, reading and analysis, and reflection. And, as Alheit (1998) has pointed out, the appropriation of human life experience as being somehow a pedagogical project to be ‘managed’ by educators is highly problematic.

In this article I seek to disrupt conventional notions of experiential learning and invite more discussion about alternative conceptions, by comparing five perspectives of experiential learning. Experiential learning here means a process of human cognition. The root of the word cognition in fact means “to learn”, and thus the two terms are used interchangeably following standard usage within each perspective. I do not believe that the dimension of experience, broadly understood, is defensible as a classificatory signifier in cognition: what manner of learning can be conceived that is non-experiential, whether the context be clearly ‘educational’ or not? Moreover, attempted divisions between human ‘experience’ and ‘reflection’ on that experience have proved problematic for all kinds of reasons that are discussed later. However, the term experiential learning is used here both because of its common usage in adult education, and to avoid epistemological arguments that may be prompted by more global terms such as knowledge or cognition. I do not address here theories of learning derived from behaviorism or cognitive science, nor do I enter debates about the nature and construction of theoretical knowledge. I am restricting discussion to contemporary perspectives on learning that are directly linked to individual and collective human actions and interactions, and which I believe hold greatest promise for future research and practice in adult learning for reasons described in the sections below.

In this article, I am assuming as natural the presence of an educator. This is because in educational discourse such as this article, we presume learning to be under our gaze as educators. Within this frame, all experiences of subjects viewed as “learners” become “learning”, and theories of learning become, for educators, questions of “pedagogy”. However much we may resist, we are still and always attempting to configure ourselves in cognition’s processes as active agents, helpers, “educators” which ultimately ‘manage’ learning, if only by understanding it. Therefore the phenomenon under study here is not simply the ongoing flow of meaning-making in which all individuals engage throughout life (and in which the insertion of educators at any point can be justifiably questioned). Instead, the perspectives represented here all are framed as pedagogical theories of experiential learning: all share the assumption that certain experiences of cognition can be enhanced in ways that produce outcomes desired by the actors or ‘learners’ involved.

Following this premise, these theories can be read pedagogically in at least two ways: as prescriptive basis for instructional design and intervention, and as descriptive or interpretive tools for understanding learning environments. However within this frame, enhancement does not necessarily have to mean application of theory as pedagogical method. Pitt, Robertson, and Todd (1998) show how theory of cognition can be read with  the educational impulse, focusing on how the theory and education can be read together . From a reading with  position, perpetual inquiry can be opened into the conditions and meanings of teaching and learning, and traditional notions of theory-practice gaps can be subverted. This third way of reading is the position I have adopted in this article.

In current theory and practice, experiential learning seems predominantly understood as reflective construction of meaning, with particular emphasis on ‘critical reflection’ and dialogue. This conceptualization was popularized by Kolb (1984) and Schon (1983), and a significant body of theory and critique has developed to debate just how reflection-on-experience unfolds in different contexts to create knowledge. However, alternate perspectives about the nature of cognition, and the relationships among experience, context, mind, and learning raise important issues about the assumptions and values of the reflective view. Further inquiry into experiential learning may be assisted by clarifying distinctions among these perspectives.

To this end, this article offers a comparison of four additional distinct currents of thought which have emerged in recent scholarly writing addressing (experiential) learning and cognition. These were selected for discussion here either because of their prominence in recent writing about learning and development, or because they offer an original perspective that may raise helpful questions about existing understandings. Space considerations mitigate against a comprehensive analysis of any particular perspective, and in most cases extended discussion of each is available elsewhere. Here my purpose is to present only a brief overview for comparative purposes, to honor and clarify different perspectives along similar questions of learning so that dialogue among them may continue.

On classification

Some rationale and discussion of the classificatory choices governing this article is warranted. I’ve avoided categories such as “individual”, “sociocultural” or “integrated” theories because these divisions imply a natural separation between individuals and environment, when in fact the theories represented here each incorporate elements of individual psychology in relation to sociocultural environment, although they emphasize different apexes of the relationship. Also, I’ve tried to avoid using dimensions of understanding derived from one frame that may prove nonsensical when imposed upon another. For example, to look for a theory’s “view of the learner” presupposes that there are boundaries between knower, knowledge and different contexts that need somehow to be cognitively traversed: those perspectives which deny such a premise would therefore appear to be deficient.

Here in fact lies one of the central problematics in creating any typology. The different categories presented here may appear as natural and given, when in fact they are highly constructed. All dimensions of classification derive from some perspective held and imposed by the classifier, thus constructing a world arranged according to the preferred order of things derived from the classifier’s viewpoint. In this assertion I simply admit the constraints of my own logic. In particular, Western classificatory logic embeds its knowers with the deep assumption that there is such a logic, seeking to know the differences between things, and to separate them accordingly. I as author cannot presume to hide my own interests in cognition and my own preferences for particular learning theories behind these dimensions as if they are neutrally presented simply as different types. I am also aware that my own desires for conceptual control are reflected in the act of rendering these perspectives as manageable, comparable “threads” of intellectual thought.

I have tried to avoid classificatory hierarchies, although the placing together of particular strains of thought inevitably subsumes subtle distinction under broad characteristics. Some readers, for example, may be perturbed at the broad category here termed “critical cultural theory” which represents those perspectives in critical pedagogy, feminist theory, poststructural theory, postcolonial studies and others which draw attention to issues of power and discourse as these configure knowledge environments. Certainly it can be argued that each of these currents of thought deserve separate attention and perhaps are even incommensurable in one category. Similarly, one can argue that “enactivism” and “situated cognition”, being relatively less significant in adult education practice to date and similar in kind, that they should be collapsed into a single category.

My reasoning for the categories presented as they are again relates to the educational purposes and audience of this typology. Many perspectives in critical cultural theory have enjoyed widespread interest, attention and dissemination in adult education literature. I believe that greater service is provided at this point by showing similar broad patterns among these perspectives than contributing further to the voluminous scholarly literature delineating their subtleties and respective utility. Meanwhile the enactivist theory of learning, while certainly not new, has only recently been applied to pedagogy theorizing in North America [1] . My concern is that newcomers to enactivist theory may automatically associate it with situated cognitive theory, when in fact there are important distinctions.

