The Lecture as Experiential Education

Paula and the Lecture by Sean Blenkinsop

Our fictional story begins with Paula, a 20 something Brazilian art lover and historian with a fiery passion and focused fascination for 17th-century Flemish art. Her interest is so specific that, after careful explorations with regard to the trompe-l’oeil and the wall-rack styles, she has alighted on the interpretive role of vegetables during that important epoch of the Flemish still life traditions. She has studied the genre with great care and admiration and seen many of the actual works available to the public. Yet she continues to be drawn to this question of the interpretive heft of vegetables. The literature is full of the experts’ thoughts on flowers: the columbine’s indication of melancholia, the poppy’s whispered meaning of death, the violet’s comment on modesty and humility, and the rose’s inferences toward love, transience, and the Virgin Mary herself. Paula has a comprehensive understanding of the importance of the skull, the hourglass, and the pocket watch in the Vanitas paintings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Claesz_002b.jpg); this ongoing exploration of impermanence and the passing of sensory pleasures that so dominated these Flemish masters’ thinking. And yet the nagging question remains: Why the presence of vegetables? Why do winter squash appear in the kitchen paintings of Jan Fyt and Frans Snyders? Why in conjunction with asparagus or artichoke? What interpretive work are they doing that fruit, flowers, and dead animals can’t, or that the artists don’t want them to do? Ultimately, what is the meaning and role of vegetables—particularly the cucumber—in 17th-century Flemish art?

Paula has tapped out all her local resources—the library, the Internet, her local painting classes, not to mention the patience of the art historian at the nearby university. Paula is at the edge of her knowledge, possibly at the edge of all knowledge with regard to this question, with no obvious way forward. How might she propel her learning forward, given everything she knows and the questions she is asking? Then, Paula learns that the local Dutch appreciation society house has invited Dr. Jan de Wey to give a talk on Flemish still life painting with a particular focus on vegetables. Paula is thrilled; the world’s leading expert is coming to her. She prepares carefully, clarifies exactly what it is she knows (thinks she knows) while also drawing up a list of key questions she would like to have answered.

Dr. de Wey’s talk is wonderful, and it covers much of the background that Paula already understands and confirms many things she has suspected and been theorizing about. It answers several of her listed questions while opening up new venues for possible exploration and even several sites of dissent she has with the esteemed doctor. Afterward, Paula has the opportunity to ask directly some of her other pressing questions and venture into some of the new areas she has generated over the course of the lecture. Dr. de Wey engages deeply, thrilled to encounter another lover of profound questions, and they continue until most of the other audience members have found their way home. It is a thrilling evening and Paula finds herself in a deeply reflective mood. So many of her previous questions have been answered, and her understanding of the subject has deepened and moved forward in really exciting ways. She can also see the next questions beginning to form and new projects to get onto right away. She floats home on a wonderful cloud of all she has learned and in the deep awareness of all there is still to learn. She knows the questions will continue and that she has the wherewithal to answer them.

And so, the question is this: Given that the lecture by Dr. de Wey was certainly a lived experience, that Paula moved through all the suggested steps of an experientially educative process, that Paula learned something and likely learned the most she possibly could have given her situation, was this lecture an example of experiential education?

The Quality of Experience by Carrie Nolan

In a word, yes. A lecture can be embraced within an understanding of experiential education as in the scenario with Paula and the case of the cucumber in 17th-century Flemish art.

It is not the case that educators need to make experience a part of education, as it is indisputable that education unavoidably contains all sorts of experience. As Dewey (1973/1981b) states, “Experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of live-creature and environing conditions is involved in the very process of living” (p. 555). To live is to experience. It follows, therefore, that all education consists of experiences. The issue, however, is the quality of that experience. Quality refers to both how palatable the experience is in the present (force) and the effect of the experience in how well it leads to future endeavors (function). Dewey (1938/1997) wishes for experiences that would “live fruitfully and creatively in future experiences” (p. 28). Dewey (1938/1997) considers an educative experience to be one that leads to growth and to being open to further experiences, not for the sake of the thing experienced but for the sake of learning, because it “arouses curiosity, strengthens initiative, and sets up desires and purposes that are sufficiently intense to carry a person over dead places in the future” (p. 31). We can see that the lecture was an experience of good quality. It enlivened Paula and functioned to carry her forward in her quest to understand the cucumber.

