From Experience to Neo-Experientialism: Variations on a Theme
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ABSTRACT This article considers several distinctive variations of experience within the intersecting fields of outdoor, environmental, and experiential education. I argue that, to date, too little work has been undertaken interrogating the usage of the term “experiential” theoretically and philosophically. This has resulted in a relatively homogeneous and simple construction of the role of experience in education that misrepresents both the complexity and the level of “contestation” in the discourse. In an attempt to begin to address this problem, I propose three variations of experiential education: experience as interaction, embodied experience, and experience as praxis. Each of the three variations is discussed in terms of their defining characteristics and the promises and challenges of their various constructions of experience. I argue further that each of these variations are threatened by the rise of a fourth variation, what I will term neo-experiential education, which neatly combines market logics of efficiency, standardization, and control. I conclude with a call for more theoretical and philosophical work in this area.
KEYWORDS: Outdoor Education, Environmental Education, Experiential Education, Neo-experiential Education, Theory, Philosophy
Jay Roberts, is a Assistant Professor of Education and Director of the Wilderness Program at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Email: roberja@earlham.edu
INTRODUCTION
Beginning around the middle of the twentieth century, a particular progressive curriculum tradition developed within the United States centered around two common elements: the centrality of “experience” to the educational process and the importance of the outdoors as a meaningful context for the orchestration of such experiences. Variously described as “outdoor” education, “experiential” education, and even sometimes “environmental” education (Adkins & Simmons 2002), the field has developed and matured to the point where a variety of curricular models, theories, and practices have emerged. Place-Based Education, Adventure Education, and Expeditionary Learning are some of the more visible and prominent models.. I have chosen here to capture all of this under the label “experiential education” and “experiential theory” to represent the various ways in which experience is evoked within this particular progressive curricular tradition. While such an approach has its dangers in glossing over key distinctions and divergences, it also presents opportunities in terms of revealing intersections and commonalities while also paying attention to differences. Following from Martin Jay’s approach to the treatment of the term “experience” in Songs of Experience, I will not endeavor to define or uncover the “real” experiential theory or practice. As Jay (2005) states:
Rather than force a totalized account, which assumes a unified point of departure, an etymological arche to be recaptured, or a normative telos to be achieved, it will be far more productive to follow disparate threads where they may lead us. Without the burden of seeking to rescue or legislate a single acceptation of the word, we will be free to uncover and explore its multiple and often contradictory meanings and begin to make sense of how and why they function as they often have to produce such a powerful effect. (p. 3)
Thus, rather than claiming some clear and ultimately “correct” organizing of the theoretical landscape, I hope to celebrate the variations on the theme, following the threads while still providing a sense of coherence and cohesion.
Variously represented in mainstream curricula by descriptors such as “hands-on learning,” “learning by doing,” “active learning,” and learning “outside the four-walled classroom,” experiential education is, in many respects, emblematic of both the promises and problems of progressive schooling approaches in a context heavily influenced by current trends toward standardization, efficiency, and control. Yet, to date, there has been relatively little theorizing on the central concept of “experience” in the field. This taken-for-granted characteristic of experience in education has belied the ways in which different philosophical traditions have employed the concept. As a result, current scholarship seems to utilize a “common sense” notion of experience that ignores important distinctions, contradictions, and conflicts embedded in the term. Critical analyses of the field have slowly begun to surface (Wichman, 1995; Loeffler & Warren, 2000; Sakofs, 2001; Brookes, 2003; Warren, 2004; Roberts, 2005) that point to the hidden contestation in the idea of experience in education. Much more work needs to be done in this area to help “open up” notions of experience and the varieties of ways it is employed.