The five currents of thought selected have been given descriptive titles for purposes of reference in this paper, which should not be understood as formally-designated theory names. These titles are reflection  (a constructivist perspective), interference  (a psycho-analytic perspective rooted in Freudian tradition), participation  (from perspectives of situated cognition), resistance   (a critical cultural perspective), and co-emergence  (from the enactivist perspective emanating from neuroscience and evolutionary theory). These five perspectives are each described briefly in the sections that follow, outlining their view of knowledge, learning and teaching, their understanding of relations between knower, culture, and knowledge, implied roles for educators, and critiques and questions raised by other perspectives.

I have also, with some trepidation, included a chart to summarize the positions of the five perspectives on each of eight dimensions. The eight dimensions are focus, basic explanatory schemata, view of knowledge, view of relation of knower to object and situation of knowing, view of learning process, view of learning goals and outcomes, view of the nature of power in experience and knowing, and view of the educator’s role, if any in learning. These dimensions were suggested by other classifications of cognitive perspectives: Greeno (1997)’s response to debates about the nature of situated knowing; Davis and Sumara’s (1997) comparison of cognitivism, constructivism and enactivism; and Mezirow’s (1996) discussion of three ‘contemporary paradigms of learning’.

Any typology such as this makes compromises to produce a certain clarity. The focus on a limited number of dimensions eliminates other dimensions which some may consider significant. It also eliminates the ability to examine rich details of the subtleties, differences and interactions among these currents of thought. Naturally there is an inherent difficulty in applying any single dimension to interpret multiple perspectives. However much I have sought to use analytical dimensions that allow representation of significant characteristics of each theoretical perspective, each perspective is its own world with its own defining schemata. In fact, within its own world, any single perspective here would subsume, interpret and classify the others in particular ways. [2] Even the act of comparing one with another is potentially problematic. The equalized side-by-side representation of these categories masks the differential influence each wields on adult education practice, social theory, and on each other.

Despite all of the problems attending the comparative presentation of different theoretical perspectives in the way that I have chosen here, I nonetheless believe in the possibilities it affords to interrupt and extend our thinking about teaching and learning. This is a temporary classification, a starting point intending to illuminate interstices where points of discussion may be opened. Its limitations may hopefully be overlooked in face of its potential usefulness. If it is possible to read our educational practice and theories of learning with  these alternate perspectives, I trust that we may come to a place that “teaches us to think beyond our means” (Felman, 1987, p. 15).

1. Reflection (a constructivist perspective)

This prevalent and influential adult learning theory casts the individual as a central actor in a drama of personal meaning-making. The learner reflects on lived experience, then interprets and generalizes this experience to form mental structures. These structures are knowledge, stored in memory as concepts that can be represented, expressed, and transferred to new situations. Explanations in this perspective inquire into ways people attend to and perceive experience, interpret and categorize it as concepts, then continue adapting or transforming their conceptual structures or “meaning perspectives” (Mezirow, 1990).

Constructivism has a long and distinguished, though by no means homogenous or monolithic history [3] (Piaget, 1966; Von Glaserfeld, 1984; Vygotsky, 1978; Wells, 1995), portraying learners as independent constructors of their own knowledge, with varying capacity or confidence to rely on their own constructions. However all views share one central premise: a learner is believed to construct, through reflection, a personal understanding of relevant structures of meaning derived from his or her action in the world. Piaget (1966) described this construction process as oscillating between assimilation of new objects of knowledge into one’s network of internal constructs, and accommodation of these constructs in response to new experiences which may contradict them.

In literature of adult learning this reflective view is embedded in the writings of Boud and Miller (1996),   Kolb (1984), MacKeracher (1996), Mezirow (1990), Schon (1983), and many others. Schon in particular has been a significant promoter of constructivism to understand workplace learning, arguing that practitioners learn by noticing and framing problems of interest to them in particular ways, then inquiring and experimenting with solutions. Their knowledge is ‘constructed’ through reflection during and after this experimental action on the ‘ill-defined’ and ‘messy’ problems of practice. Brookfield (1987) and Mezirow (1990) both have made considerable contribution to constructivist views of adult learning by theorizing how “critical reflection” interrupts and reconstructs human beliefs. Brookfield shows how both skeptical questioning and imaginative speculation can reflect on memoried experience to refine, deepen, or correct adults’ knowledge constructions. Mezirow has continued to argue that an individual’s reflection on fundamental premises opens meaning perspectives that are more “inclusive, differentiating, permeable, critically reflective, and integrative of experience” (1996, p. 163).

Critique from other perspectives

Critics such as Britzman (1998a) and Sawada (1991) maintain that the reflective constructivist view is somewhat simplistic and reductionist. It reifies rational control and mastery, which feminist theorists of workplace learning have criticized as a eurocentric, masculinist view of knowledge creation (Hart, 1992; Michelson, 1996). Constructivism also does not provide any sophisticated understandings of the role of desire in learning, a foundational principle according to psychoanalytic theory, despite its central tenet that a learner’s intention guides the inquiry process. The focus on rational concept-formation sidesteps the ambivalences and internal ‘vicissitudes’ bubbling in the unconscious which according to Britzman (1998a) direct our interpretations and therefore our meaning-making or experience in unpredictable ways. Sawada (1991) argues that ‘reflection as processing’ reinforces a conduit understanding of learning, relying on an old input-output metaphor of learning where the system becomes input to itself. Furthermore, constructivism falsely presumes a “cut” universe, where subjects are divided from environment and from their own experiences, and reflection is posited as the great integrator, “bridging separations” that it creates, instead of re-orienting us to the whole.

The constructivist view considers the individual a primary actor in the process of knowledge construction, and understanding as largely a conscious, rational process. Clark and Dirkx (in press) show that in this dominant humanist view, the “learner” is assumed to be a stable, unitary self which is regulated through its own intellectual activity. Access to experience through rational reflection is also assumed, as is the learner’s capacity, motivation, and power to mobilize the reflective process. As will be shown in later sections of this article, this view of the learning self is challenged by psychoanalytic, situative, and enactivist perspectives.