Experience, according to Dewey, is both passive and active, trying and undergoing. As he says, “… doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connections of things” (Dewey, 1973/1981b, p. 496). Where there is no conscious connection between doing and undergoing, the potential for learning is significantly diminished due to the fact that “A separation of the active doing phase from the passive undergoing phase destroys the vital meaning of an experience” (Dewey, 1973/1981b, p. 505). Experiential education involves doing and undergoing in conscious relationship where the body matters, where the senses are given a place of consequence, and where it is the relationships between things and between the learner and things that is the focus. Paula’s prior doing meant that the lecture was an opportunity to make make connections to, within, and beyond that prior doing—the lecture was a process of undergoing. We can say with confidence, therefore, that the experience of the lecture was educative.

Interest is essential in propelling one through the process of inquiry, which can be understood to incorporate both the doing and the undergoing that are necessary in an experience of force and function. Dewey (1915) conceptualizes interest as an inherent human instinct and offers four categories by which the expression of interest can be observed: making things, finding things out, artistic expression, and conversation. Importantly, interest is not a narrowly psychological response to an environmental stimulus, but rather an expressive characteristic of being human. Dewey (1973/1981b) identifies three phases of interest: active, objective, and subjective. The active phase concerns the initial impulse of taking interest. In the objective phase, impulse metamorphoses into a conscious connection with the object of interest. The subjective phase regard the attribution of value or worth to the object. Interest is inextricably connected to notions of identity and self (Dewey, 1916/1997) whereby interest is fundamentally an expression of self and self is subject to modification as a result of actions taken. We might consider interest in such contemporary terms as being ‘invested’ in or feeling a sense of ‘ownership’ of one’s learning as opposed to a transitory, whimsical sense of pleasing amusement or entertainment.

Interest functions as motivation “to arouse energy, to stimulate the means necessary to accomplish the realization of ends” (Dewey, 1973/1981b, p. 437). Clearly, Paula was motivated to take in the lecture based on her interest. In situations where the interest of attendees in the topic of the lecture might be reasonably argued to be less reliable than a public lecture to a select group of art aficionados—a university lecture, perhaps, where students may be attending for a variety of reasons ranging from coercion to social presentation of self—the experience might have neither force nor function for those lacking interest. And this is where there is potential to not engage in an educative experience, and so it falls upon the teacher, working with the student, to find and bring forth connections of interest for the students, and for students to take responsibility too. An educative experience, be it lecture or rappelling, requires that the content is associated with relevant experiences that connect to the intended area of learning.

When these elements of experience such as trying, undergoing, and interest are present, as they were for Paula in the lecture from Dr. de Wey, then we might reasonably consider that the learning has taken place within a framework understandable as experiential education. This lecture differs from what might be described as formalized experiential learning experiences. These formalized experiences involve contexts where teaching and learning have been intentionally framed to encourage connections between doing and undergoing and which are explicitly promoted to identify with experiential education as a theoretical concept. With Paula’s prior experience and inclinations, however, the lecture is sufficient as experiential education.

It is important to acknowledge, conversely, that not every student engaging in a formally designed experiential education endeavor such as rappelling will necessarily have educative experiences. As educators, we do not know how each individual will take up the process, but experiential education should be intentionally designed to encapsulate in a learning endeavor what Dewey (1938/1997) means by educative experience.

Esthetic Experience by Jasper Hunt

To clearly show how the lecture Paula attended is both an educational experience and also an example of experiential education, it is important to go back to the beginning of the situation, rather than start at the end.

The question must be asked: Why did Paula become interested in 17th-century Flemish art in the first place? What got her involved in this quest? This issue is essentially a philosophy of esthetics question. At some point, Paula found herself within a situation where she had a perceptual involvement with a work of art by a Flemish artist from the 17th century. What happened upon her initial empirical experience with that work of art? Did she walk away, disgusted, bored, repulsed, or otherwise not inclined to intentionally stay engaged with that work of art? Or did she stay engaged, empirically connected? What is important is the fact that she stayed engaged.

One of the most basic questions in philosophy of esthetics is whether or not beauty is contained within the art object itself or is simply a matter of what the viewing subject brings to the context. Is beauty objective independent or is it dependent upon the subjective experience of the beholder—rhetorically, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”? This is a quintessential case of philosophical dualism and was a subject dealt with in detail by Dewey (1934) in his classic work, Art As Experience. Dewey (1934) argues that both the art object and the subjective experience of the beholder bring something to the context of the esthetic experience. If the object blocks engagement and the potential for further experience between itself and the beholder, then the esthetic experience is cut short. It ends. This might happen in a situation where the object is too overwhelming or at such a distance from the learner as to be inaccessible. The same ‘cutting short’ result can happen in the opposite direction where the beholder comes to the esthetic experience and, for some reason, does not engage with the object. Again, the experience ends. One can imagine a student being forced into an art gallery, or outside for that matter, against her will and responding by turning away thereby blocking the esthetic experiential possibilities of the encounter.