I will begin by identifying what I consider to be three distinct “variations” of experience (to borrow a framework from Martin Jay’s seminal work, Songs of Experience) in the development of experiential theory: “interactive experience” drawn from pragmatist philosophy, “embodied experience” drawn from Romanticism and phenomenology, and “experience as praxis” drawn from critical theory. Each of these philosophical positions constructs a notion of experience that is distinctive and, at times, quite contradictory. In addition, each of these three variations bring with them particular theoretical emphases and practical consequences. While it is not my intention here to advocate for any one approach per se, it is worth noting both the strengths and vulnerabilities of each. After I look at each of these variations separately, I will then move on to a discussion of how all of these philosophical traditions and constructions of experience have been marginalized, within mainstream education, by a fourth variation, what I propose to call neo-experiential education. Before I begin, it is important to note that a more complete discussion of notions of experience in education would include a fourth variation, what I would call “post-experience” drawn from post-structural philosophy. This variation strongly critiques notions of “authentic” individual lived experience and examines the central role of language in mediating such experiences (Scott, 1991; Ruitenberg, 2005). I have chosen not to include it here due both to space limitations and the fact that the scholarship in experiential education has yet to connect to this notion of experience in a substantive way (though there is much to be learned from more work in this area).
Pragmatism and Experience: “Interactive Experience”
The first variation of experience in education is exemplified in the work of John Dewey and others such as Mead, Addams, James and Kilpatrick in the early pragmatist and progressive period as well as educational theorists in the modern context (e.g., Beane, 1997; Greene, 1988; Meier, 1995). ,Undoubtedly, though, Dewey is the seminal figure within this variation. Schubert (2002) in his classic work, Curriculum Books, describes three historic schools of curriculum thought: intellectual traditionalists, social behaviorists, and experientalists and goes on to claim that “although virtually all writers will be succeeded by other voices in their respective educational positions, Dewey is never superceded as spokesperson. Even today, he retains his posture as the single most significant voice of the experientialist perspective”(p. 13). While it should be acknowledged that such a construction is decidedly North American in orientation, it is clear that Dewey’s work has been given the most attention in experiential curriculum theorizing and for that reason I will use him as an exemplar here. It is beyond the scope of this analysis to either lay out the entirety of Dewey’s richly textured construction of experience or to detail all the variations within the variation. Rather, I will discuss what I believe to be several defining characteristics of the pragmatist variation (what I will label as “interactive experience”) and follow that with an examination of limitations of this construction of experience in education.
For Dewey, experience was at the very center of his epistemology. While later in his life he almost gave up on the term due to the ways it was misinterpreted and considered replacing it with arguably a more awkward term “culture,” the notion of experience allowed him to bring together a philosophical framework from which to build his pragmatic social agenda (particularly as it related to schooling). Knowledge through the concept of experience became both active and relational for Dewey. Gone were the reliance on foundations, universal truths, and a quest for certainty (Dewey 1929). In its place was a deeply contextual, action-oriented epistemology that allowed for the contingencies of a changing world. Dewey also believed that schooling was the cultural institution where experience could be perhaps most powerfully put into practice.
Thus we reach a technical definition of education: it is that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and which increases the ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. The increment of meaning corresponds to the increased perceptions of the connections and continuities of the activities in which we are engaged. (Dewey, 1938, pp. 76-77)
It is here that I see the key elements of an educative experience for Dewey. It must achieve a continuity in which the past and present interact to create the future and the meaning of such interaction is directly correlative to the connections we make in the process. This “continuous reconstruction of experience” (Dewey, 1938, p. 80) defines what is essential in the educational endeavor and, as a pedagogical approach, is separate (and superior) to alternate notions of education, as preparation for future living, as recapitulation of the past, or as an unfolding toward definitive goals. These necessary conditions (continuity and interaction) set the stage for one of Dewey’s central ethical claims: that learning does not happen merely for learning’s sake. Rather, learning takes place with the understanding that knowledge has moral consequences that invite (and often demand) social action. It is this final characteristic that firmly connects Dewey’s notion of experience to most, if not all, pragmatist thinkers. Beyond Dewey, feminist pragmatists have taken up the notion of the transactional relationship between the subject and the object to argue for a critical approach to how certain types of knowledge become privileged while marginalizing others (Hill-Collins, 2000). Neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty (1989) have pushed the boundaries of anti-foundational epistemology to the point of breaking away from truth claims of any sort, arguing instead for notions of irony, contingency, and solidarity, while others such as Jurgen Habermas (2003) have tried to return pragmatism to its more rational and reason-based roots.