From a feminist perspective, Michelson (1996) observes that emphasis on (critical) reflection in workplace pedagogical activities such as Prior Learning Assessment depersonalizes the learner as an autonomous rational knowledge-making self, disembodied, rising above the dynamics and contingency of experience. The learning process of “reflection” presumes that knowledge is extracted and abstracted from experience by the processing mind. This ignores the possibility that all knowledge is constructed within power-laden social processes, that experience and knowledge are mutually determined , and that experience itself is knowledge-driven and cannot be known outside socially available meanings. Further, argues Michelson (1996), the reflective or constructivist view of development denigrates bodily and intuitive experience, advocating retreat into the loftier domains of rational thought from which ‘raw’ experience can be disciplined and controlled.

The emphasis on conscious reflection also ignores or makes invisible those psychic events that are not available to the conscious mind, including the desires and position of the reflecting “I” respective to the reflected-upon “me” being constructed as a container of knowledge. Meanwhile, constructivism does not attend to internal resistances in the learning process, the active “ignore-ances” which Ellsworth (1997) contends are as important in shaping our engagement in experience as attraction to particular objects of knowledge. The view that experience must be processed through reflection clings to binaries drawn between complex blends of doing/learning, implicit/explicit, active/passive, life experience/instructional experience, reflection/action (most notably in Kolb’s depiction of perceiving and processing activities conceived as continuums from “concrete” to “abstract” engagement).

In constructivism, context is considered important but separate, as if it were a space in which an autonomous learner moves rather than a web of activity, subjectivities and language constituting categories such as “learner”. A particular context of learning presents possibilities from which learners select objects of knowing, thus context influences both the content of experience and the ways people respond to and process it. However, in the constructivist view the learner is still viewed as fundamentally autonomous from his or her surroundings. The learner moves through context, is “in” it and affected by it, but the learner’s meanings still exist in the learner’s head, and move with the learner from one context to the next. Knowledge is thus a substance, a third thing created from the learner’s interaction with other actors and objects and bounded in the learner’s head. Social relations of power exercised through language or cultural practices are not theorized as part of knowledge construction. This is a fundamental distinction between constructivism and other views presented here.

2. Interference (a psycho-analytic perspective)

Psychoanalytic theory has been taken up by educational theorists, among other cultural critics of the late twentieth century, to help disrupt notions of progressive development, certainty of knowledge, and the centered individual “learner”. Psychoanalytic theory also helps open ways of approaching the realm of the unconscious; our resistances to knowledge; the desire for closure and mastery that sometimes governs the educational impulse; and enigmatic tensions between learner, knowledge, and educator. The field of psychoanalytic theory is broad. In contemporary educational writing, analyses draw upon both Freud and Jung, and what Donald (1991) calls “feminist re-reading of Lacan’s rereading of Freud” (p. 2). Curriculum theorists Pinar (1992) and Grumet (1992) both worked from psychoanalytic theories to invite interest in autobiography as a space of writing within which learning’s conflicts between personal myths from outside, and personal fictions from inside, could be engaged.

Recently there has been what Pitt, Robertson, and Todd (1998) describe as an “explosion of psychoanalytic consideration of matters curricular and pedagogical” (p. 6). One of the more prominent explorations they identify are the individual’s relations between the outside world of culture and objects of knowledge, and the inside world of psychic energies and dilemmas of relating to these objects of knowledge. Object relations theory, as Melanie Klein has explained, shows how the ego negotiates its boundaries with these objects. [4]

These knowledge dilemmas unfold through struggles between the unconscious, and the conscious mind which is aware of unconscious rumblings but can neither access them fully nor understand their language. Britzman (1998b) describes the unconscious as an “impossible concept” that cannot be educated: “knows no time, knows no negation, knows no contradiction . . . We do not address the unconscious, it addresses us. But its grammar is strange and dreamy; it resists its own unveiling” (p. 55). The conscious mind, on the other hand, is both ignorant and partially aware of its own ignorance. The consciousness is thus anxious about its own uncertain, impartial knowledge and ability to know, fragile in its own boundaries and existence, and often resistant to learning. The resulting negation or repression of certain knowledges holds particular interest for psychoanalytic educational theorists. [5]

Britzman’s (1998a) theory, following Anna Freud, views learning as interference  of conscious thought by the unconscious, and the ‘uncanny’ psychic conflicts that result. Our desires and resistances for different objects, which we experience as matters of love and hate, attaches our internal world to the external social world. Our daily, disturbing inside-outside encounters are carried on at subtle levels and we draw upon many strategies to ignore them. [6]   But when we truly attend these encounters we enter the profound conflicts which are learning. The general learning process is ‘crafting the self through everyday strategies’ of coping with and coming to understand what is suggested in these conflicts.

Although the unconscious can’t be known directly, its workings interfere with our intentions and our conscious perception of direct experience. These workings constantly ‘bother’ the ego, producing breaches between acts, thoughts, wishes, and responsibility [7] . Despite the ego’s varied and creative defenses against confronting these breaches, the conscious mind is forced to notice random paradoxes and contradictions of experience, and uncanny slips into sudden awareness of difficult truths about the self. These truths are what Britzman (1998a) call “lost subjects”, those parts of our selves that we resist, then try to reclaim and want to explore, but are afraid to. True knowledge of these lost subjects jeopardizes the ego’s conscious sense of itself, its loves, and its knowledge. But, for the self to be more than a prisoner of its own narcissism, it must bother itself, notice the breaches between acts, thoughts, dreams, waking, wishes, and responsibility. We learn by working through  the conflicts of all these psychic events. Experiential learning is thus coming to tolerate one’s own conflicting desires, while recovering the selves that are repressed from our terror of full self-knowledge.

