Rethinking Experience: What Do We Mean by This Word “Experience”?

Abstract

This paper uses autoethnography to reassess the concept “experience” and the lack of theoretical frameworks within experiential education for delimiting experience within the practices and research around experiential, adventure, and outdoor education. Although a pivotal and essential part of practice, theoretical understandings of experience have been missing in experiential education scholarship. Experience is clearly a complex, constructed “reality.” Jagger (cited in Lauritzen, 1997, p. 83) has pointed out that an appeal to experience is “fraught with methodological difficulties.” What exactly is experience? Whose experience is heard? Like other disciplines, for example the studies of religions and psychology, experiential education has no rigorous definitions, characterizations, typologies, or conceptualizations of the focus of its study and practice—a type of experience. Drawing upon critiques from Indigenous, feminist, postcolonial, and black Americans and Canadians, and integrating with an autoethnographic approach, this paper provides a critique of the existing use of “experience” and sketches an initial approach for developing theoretical understandings of the central phenomenon of experiential, adventure, and outdoor education.

Reconceptualising outdoor adventure education: Activity in search of an appropriate theory

“…Both can be considered as part of the same argumentative process which constructs meaning" (p. 142). Experience is not a stable entity, rather it is multi-layered and confounds attempts to bound and rationalise it into categories that can easily be managed (Bell, 1993;Fox, 2008;Michelson, 1999). Some OAE programmers have perhaps drawn a somewhat arbitrary line between being active and then structuring reflection on these experiences to aid meaning-making to enhance learning.…”

“…Such is the 'bedrock' status of experiential approaches that critiques of accepted experiential practices are relatively rare within OAE literature (for existing critiques see Bell, 1993;Brown, 2003;Fox, 2008;Hovelynck, 2001;Loynes, 2002;Quay, 2003;Ringer, 1999;Roberts, 2008;Seaman, 2008;Wurdinger, 1995).…”

“…various cyclic models, Joplin, 1995;Kolb, 1984). However the focus on reflection in experiential learning has been criticised for being too simplistic, reductionist and linear (Bell, 1993;Fenwick, 2003a;Fox, 2008;Holman et al, 1997;Roberts, 2008;Sawada, 1991). Critiques of the experience -reflection binary are focussed on several overlapping issues.…”

“…As Kemmis (1985) remarked, "We do not pause to reflect in a vacuum" (p. 141). All experiences are mediated through our bodies and our cultural lens; there is no such thing as a pure, immediate or transparent experience (Fox, 2008). Seaman (2007) argues that the recognition that learning is mediated through cultural understandings challenges "assumptions about the radical autonomy of learners, about 'direct experience,' and about the centrality of independent, cognitive reflection in experiential learning" (p. 3).…”

Experiencing spiritual aspects outdoors in the winter: a case study from the Czech Republic using the method of systemic constellations

“…The very word 'experience' is, however, a nontrivial term (Fox 2008) and its application in experiential education may involve various connotations. For instance, Roberts (2008) distinguishes between three viewpoints: experience as interaction, drawing on Dewey's pragmatism; embodied experience, referring to phenomenology and Romanticism, and experience as praxis, taken from critical theory.…”