Dewey argues that a genuine esthetic experience is one where both the art object and the beholder contribute something that results in what Dewey refers to as an esthetic “consummation” (Dewey, 1934, pp. 35-38). Prior to the consummation, both the object and the beholder are esthetic potentialities (Dewey, 1934). Once they come together in a moment of indeterminacy and the beholder and the object connect in an esthetic consummation, then beauty—a single qualitative whole (Dewey, 1934)—has been created. Note that this has not made the object ‘beautiful’ by definition but that the encounter itself was beautiful because of the connections made and the possibilities afforded. The esthetic consummation is a connection made between the creator of the art object and the beholder, which invites the beholder into further engagement with the object. Dewey (1938/1997) calls this the “experiential continuum” (p. 35). Blocking further experience interrupts the experiential continuum; esthetically, these would be understood to be ‘ugly’ or, in the more common educational language, miseducative. Dewey attempts to overcome the previously mentioned philosophical dualism by arguing that both the artist and the beholder contribute to the esthetic moment. For experiential educators, the challenge here is to think about how we act as artists in the creation, selection, and positioning of educational experiences, our object corollary, while also orienting the students such that the experiential continuum is the result of these beautiful moments.

If the esthetic consummation happens in the dynamic interplay between the artist (through the art object) and the beholder, then I argue that the beholder has had what Dewey (1934) calls a primary experience, a primary esthetic experience, to be more precise. I am assuming that readers are familiar with the general theory of experiential education that requires primary experience to be complemented by secondary experience. Paula, at some point in her life, had a primary experience with 17th-century Flemish art which engaged her through an esthetic consummation and impelled her into further inquiry and investigation. The further inquiry is a classic example of secondary experience being brought to bear upon primary experience. This resulted in Paula having an epistemologically significant esthetic experience.

But her esthetic experience was incomplete. She was thrust into further indeterminate situations with her art interest that left her hungry for more knowledge and insights. She needed more secondary experience to further her knowledge. Thus, she attended the lecture by Dr. Jan de Wey. When she listened to the lecture, she was having another primary experience (empirically grounded), which was followed by another secondary experience with Dr. Jan de Wey when the lecture was over. Attending the lecture did not block the experiential continuum. Indeed, the lecture helped to inform and give depth to the experiential continuum experienced by Paula. What is key here is that the lecture was preceded by epistemologically significant esthetic experience in the life of Paula. For another person in the audience without any significant esthetic experience of 17th-century Flemish art, the lecture may have blocked further experience. For example, the hypothetical reluctant student who was in the audience by order of a school master may have been ‘bored to tears,’ unable to engage, and left with no desire ever again to engage in 17th-century Flemish art. The lecture would have been miseducative (Dewey, 1938/1997) for that student. For Paula, the lecture was educative.

Therefore, my conclusion is that, yes, indeed, Paula’s experience of the lecture on 17th-century Flemish art was well within the parameters of experiential education, and may indeed be a “beautiful” example of it because, as an educational experience, it did not block the esthetic consummation and it was clearly an extension of her experiential continuum.

Technique or Philosophical Process? By Paul Stonehouse

Paula’s experience elicited a memory from my own life, some 7 years ago . . .

“I think reading can be a primary experience!” My exclamation seemed to echo within the graduate-level experiential education classroom. The incredulity on the faces of my classmates implied that I had just crossed a sacred line. My claim came from a tension I had been feeling for some time: Why couldn’t traditional methods of educating (e.g., reading, writing, and attending lectures) be conducive to Dewey’s conception of quality educational experiences? It is this question that I aim to address here in this brief response.

I suspect that much of the disdain for traditional methods among experiential educators comes from a reduction of experiential education to (mere) experiential learning. Roberts (2012) differentiates the two, suggesting that experiential learning refers to the experiential method or technique of “learning by doing” (pp. 4-8), which emphasizes bodily movement, hands-on activities, and out-of-the-classroom experiences. By contrast, experiential education is rooted in a far broader process that addresses philosophical questions about reality, knowledge, and ethics. While affirming the usefulness of experiential learning techniques, Roberts (2012) notes that the tendency to equate experiential education with learning by doing has left our field open to trivializing critique, caricature, and even mockery.