The role of the educator from this psychoanalytic view is a problem because its impulse is to ‘solve the problem’ of these conflicts. But these conflicts are not knowledge deficits or insufficiently developed meaning perspectives to be liberated through conscious “critical reflection” or an educator’s intervention. Britzman (1998a) deplores education’s urgent compulsion to ‘emancipate’ and ‘produce’ learners’ change. She argues that such pedagogy often represses psychic conflict in its intolerance of complex individual learning processes of ‘working-through’. Education instead, Britzman (1998a) claims, should help people come to know and value their self’s dilemmas as elegant problems and allow space and time for workings-through. The conditions and dynamics for the slow, difficult and interminable work of learning itself are what should be at stake, not content or particular versions of cognitive change.

Thus, educative conditions would promote interference, botherings of the conscious mind, interruptions of the sense of truth, and ultimately anxiety. Felman (1987) argues that education’s dream of “absolute completion” of knowledge in a fully conscious knower is impossible, for the unconscious “is a kind of unmeant knowledge that escapes intentionality and meaning, a knowledge spoken by the language of the subject, but that the subject cannot recognize, assume as his, appropriate” (p. 77). In fact, Felman points out that the powerful dynamic between learner and educator in which the learning conflicts unfold is formed between the relation of one unconscious to another, and is unknowable to both. To learn, people need to be deliberate experimenters in their own learning, willingly engaging in traumas of the self.

Critique from other perspectives

From a rational constructivist perspective, Mezirow (1990) acknowledges the perturbations of the unconscious, usually inaccessible to the reflective conscious mind, which often catalyse transformative learning. However he asserts the primacy of reason and the need to control and subvert through critical reflection and communicative dialogue those “dysfunctional” habits of mind leading to undesirable actions. As rational beings we can overcome our logical contradictions, unjustified or inarticulable beliefs (Mezirow, 1996) which psychoanalytic theory asserts must be simply accepted as interminable dilemmas. In other words, learning is more than just a process of working-through, it is working towards   idealized mental frames of reference, and beliefs that can be validated.

Situative perspectives might argue that psychoanalytic theory dwells too strongly on the internal, with insufficient attention paid to the systems that bind the changing human mind and its psychic traumas to its changing contexts. Lave (1988) points out that context is frequently undertheorized as some kind of container into which individuals are dropped. The context may be acknowledged to affect the person but the person is still viewed as an autonomous agent of knowing with his or her own psychic systems, which are still viewed as fundamentally distinct from other contextual systems. Further, the psychoanalytic view seems to assume that learning can take place entirely as a mental process, regardless of patterns of participation in continuously evolving communities. Psychoanalytic views may mistake learning and doing, individuals and the symbolic tools and communities of their activities, as separable processes.

Critical cultural views of learning might well take up a moral question with psychoanalytic learning theories: Are all ‘workings-through’ to be honored and encouraged? How can we envision alternate possibilities if all knowledge floats according to an individual’s own psychic disturbances? Agency is a contested issue in any learning theory, but perhaps particularly in psychoanalytic theory. Followed to its logical conclusion, this perspective may leave people in interminable ambivalence. Some theorists mobilized by a critical cultural impulse would likely find it difficult to tolerate this position.

3. Participation (a situative perspective)

An alternate view of learning is proposed by situative perspectives (i.e. Brown, Duguid, and Collins, 1989; Greeno, 1997; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990). ‘Situated cognition’ maintains that learning is rooted in the situation in which a person participates, not in the head of that person as intellectual concepts produced by reflection, nor as inner energies produced by psychic conflicts. Knowing and learning are defined as engaging in changing processes of human activity in a particular community. Knowledge is not a substance to be ingested and then transferred to new situation, but part of the very process of participation in the immediate situation.

Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that the understanding that emerges in and helps a person to participate in a situation are intimately entwined with the particular community, tools, and activity of that situation. In other words, individuals learn as  they participate by interacting with the community (with its history, assumptions and cultural values, rules, and patterns of relationship), the tools at hand (including objects, technology, languages and images), and the moment’s activity (its purposes, norms, and practical challenges). Knowledge emerges from these elements interacting. Thus knowing is interminably inventive and entwined with doing (Lave, 1988).

Because knowledge flows in action it can be neither commodified as a conceptual substance, nor considered as centered in any way within individual subjects. Pile and Thrift (1995) argue that first, understanding is created within conduct itself, which flows ceaselessly, is adaptable but not often deliberately intentional, and is always future-oriented. Second, understanding is worked out in ‘joint action’ with others, through shared but not necessarily articulated understandings of “what is real, what is privilege, what is problem, and what is moral” (p. 24). [8] Thus the process of knowing is essentially corporeal, realized through action, and therefore often worked out in a domain beyond consciousness. This fundamentally challenges the belief that individual reflection and memory is significant in knowledge production.

‘Transfer’ of knowledge then becomes problematic. But as Wilson (1992) points out, adults don’t learn from  experience, they learn in  it. He writes “If we are to learn, we must become embedded in the culture in which the knowing and learning have meaning: conceptual frameworks cannot be meaningfully removed from their settings or practitioners” (p. 77). Each different context evokes different knowings through very different demands of participation. This means that training in a classroom only helps develop learners’ ability to do training better. What is learned in one training or work site is not ‘portable’, but is transformed and reinvented when applied to the tasks, interactions and cultural dynamics of another. As Sfard (1998) explains, the notion of ‘knowledge transfer’ implies carrying knowledge across contextual boundaries. But when neither knowledge nor context are viewed as clearly delineated areas, “there are no definite boundaries to be crossed” (p.9).

