Chapter 4. How the Experiential Learning Baton Was Passed

Conceptions are usually one person’s exclusive output, but their development is always organic—the building of one bit of understanding upon another, exactly like experiential learning.

The genus, which focuses on how people learn, has its origins in the field of psychology, philosophy, and physiology, not education or industry. In the first half of the 20th century, so-called behaviorialism—a Pavlovian view of human behavior—dominated the field. Without knowledge of what was going on in the brain, scientists limited their theories to aspects of stimulus and response, a view that eventually spilled over into other disciplines such as education, sociology, and even linguistics.

First on the scene was Jean Piaget, the Swiss philosopher and psychologist, who spent much of his professional life listening to growing children (Piaget, 1975). In the course of his work with the Frenchman Alfred Binet, the creator of the first intelligence test, he became interested in the reasoning process used by those performing intelligence tests. He found that there were age-related regularities in the reasoning processes as well as differences in the way children thought about things. These insights led him to undertake a study of experience and human knowledge. Over a near 70-year working life Piaget’s pioneering researches in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology gave him an insight into how knowledge grows, a discovery that Albert Einstein described as “so simple that only a genius could have thought of it” (Time magazine, 1999). What Piaget realized was that children were not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, as traditional educational theory believed, but rather they were active builders of knowledge through the continuous creation and testing of their own perceived theories of the world. It was an understanding in the field that others would later develop such individualistic teaching approaches in their own right, among them the Italian medical doctor and educator Maria Montessori, whose ideas have spawned specialist schools that still bear her name around the world.

Further refinement was initiated by the likes of American academic Jack Mezirow, who introduced the idea of transformative learning, the U.S. philosopher and psychologist John Dewey, whose concern was with “interaction, reflection, and experience,” the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, whose methodology introduced “dialogue” into the learning process, and the German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin, who brought to the table the concept of action research, a form of collective self-reflective enquiry (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1985; Lewin, 1951; Mezirow, 2000).

Dewey’s contribution—education must engage with and enlarge experience through interaction and reflection—came out of the observation that traditional teaching was teacher driven, where the chief business of a school was to transmit to the new generation “bodies of information and of skills that had been worked out in the past” (Dewey, 1916). From this he reconceptualized vocational teaching to be learner centered. Dewey rejected knowledge of the past as the end of education—rather, he said, it is a means. For educators, the challenge was how to use experience to educate, the subject of this text.

Lewin’s contribution was the realization that learning was best facilitated in an environment where there is dialectic tension and conflict between concrete experience and analytic detachment. Like Dewey, Lewin became convinced that the way to understand anything was to understand experience’s evolution.