If experiential education is not limited to learning by doing, then just how does the word ‘experiential’ modify the broader process of education? Chapman, McPhee, and Proudman (2008) suggest that it is relevancy that makes education distinctly experiential. Thus, experiential educators attempt to create a learning environment where the material under consideration is directly relevant to the learner. Students must be convinced that the question under investigation is important, meaningful, and real. Something of value, to the students, must be at stake (Crosby, 2008). Too often, however, traditional educators fail to generate such relevancy, and their lectures and assigned readings register as little more than “inert ideas” (Whitehead, 1929/1967, p. 1). Of course, this critique could equally be lodged at many outdoor-based programs that similarly fail to connect their activities (e.g., wilderness travel) with larger social and ecological issues.

Dewey (1938/1997) describes such disconnected learning as miseducative because it ignored his “principle of continuity” (p. 35), a principle that may further explain the current disfavor for lecturing among experiential educators. The principle of continuity of experience claims that “every experience affects for better or worse the attitudes which help decide the quality of further experiences” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 37). If lecturers were to consider the past experiences of their learners, make efforts to connect the lesson to the learners’ present realities, and make obvious the relevancy of the topic to the learners’ future, a lecture could be experiential in nature. Comparably, for outdoor-based programs to be experiential, their educators must also be mindful of the “principle of continuity” when preparing their lessons. Falling short of this principle risks lectures that students may find boring and useless, and outdoor programming that participants equate with little more than a one-off fun experience.

Although there are many reasons for the lackluster performances we often experience within our lecture halls, a main contributor is the challenge of the information age. Never before have educators had to sift through so much seemingly relevant material. Anxious that they not underexpose their students to the full scope of an area of study, educators dutifully increase the density and volume of their lectures (Palmer, 2007). Unfortunately, this excess often precludes an essential element of experiential education: reflection. These educators have provided a primary experience in the form of a lecture and the reading that accompanied it but may fail to provide a secondary experience in the form of reflective activities such as questions, discussion, and assignments that require application and synthesis (Dewey, 1929/1958). Unfortunately, such an omission breeds irrelevancy tantamount to miseducation.

Given this state of affairs, one can hardly blame a student for dismissing traditional methods of education or deeming them an intolerable waste of time. Although forgivable, I find this assessment tragic. Many of those held venerable within our field (e.g., Dewey, Hahn, Leopold, and Unsoeld) possessed their intellectual powers, in part, because of their classical educations. No less of an experiential figure than Whitehead (1929/1967) reminds us that “the pleasure and the discipline of character to be derived from an education based mainly on classical literature and classical philosophy has been demonstrated by centuries of experience” (p. 61).

Many experiential educators fall and/or have fallen into the trap of dichotomizing educational experiences as ‘experiential’ or ‘not experiential’ instead of focusing, as educators, on the challenges of incorporating pedagogical methods of whatever kind in a thoughtful way that sustains learning through the continuity of experience. Every spring, I confront these challenges as I struggle to teach experientially a course on environmental ethics. Through trial and error, however, I believe I have made some progress. On Monday evenings, I show a documentary that encapsulates the ethical topic/issue of the week. As the students depart the classroom, I hand them a list of questions on which to reflect. The film serves as a shared experience for the class, contextualizes the theory and philosophy we are about to examine, and emotionally engages (see Goralnik, Millenbah, Nelson, & Thorp, 2012) us in the relevancy of the topic. On Tuesdays, I lecture and facilitate interaction on the environmental philosophy chapter that they have read for that week. At the close of Tuesday’s class, I again provide a list of questions on which they can reflect. Then, on Thursday, our entire class is given to discussion. Students are to come prepared. Sometimes, they wish to discuss my questions, in other instances, they wish to examine their own. Discussions are sometimes facilitated within the classroom, often outdoors, and periodically en route to a related local field experience. Thursdays have become a time to clarify understanding, to articulate the relevancy of the topic to our world, and to explore the implications of our new understanding for how we might more thoughtfully live.

Admittedly, my students’ favorite classes rarely fall on a Tuesday, but I believe they have come to see, articulate, and embody the relevance of philosophy to their moral lives. In this way, I feel we have come a little closer to Dewey’s (1973/1981b) vision for education: “a process of living and not a preparation for future living” (p. 445).

Part 1: General Consensus

That a lecture can be understood as experiential education might seem intuitively wrong for many who consider themselves experiential educators. Those who work in experiential education often do so in part as a reaction against educational formats dominated by didactic, lecture-style teaching. And yet, all three authors are quite clear, each in their own way, that the dichotomy—experiential/non-experiential—is untenable. A lecture, if offered in the appropriate way and in the right context, can indeed be an educative experience. It can even be the best educative experience available at any particular moment. Yet, to this assertion every author attaches caveats.