Truth claims also become problematic in situative views. Here, knowledge is not judged by what is ‘true’ and ‘false’, or what is ‘erroneous’, but by what is relevant in this particular situation, what is worth knowing and doing, what is convenient for whom, and what to do next (Lave and Chaiklin, 1993). The emphasis is on improving one’s ability to participate meaningfully  in particular practices, and moving to “legitimate” roles within communities. ‘Meaningful’ must be negotiated between the individual’s desires and intentions (including the desire to belong), and the community’s changing requirements for certain forms of participation. Situated theorists focus their continuing inquiry on questions such as, What constitutes meaningful action for a particular individual in a given context? How is the development of knowledge constrained or created by the intersection of several existing practices in a particular space? (Lave and Wenger, 1991)

The educator’s role is not to develop individuals, but to help them participate meaningfully in the practices they choose to enter. Greeno (1997) characterizes this pedagogical goal as “improved participation” in an activity. People “improve” by becoming more attuned to constraints and affordances of different real situations. The educator may arrange authentic conditions and activities in which the learners practice interacting. When people learn to notice how specific properties and relations influence their possibilities for acting in one situation, they can more easily transform that activity in a wider range of situations (Greeno, 1997). However Greeno’s portrayal of the ‘helping’ educator contradicts certain premises of situated cognition, for the deliberate insertion of an actor with particular intentions changes the purpose and flow of the activity. Educators cannot regard their own participation separately from the overall negotiation of the question, What constitutes meaningful participation in this community?

Other claim the pedagogical value of the situated perspective is to illuminate how different elements of a learning environment interact to produce particular actions and goals. Following this, Wilson and Myers (1999) propose these questions for educators: “Is the learning environment successful in accomplishing its learning goals? How do the various participants, tools and objects interact together? What meanings are constructed? How do the interactions and meanings help or hinder desired learning?” (p. 242). Sfard (1998) points out that the participation metaphor invokes themes of togetherness, solidarity, and collaboration which could promote more positive risk-taking and inquiry in learning environments. Further, the situative perspective emphasizes being in constant flux, which avoids any permanent labeling of people:

. . . for the learner, all options are always open, even if he or she carries a history of failure. Thus quite unlike the [acquisition of knowledge] metaphor, the [participation metaphor] seems to bring a message of an everlasting hope: Today you act one way; tomorrow you may act differently. (Sfard, 1998, p. 8).

Critique from other perspectives

Some constructivist learning theorists have argued that the situative claims are “misguided” and “overstated” in their insistence that knowledge is context-dependent (Anderson, Reder, and Simon, 1996, p. 5). These critics claim that the extent to which learning is tightly bound to context depends on the kind of knowledge being acquired, and the ways the material is engaged. “Transfer” is a legitimate construct: learners have proved they can master abstract knowledge in one context and apply these to a different context, argue Anderson, Reder, and Simon. The key is to help people develop transfer skills during initial learning events, and to remind and help learners in unfamiliar situations to adapt and apply concepts with which they are already familiar. They claim that what is truly important in learning is “what cognitive processes a problem evokes, and not what real-world trappings it might have” (p. 9).

Other critics have pointed out that not all learning in communities is laudable. Unsupervised people learning in “authentic environments” may make do, finding ways to participate which actually reinforce negative practices which a community is trying to eliminate. Salomon and Perkins (1998) argue that people who are apprenticed in particular ways may ‘pick up’ undesirable forms of practice, wrong values, or strategies that subvert or profoundly limit the collective and its participating individuals.

The critical cultural perspective may well challenge the a-political position of situated cognition. Relations and practices related to dimensions of race, class, gender, and other cultural/personal complexities, apparently ignored by situative theorists, determine flows of power which in turn determines different individuals’ ability to participate meaningfully in particular practices of systems. There appears not to be, among situative perspectives, satisfactory responses to certain fundamental ethical questions of learning that are posed by other perspectives: Whose knowledge, among the various participants in the system, is afforded the greatest influence over the movements and directions of the system?

The situative perspective also has yet to address the question of positionality of actors within a system. As Ellsworth (1997) explains, “Each time we address someone, we take up a position within knowledge, power, and desire in relation to them, and assign to them a position in relation to ourselves and to a context” (p. 54). Power flows through the system according to the way these positions are connected, the way they address on another, and the nature of the resulting space between the positions. The positions are in constant flux, for they change each time someone turns to a new activity or subject. In Lave and Wenger’s work (1991), a learner’s positionality within a system was conceptualized simplistically as a general movement from the “peripheral participation” to the “centre” of a community. This notion would be viewed as problematic from critical cultural perspectives: it presumes the existence of an identifiable centre, and appears unconcerned with the governmentality of any system that accepts participation as hierarchical.

Situated perspectives also seem silent on the issue of resistance in communities where tools and activities may be unfair or dysfunctional. Is such resistance also considered meaningful participation? And does the appropriation of all energies as participation, including those intending to disrupt and fundamentally change the system, in fact dilute their disruptive effect and ensure the continuation of the system? The situated view may be understood to assume that encouraging participation in the existing community is a good thing, and thus provides few theoretical tools for judging what is deemed ‘good’ in a particular situation, or for changing a system’s conventional flow of movement.

4. Resistance (a critical cultural perspective)

Critical cultural perspectives center power as a core issue. The problem with some situated views and systems-theory perspectives is their lack of attention to inevitable power relations circulating in human cultural systems. Any system is a complex site of competing cultures. To understand human cognition we must, from a critical cultural perspective, analyse the structures of dominance which express or govern the social relationships, and competing forms of communication and cultural practices within that system. Writers in critical cultural pedagogy (i.e. Flax, 1990; Giroux, 1992; Giroux and McLaren, 1994; Kellner, 1995) claim that when these mechanisms of cultural power are named, ways and means to resist them appear. With resistance people can become open to unexpected, unimagined possibilities for work, life, and development. A purely-applied systems view of cognition free of historical, political, cultural, and gender concerns makes some vulnerable to those others intent on sustaining the discourses and practices which ensure their power.

As Foucault has shown, it is simplistic to conceive power as domination or as irrevocable forces which determine human activity. Critical cultural studies offer tools for tracing complex power relations and their consequences. The field is wide and certainly not monolithic, embracing pedagogical theorizing focused on gender issues, ideology and discourse analysis, media analysis, post-colonialism and subaltern studies, queer theory, race and identity, technoculture theory, and others. Obviously many conflicting perspectives and emphases are involved. For the purpose of this brief section, no distinction will be made among these perspectives although their heterogeneity should remain understood. Their writers all have in common their belief that politics are central to human cognition, activity, identity, and meaning. They often make explicit and demystify existing moment-to-moment interplays of power, and advocate social reconstruction by seeking more inclusive, generative and integrative alternatives to certain oppressive cultural practices and discourses.