Pragmatist notions of interactive experience are signaled in many areas of the experiential education field. The emphasis on the social dimension of learning is emphasized in many experiential curriculum projects. As Dewey said, “shared experience… is the greatest of human goods” (cited in Jay, 2005, p. 295). Educational models and approaches such as expeditionary learning, adventure education, and challenge education all place a great deal of importance on the value of shared, interactive experience over individual-centered learning. In addition, the sense that experience forms the genesis of social action informs much current practice in service learning, for example. The central importance of the act of reflection as a necessary condition of educative experience is also infused in much, if not all, work that is considered “experiential” today. Finally, the notion of democracy as a way of life developed by Dewey and continued by modern day pragmatists can be seen in how experience becomes tied to issues of citizenship and community.
While there is much to celebrate and acknowledge in terms of both Dewey’s legacy and the modern notions of interactive experience in pragmatism, it also comes with significant limitations. Some have critiqued the variation for being overly steeped in Enlightenment ideals of progress and a fetish for the scientific method. For example, Bowers (2003) sees such a legacy as offering no foundation for an ethical construction of experience in environmental education. Others see no evidence in Dewey of an awareness of marginalized groups in the democratic process (Noddings, 1995). Indeed, as West (1999) notes, African-Americans are virtually invisible in Dewey’s writing and leads one to ponder whose interests did Dewey see democracy serving in the end. Finally, Dewey and others who argue for a notion of democratic schooling too easily brush aside notions of power. Diggins (1994), for example, is concerned that Deweyian democracy seems to assume a kind of homogeneous community that simply does not exist in a world of structural and institutional inequalities. In the end, according to the critiques, the pragmatist construction of interactive experience is embedded in notions of social harmony, not conflict. Thus, the process of schooling (in both the formal and informal curriculum) is viewed as adaptive and hopeful (and thus, progressive). Indeed, it will not be until the critical theory variation (experience as praxis) that we will see experience in education constructed as a site of struggle where questions of identity, power, and culture cannot be separated. These critiques are significant and remain a struggle for those who theorize within the pragmatist variation to reconcile as they attempt to argue that the underlying philosophy sets the stage for many of the modern progressive projects of today (Hewitt, 2002; Kadlec, 2007).
Phenomenology and Experience: “Embodied Experience”
The second variation of experience, what I refer to as “embodied experience” draws from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology as well as the influence of the Romanticism. It also has similarities to what some have described as the “humanist” perspective in experiential education. The most crucial shift from this variation to the one just discussed comes from where the “experience” itself is located. For pragmatists, lived experience was always seen as relational and transactional. That is, there is no point in discussing or attempting to retrieve or identify the “authentic” or transcendent individual experience as it is not located solely within the consciousness of the experiencing subject but rather in the interplay between the subject and her surroundings. As Dewey noted:
The pragmatist starts from a much more commonplace notion of experience, that of the plain man who never dreams that to experience a thing is first to destroy the thing and then to substitute a mental state for it. More particularly, the pragmatist has insisted that experience is a matter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, of coordinations and activities, rather than states of consciousness. (Cited in Kadlec, 2007, p. 21)
By contrast, within the traditions of Romanticism and the philosophy of phenomenology there exists a notion of experience that is highly individualized and transcendent. Hay (2002) notes, for example, that embedded within romantic notions of nature and the outdoors is the “triumph of extreme individualism”(p. 7). Discussing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalist perspective, Hay goes on to describe Emerson’s sense of experience in Nature: “His romanticism thus pro-claims a supreme and sovereign individual- one that is almost god-like- and the function of nature is to serve as the medium for the individual’s attainment of a state of high exaltation of the spirit...”(p. 8). This notion that an individual ought to have “direct experience” that is transformative is thus set apart as a qualitatively better way of knowing and acting.
Added to Romantic notions of experience as direct and transcendent are the notions from phenomenology of how experience is “embodied.” By moving away from the objectivity and universal explanations of the sciences toward individual meaning making and the “things themselves,” phenomenologists wish to explore “the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience” (Abram, 1997, p. 35). This places a premium on the subjectivity of our selves and our senses. Experience becomes “lived” through our individual bodies. The fact that each of us has a sensing body allows for a sense of intersubjectivity, a matrix of experiencing bodies that allows for mutual understanding and a “single, phenomenal world or ‘reality’”(Abram, 1997, p. 39). Experience thus becomes “real” because we sense it and live through it, first as individuals, but then also corporately, as social beings.