The most apparent and consistent caveat has to do with the learner. All three stress that the student’s context, educational history and continuum, and even identity are necessary considerations. Paula is independently motivated, does not fear lectures, and has the ability to support her own reflective processes. As we all know, these are not guaranteed realities for all learners. The respondents, therefore, have placed a heavy burden on the educator while opening up a huge array of new experiences (e.g., beyond the lecture, the artistic encounter and reading have been added) that might be considered potentially employable in any given learning situation. The burden placed on the educator is multilayered. There is a clear directive to consider learners as being in process. Learners have educational histories, successes, failures, and proclivities toward particular experiences and topics, and away from others. They also have futures, directions they are aiming toward, and imagined possibilities. Thus, it is important that educators find ways to come to know these things about each learner while also understanding any experiences offered (including paddling rapids, doing initiatives, and standing in a circle reflecting) can act as an addition, subtraction, or blockage to a stream of learning and living that is already in motion, and is not a detached moment without context and outside of time. The issue of time needs to be considered in both the immediate and the long-term. For example, Hunt points out that not only might forcing a student to go to the museum, or jump off a platform, be miseducative in the moment, but also if it leads the student to forsake all art or outdoor activities far into the future, then the educator has done a deep disservice to the learner and to future educators as well.

One other clear consensus that appears across the three respondents is the ubiquitous presence of John Dewey. ² In this case, it may be because of the tongue-in-cheek presence of Dr. Jan de Wey, or the fact that all three respondents are based in North America, or Dewey’s still deep influence on much of educational theory especially when the word experience appears, or a combination of all of these and others. However, we would like to suggest that this focus, particularly because the respondents want educators to attend to individual learners, is problematic and potentially limiting for myriad reasons, but we will draw forward two. The first is that Dewey is clearly a product of his time with regard to something like the question of student identity. For example, he is unlikely to provide any guidance at all when it comes to questions of gender (ascribed and chosen), racial, cultural, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, physical attributes, identity politics, privilege, and so on. Yet these are important questions in our lives as experiential educators today. The second reason why it would behoove us to move beyond Dewey when considering experiential education is because much of the larger educational field has already done so for good, if varied, reasons. Constructivism and progressive education are being rethought and reconceptualized by curriculum theorists (see, for example, Pinar, 2012; Slattery, 2013), de-colonial and postcolonial work in education has pushed back on some of the assimilationist and colonizing tendencies in public education (see de Oliveira Andreotti & de Souza, 2012; Pratt-Clarke, 2010), and environmental theories have rightly pointed toward a lack of environmental discussion in Dewey’s work (Bowers, 2001). Our point is not to abandon Dewey altogether, but to recognize that we are in a world where a simple dualistic understanding of experience is neither aligned with Dewey nor an expedient the field can afford any longer. We are in a time where we need to find ways to become comfortable with a non-dualistic and deeply nuanced concept of experience and with a consideration of the multifaceted, multidimensional learners with whom we work.

It is in response to this goal of moving beyond dualism, a tension which admittedly continues at times to exist in this article, that we think the respondents above have offered a very interesting educational metaphor—experiential educator as artist. Hunt refers to the idea that a “successful” art object is one that draws the beholder into “further engagement” not only with the object itself but also with the creator thereof and also with others who are actively encountering the object. This is clearly analogous to a discussion of the relational dynamic between learner, educator, materials used, and the educational experience. The artistic metaphor illustrates well the false dichotomy of experiential/non-experiential and provides a starting point for rich conversations related to the multidirectional relationships inherent in learning situations.

Given the responses in this article, it would appear that the false dichotomization of learning experiences is a distraction from, and a hindrance to, developing a theoretically robust concept of experience that is able to deal with the multiculturalism, poly-vocality, and diversity of our students. It also distracts from the real goal of facilitating the best educative experiences that are relevant to the learners involved, the environment engaged, and the sociocultural context. However, it is clear that within the broad conversation of education, the intent of qualifying education as experiential or non-experiential has been done for important and significant reasons. Theorists and educators in search of ways to clarify educations that are successful often include many of the characteristics presented here—relevance, interest, trying, undergoing, the interplay between primary and secondary experience, an esthetic consummation—all things which collectively we might simply describe as the search for “good” education/teaching/learning. And so, by denying the dualism and expanding the possible range of experiences available, we have shifted the focus away from the “dust” described above and toward the rich earth of experiential practice.

The scenario involving Paula provides provocative possibilities for how all educators, and not just those who hive themselves off as experiential educators, might understand experiential education while also providing rich fodder for further discussion. Consideration of the three responses above exhorts us to continually examine our understanding of what a positive educational experience might be as we reflect on the broader cultural context, the individual histories and educational trajectories of each learner we encounter, and the future possibilities and foreclosures that any experience might offer.