Critical cultural perspectives suggest that learning in a particular cultural space is shaped by the discourses and their semiotics  (the signs, codes, and texts) that are most visible and accorded most authority by different groups. These discourses often create dualistic categories such as man/woman, reflection/action, learning/doing, formal/informal which determine unequal distribution of authority and resources. Such dualisms can result in labels that depersonalize human beings. They also legitimate certain institutions and exclude others, by representing ‘norms’ and casting nonconformists as ‘other’ to these norms. Analysts such as Kellner (1995) analyse how such representations  of people in cultural discourses contain, define, control behavior and relations, and generally limit the possibilities of people’s identities. Young (1990) urges examination of the historical forces and mythologies that have shaped these discourses and representations, including the experiences and contributions of both ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, as these are defined by a discourse.

Some critical educational writers have used Bourdieu’s (1980) theory of cultural capital  to analyse certain mechanisms of control that are hidden or unrecognized, and often complied with and exercised by the subjects of the control. Critical writers ask, What capital in this culture is accorded dominant status, and which group invests value in it? Desired cultural and symbolic capital has interest and meaning for particular groups, and requires particular cultural codes to understand and appreciate it. Knowledge itself and the categories that make it possible are capital invested with values. What is considered legitimate knowledge and how is it developed and exchanged? Which kinds and whose knowledge counts most?

Borders and boundaries  are significant for critical cultural writers in different ways than for theorists of other perspectives in which boundaries between inner and outer worlds (psychoanalytic), or between individual knower and objects of the environment (constructivist) are of most interest. Giroux (1992), for example, analyses borders thought to define cultural communities and territories, examining the identity options constructed for people within certain borders and the consequences for those who transgress. Chow (1993) examines blurrings of boundaries, discerning the tensions resulting from mixes and flows of cultures cross multiple spaces. Edwards and Usher (1998) are interested in ways location and dislocation function in people’s learning, as new spaces for alternative cultural practices and identities are being opened by ‘border crossings’ in this globalized world, and where boundaries between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ cultures, individual and collective experiences, are increasingly blurred.

Post-colonialist writers claim that all of our histories and therefore our experiences and learning are entwined in some way with colonization. Education itself is a colonizing process. Colonization has depersonalized and dislocated colonial subjects, created new worlds from these oppressions (Spivak, 1988), produced multiple patterns of dissent (violent, pacifist, and withdrawal) and created complex histories and dependencies between colonizers and resisters (Said, 1993). Some writers suggest looking at the utopian traces that are inherent in any impulse to colonize others, which may provide clues to possibilities beyond the domination. Bhabha (1994) suggests that new hybrid knowledges and spaces are developing from our collective histories of colonial dominance/resistance. Very new meanings and visions emerge as possibilities for new futures in these spaces -- if they can be discerned by those locked in reasoning patterns of the past.

In critical pedagogy processes, learners trace the politics and constraints of their contexts of experiential learning. Learning is coming to critical awareness about one’s contexts as well as one’s own contradictory investments and implications in what knowledge counts in particular communities, how development is ‘measured’, who gets to judge whom and why, and the interests that are served by resistant or development initiatives. Educators help themselves and others become more aware of their own constituted natures, their own continuous role in power relations and the production of meaning, how representations act to represent and construct reality, and how difference is perceived and enacted. People learn how what they may experience as personal yearnings, despair, conflict and identity struggles are shaped partly by historical cultural dynamics and ideologies of particular communities.

Through critical pedagogy, groups of people and their values who have been lost or dislocated in rigid narrow identity categories recover and name new ‘subject positions’. They learn to see through accepted social discourses to discern blurring borders and categories, new hybrid knowledges emerging, and even ultimate incommensurabilities of different cultural practices and groups. As Foucault puts it, “When we undermine their ‘naturalness’ and challenge the assumptions on which they’re based, we can see the possibility for difference....transformation becomes urgent, difficult, possible” (Foucault in Kritzman, 1988, p. 154). Giroux (1996) writes that critical pedagogy can open spaces to discern new futures, craft new identities and seek social alternatives that may be obscured by current dominant ideologies and struggles.

Critique from other perspectives

There has been much criticism of emancipatory views of experiential learning. Over-zealous cultural critique and reconstruction is a recurring pedagogical issue. Kellner (1995) cautions educators not to suppose a monolithic “dominant ideology” which is inherently manipulative or evil, and to remember that people are not a mass of passive, homogeneous non-critical victims of a dominant ideology. Feminist scholars have shown the repressive potential in any emancipatory efforts (i.e. Ellsworth, 1992). Troubling issues about who presumes enlightenment, and how authentic democratic participation can ever be achieved through existing discourses which favor certain knowledge interests over others, have not been resolved.

Britzman’s (1998a) psychoanalytic view claims that individual or collective ‘critical reflection’ are highly limited means of coming to self-knowledge. Cultural analysis may not be viewed as attending sufficiently to the extraordinary significance of desire and the nuance of the unconscious in determining understandings and behaviors developed through experience. Our attempts at achieving deeper awareness by examining experience solely through rational ‘critical’ thinking are thwarted by the ego’s investments in maintaining its own narcissism.

Enactivists and certain situated perspectives of learning do not discuss power as a primary determinant of systems’ evolution. Some reject as too deterministic the structural view of a dominant elite subordinating other groups. Sumara and Davis (1997) eschew entirely what they describe as traditional perspectives of domination/oppression as perpetuating negative views of power. They explain that systems theories of learning place much greater emphasis on mutual affect, collectivity, and coemergence, which transcend the limitations and self-perpetuated negative circles created by power/resistance-based critical thinking.

5. Co-Emergence (the ‘enactivist’ perspective)

Enactivism is a theory explaining the co-emergence  of learner and setting (Maturana and Varela, 1987; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). This perspective of experiential learning assumes that cognition depends on the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensori-motor capacities embedded in a biological, psychological, cultural context. Enactivists explore how cognition and environment become simultaneously enacted  through experiential learning. The first premise is that the systems represented by person and context are inseparable, and the second that change occurs from emerging systems affected by the intentional tinkering of one with the other.