Finally, this variation of experience places more emphasis and distance between the “experience” and that which happens before and after. Due to the heightened awareness of sensorial experience, lived experience becomes something “special” as opposed to something “everyday.” Drawing from the Romantic tradition, truly transformative experience is that which takes us away from the everyday and the typical. Thus the most powerful lived experiences happen somewhere else, not “here.” It requires a “strange lands experience” (Kraft, 1992). While Dewey emphasized the false dichotomy between the “real world” and the school world, the embodied experience variation seems to capitalize on the difference in order to signal the significance and novelty of the experience outside the four-walled classroom.
The signs of this variation within experiential education are numerous. Emphasis on solos on wilderness courses, the importance of felt sensations and heightened awareness such as perceived risk, and the belief that a “true” environmental ethic comes from “direct contact and experience” with the natural world all derive from this particular variation of experience. Indeed, when we ask in reflection sessions how an experience “felt” we are signaling to this particular philosophical tradition whether we realize it or not. Outdoor camps and programs lift up the sublime or special character of the “wilderness” experience that is separated, both physically and symbolically from the “civilized” and the everyday. Finally, the “experiential learning cycle” popularized from Kolb (1984) seems oriented to a more individual notion of experience.
Several areas of concern emerge within this variation. Following from the critique of Romanticism in the environmental field (Hay, 2002), “direct experience” in this variation is seen not only as possible but preferable as a transcendent expression of being fully human. But is experience quite so raw and unmediated? Do the mountains really “speak for themselves”? (Neill, 2002). Following from this, the romantic and phenomenological emphasis on individual agency within this variation can gloss over the social construction of experience, and as a result, fail to incorporate issues of power, particularly around issues of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual orientation). For example, the term “challenge by choice” is employed with some regularity in experiential programming. Yet, with the post-modern turn, the idea of autonomous, rational action and “choice” is strongly critiqued. From this perspective, since identities themselves are socially constructed, choices exist within contexts, what Bourdieu (1993) described as “habitus” and “field”. As such, any discussion of “choice” must include within it the ways in which social identities, and as a result, dynamics of power influence so-called “individual” choices. Claude Steele’s (1997) work on identity threat and its impact on achievement is an excellent demonstration of the dynamics of social identity formation and its impact on so-called “individual autonomy.”
Finally, another concern with this variation emerges with the sense that experience must be “exotic” in order to be fully valued. Abram (1997) writes eloquently of the power of somatic experience in nature in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, but the vignettes he offers always seem removed from his everyday experiences. They are not local, or everyday but rather rely on a journey (either physical or metaphoric) to experience transformation. Hess (2007) argues for an environmental ethic that privileges “everyday nature” over more romantic and dichotomized notions of wilderness/civilization, or even outdoor/indoor in relation to experience. Somehow, the lived experiences of this variation are “special” experiences. And yet, what happens upon re-entry? Does the very construction of experience as “Other” preclude its transference back to the “real world”?
Critical Theory and Experience: “Experience as Praxis”
A third variation of experience emerges through the philosophic tradition of critical theory. Perhaps most clearly illustrated in education with the work of Paulo Freire (1970, 1987) this variation addresses some of the limitations of both the previous variations while, of course, providing its own set of limitations . I use the term “experience as praxis” to signal the ways in which experience in this variation is embedded within the dynamics of power and social change. Rather than viewing experience as a form of associated living and interaction (pragmatist), or as individual meaning making and transformation (embodied experience), the experience as praxis variation views experience in a much more political sense, either as a tool for reproducing inequalities, or as a means for counter-hegemonic emancipation (Reynolds, 1999).