This understanding begins by stepping aside from notions of knowledge as a substantive ‘thing’ to be acquired or ingested by learners as isolated cognitive agents, thereafter to exist within  them. Davis and Sumara (1997) explain that instead, enactivism accepts the premise that “cognition exists in the interstices  of a complex ecology or organismic relationality” (p. 110). Humans are understood to form part of the context itself, as systems that are completely interconnected with the systems in which they act. Maturana and Varela (1987) have represented the unfolding of this interconnection as a series of “structural couplings”. When two systems coincide, the “perturbations” of one system excites responses in the structural dynamics of the other. The resultant “coupling” creates a new transcendent unity of action and identities that could not have been achieved independently by either participant.

Educators might understand this phenomenon through the example of conversation, a collective activity in which interaction enfolds the participants and moves beyond them in a “commingling of consciousness” (Davis and Sumara, 1997). As each contributes, changing the conversational dynamic, other participants are changed, the relational space among them all changes, and the looping-back changes the contributor. This is “mutual specification” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991), the fundamental dynamic of systems constantly engaging in joint action and interaction. As actors are influenced by symbols and actions in which they participate, they adapt and learn. As they do so, their behaviors and thus their effects upon the systems connected with them change. With each change these complex systems shift, changing their patterns of interaction and the individual identities of all actors enmeshed in them. Thus the ‘environment’ and the ‘learner’ emerge together in the process of cognition, although this is a false dichotomy: there is no context  separate from any particular system such as an individual actor.

Understandings are considered embedded in conduct. Davis and Sumara (1997) explain this premise by drawing attention to the knowledge we are constantly enacting as we move through the world. Often called ‘habit’ or ‘tacit knowledge’ by others, enactivists view these understandings as existing not within ourselves in ways that drive our actions, but as unfolding in circumstances that evoke these particular actions. As example, Davis and Sumara show how a “choreography of movement” can be discerned in a particular community, where individuals find themselves swept up in collective patterns of expectation and behavior. Their examples show how much of this joint action exceeds and leaks out of individual attempts to attend to and control unconscious action through critical reflection. The problem lies not in underdeveloped critical abilities that should be educated, but in a false conceptualization of the learning figure  as separate from the contextual ground. Enactivism draws attention to the ‘background’, and examines myriad fluctuations, subtle interactions, imaginings and intuitions, the invisible implied by the visible, and the series of consequences emerging from any single action. All of these we normally relegate to the backdrop of our focus on whatever we construe to be the significant ‘learning’ event. The focus of enactivism is not on the components of experience (which other perspectives might describe in fragmented terms: person, experience, tools, community, and activity) but on the relationships  binding them together in complex systems.

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. There is no absolute standard of conduct, because conduct flows ceaselessly. Maturana and Varela (1987) suggests that subsystems in a series of increasingly complex systems together invent changing understandings of what is “adequate conduct” in this particular time and situation, or “consensual domain” (p. 39). “Adequate conduct” is action that serves a particular consensual domain. New possibilities for action are constantly emerging among the interactions of complex systems, and thus cognition occurs in the possibility for unpredictable shared action. Knowledge cannot be contained in any one element or dimension of a system, for knowledge is constantly emerging and spilling into other systems.

In analysing a process through which a group learned and changed over time, Sumara and Davis (1997) show the usefulness of enactivism as an explanatory tool. They describe how systems of cognition and evolution interacted in spontaneous, adaptable and unpredictable ways that changed both, resulting in “a continuous enlargement of the space of the possible” (p. 303). In other words, people participate together in what becomes an increasingly complex system. New unpredictable possibilities for thought and action appear continually in the process of inventing the activity, and old choices gradually become unviable in the unfolding system dynamics.

The enactivist perspective insists that learning cannot be understood except in terms of co-emergence: each participant’s understandings are entwined with the other’s, and individual knowledge co-emerges with collective knowledge. Educational theory also must examine the subtle particularities of ‘context’ created through the learning of complex systems, embedded in their constantly shifting interactional dynamics, and the relations among these particularities. Educators need to become alert to a “complexified awareness . . . of how one [individual] exists simultaneously in and across these levels, and of how part and whole co-emerge and co-specify one another” (Davis and Sumara, 1997), p. 120). Educators can also help all to understand their involvement, and find honest ways to record the expanding space and possibilities. Questions for facilitators are offered by Sumara and Davis (1997): How does one trace the various entangled involvements in a particular activity in a complex system, while attending assiduously to one’s own involvement as participant? How can the trajectories of movement of particulate actors in relation to the system’s objects be understood and recorded in a meaningful way?

The educator’s role might be first, a communicator: assisting participants to name what is unfolding around them and inside them, to continually rename these changing nuances, and to unlock the tenacious grasp of old categories, restrictive or destructive language that strangles emerging possibilities. Second, the educator as story-maker helps trace and meaningfully record the interactions of the actors and objects in the expanding spaces. Third, educators as interpreters help all to make community sense of the patterns emerging among these complex systems, and understand their own involvements in these patters. systems. that don’t fit new situations. Naturally, educators must be clear about their own entanglement and interests in the emerging systems of thought and action.

Critique from other perspectives

This enactivist perspective has joined debate about experiential learning so recently that critique has not yet become available in educational literature. However, working from basic premises of other perspectives, some challenges can be formulated to the enactivist perspective in anticipation of critique that will no doubt emerge in future writing.

Challenge from a constructivist view might focus on the lack of full recognition accorded to individual meaning-making and identity-construction processes. Although Davis and Sumara (1997) claim that personal subjectivities are no means abandoned but rather understood as “mutually specifying” one another, it is unclear how individual integrity is maintained in a “commingling of consciousness” (p. 110). Enactivists pose a rather seamless link between cognition and interaction in community. Constructivists would argue that there are aspects of an individual’s subjective world of cognition which are not unavailable through dialogue and not present in action. As well, the connection to one particular context of individuals’ personal histories and their dynamic processes of change and growth within other systems are not yet fully articulated in the enactivist understanding. Finally, the relationship of individual knowers to theoretical knowledge existing apart from a particular community of actions also must be articulated.

Ethical issues of justice and right action, fundamental to education, become somewhat problematic in the enactivist perspective as presented here. How can an educational project for change be formulated that adequately accounts for the complexified ongoing systemic perturbations, without being deliberately illusory? That is, if any action of an educator or other particular element of a system becomes enfolded in that system’s multiple interactions and unpredictable expansions of possibility, what sort of reference point can be used to guide intention toward some deliberate pedagogical goal? On another point, how can we explain the differential change that different elements of a system appear to register? If all interactions between people co-emerge in ways that specify each other, how is that educators often influence learners more than they are influenced in their interactions? And finally, what moral choices for wise judgment are available for educators within notions like “adequate conduct”? Because they are self-referenced (Waldrop, 1992), complex systems that many educators would abhor do often survive and expand in sustainable ways. Cancer and neo-nazism are two examples. There must be a more defensible framework than simply co-emergence to guide understandings of cognition. These questions are not obstacles, or reasons to reject enactivist perspectives of cognition. They simply serve to point out further paradoxes that must be named as educators struggle to find ways to act within complexity.

Challenge to the enactivist view from a critical cultural perspective may observe that discussion of experiential learning is inseparable from cultural practices, social relations, images and representations. Perspectives such as enactivism don’t address inevitable power relations circulating in human cultural systems. Therefore the influences on patterns of co-emergence exerted by culturally-determined meaning categories such as gender/race/sexuality/class/religion may be indiscernible from a systems-perspective. In addition, neither systems nor situative perspectives appear to attend to the way cultural practices (such as tools of discourse, image, and representation) have been shaped and maintained by dominant groups in the system, and continue to sustain interests of some participants in the system more than others. Further, a systems view like enactivism demands that the interests and identities of individual elements be surrendered to the greater community. Therefore, individuals become vulnerable to a few who manipulate the system’s discourses to sustain their own power, ensuring that their experiences become the most valued knowledge in the collective.

Conclusion: Implications for theorizing the nature of experiential learning

A careful comparison of theoretical frames is needed to help researchers and educators better understand and name the various processes occurring as experiential learning, and constitute their own roles relative to these processes in moral, sensitive ways. The perspectives highlighted by this paper may help interrupt dominant views of experiential learning as reflective knowledge construction, and open spaces for dialogue between situative and enactivist, constructivist, critical, and psychoanalytic voices. These perspectives can also move us toward developing more robust theoretical tools for experiential learning that integrate themes within the issues of reflection, interference, participation, power, and co-emergence as they are raised by different perspectives. Meanwhile, comparative examination of different perspectives can enlighten and raise new questions for each perspective, as well as help researchers, theorists, and educators situate and think carefully about beliefs of experience and learning underpinning their own practice.

Producing a synthesis of these five perspectives in terms of their implications for educators is both impossible and theoretically unsound. Each view enfolds a different understanding of the positioning of educators, learners, and learning, and of the relationship between theory of learning and the practice of teaching. Alternately one might try transcendence to a domain of theoretical “eclecticism”, which as Wilson and Myers (1999), argue, is most often the stance of the practitioner:

Practitioners tend to be opportunistic with respect to different theoretical conceptions: they might try viewing a problem from one theoretical perspective, then another, and compare results. This stance might be termed ‘grab-bag’ but we prefer to think of it as problem- or practitioner-centered. People, rather than ideologies, are in control. The needs of the situation rise above the dictates of rules, models, or even standard values.” (p. 248).

However even this view of a single actor choosing to ‘apply’ particular ideas to actions according to the particular demands of the immediate context is itself located within one perspective, the situative view, which others might reject as unadvisable, impossible, or theoretically inaccurate as a representation of what that actor may think he or she is doing. Indeed, certain streams of constructivism would question the cognitive possibility of ‘paradigm hopping’. And certain theories of epistemology would not accept the theoretical assumption that perspectives derived from fundamentally disparate worldviews can ever be integrated or even adequately represented side-by-side as I have presumed to do here.

But now that I have pulled apart these five different views of learning and represented them as a chart for purposes of some clarification, discussion should proceed to deconstruct the chart itself, its classificatory dimensions and its influence in constructing ways of thinking, perhaps experimenting with alternate ways of understanding and representing these and other learning perspectives. There are many possible readings and combinations of themes within perspectives. For example, perspectives sharing a subject-centered philosophy of consciousness (reflection and some emancipatory views of resistance) can be counterpoised to conceptions which decenter the subject (participation, co-emergence and post-structural perspectives of resistance). Enactivism resonates with psychoanalytic theory on some dimensions and situated cognition on others. Wilson and Myers (1999) argue that situated cognition actually embeds fundamental premises of early behaviorist theory, while Wilson (1992) shows its alliance with critical theory. Some streams of critical cultural theory align with constructivist notions of cognition, others with psychoanalytic or post-structural theories.

The further challenge is to examine the omissions, links and blurrings among these perspectives, to locate points where they already agree or where they may complement one another. More in-depth comparison should identify and probe, with careful analysis of terms and conditions, points of complete disagreement or incommensurability. These points of controversy may help us choose the most imminent questions for our further inquiry into the nature of experiential learning. Then discussion should open exploration of the movements within and between the perspectives, examining the contradictory currents, the mutual influences, and the relationship of different perspectives to broader sociocultural movements in thought. Finally, in contexts of adult education, discussion might explore possible roles for educators within different perspectives, and the problem of inserting this role.

This typology now needs to be challenged and unraveled. Charts such as this which pretend to totalize distinct currents of thought and pedagogical energies must be disrupted, put off balance. I can’t find a way to do this while simultaneously clarifying these ideas, in a way which would not dissolve into incomprehensible and interminable denial of the ideas themselves. I therefore invite my colleagues in adult education to challenge and debate or extend and modify the five perspectives of experiential learning as I have represented them here.

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