Experience becomes “critical” here in the sense that experience is viewed much more skeptically than in either of the previous two variations. As Stephen White claimed, to be “critical” means to “1) cultivate a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ and 2) view ‘social structures of inequality’ as manifestations of power relations” (Cited in Kadlec, 2007, p. 14). Thus, the democratic deliberation and experiential interaction of the pragmatist tradition or the embodied individual experience of the phenomenological tradition both remain vulnerable to the ways in which power operates in society. To critical theorists, each of these constructions view experience as essentially “innocent” and uncorrupted by the structural inequality evident in social relations. Such structural inequality has the ability to produce “false consciousness” both within the oppressed and the oppressor. As a result, we cannot rely on the transformative and ameliorative power of experience to emancipate us from inequality. Indeed, experience itself might be implicated in maintaining “false” consciousness. As bell hooks (1994) details in her chapter “Essentialism and Experience” in Teaching to Transgress: “…the very discursive practices that allow for the assertion of ‘the authority of experience’ have already been determined by a politics of race, sex, and class domination”( p. 81).
Thus, to Freire and others in this variation, the central aim of education is not a homogeneous form of associated living and social harmony as pragmatists sometimes argue, or a more individual and/or transcendent self-actualization as a Romantic and phenomenological position would emphasize. Rather, the purpose of schooling is a kind of critical consciousness that attempts to reveal structural and systemic inequality while also providing a sense of urgency to act locally on these injustices. Schooling (like experience) within this variation is not seen as a neutral process. Drawing from the theoretical work in critical and feminist pedagogy as well as neo-Marxism, education and the process of schooling both function to legitimate systems of domination and reproduce current structural inequalities (Apple, 2001; Bourdieu, 1993; Hill-Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994). Thus, any educational process (including “experiential” ones) are immediately viewed with suspicion and a critical eye to examine the ways in which experience can be employed for hegemonic purposes. To ignore this larger project leaves the educational process vulnerable to oppressive social forces (e.g., capitalism, institutionalized racism) that can “colonize” experience and deflate its potential emancipatory functions.
To critical theorists, without a conscious effort experience-based education is just as likely (and perhaps in some ways more likely) to reproduce and legitimate systems of domination than any other curricular approach. For example, a colleague recently told me of a mandatory service learning experience at a local university. Members of a sorority took a trip down to an urban re-development zone in a major metropolitan city in an effort to help re-vitalize a “blighted” neighborhood. While at the job site, two members of the class posed for a photo and encouraged a third to “take a picture of us, this is so ghetto!” Clearly, these students were “meaning-making,” but is it the kind we are striving for in curriculum and schooling practice?
Does this particular variation play out in experiential curricula? It would be fair to say that it certainly is not the most prevalent variation of experience employed in the field today. It can be argued that to this point, the track record of experiential education curriculum projects have been quite poor in relation to issues of race, gender, class, and other social justice issues (Loeffler & Warren, 2000; Warren, 2002). While there may be some exceptions, in the United States the fields of environmental education, experiential education, and outdoor education in particular are pre-dominantly white, male, and middle class in membership and orientation. Indeed, the prevalence of a term such as “hoods in the woods” is indicative of the unconscious racialized nature of certain experiential curriculum projects. To compound the issue, within both the interactive experience and embodied experience variations, historically marginalized groups have predominantly been the receivers of curriculum and have not been involved in the active construction of curriculum. Yet, rather than simply dismissing the use of experiential education as inherently “bad,” experience as praxis works with the racialized, gendered, and class-based nature of “experience” in order to move toward a more liberatory pedagogy. In this way, it politicizes experience. It first deconstructs its assumed neutrality and then seeks to employ it toward acts of resistance and liberation. Whether it’s the intersection between experience and class, gender, race, sexual orientation, or various combinations of these identities, the experience as praxis variation reminds educators that we must wrestle with how various constructions of experience are formed, contested, amplified, and/or marginalized through both the formal and informal curriculum. For example, critical theorists might ask how we could use experience (through racial autobiographies, for example) to talk about white privilege. Or, how service-learning experiences incorporate critical reflections on privilege and power (Ivan Illich’s classic and provocative essay, “To Hell With Good Intentions,” is an example of this form of critiquing “innocent” notions of service). Or, how environmental and outdoor education curricula can move beyond what David Sobel once described as “cutesy lessons on owls” to address deeper issues of social justice and sustainability.
Despite many positive attributes, the construction of experience in the “experience as praxis” variation has several unresolved problems. In attempting to question the innocence and neutrality of experience, critical theorists often resort to grand narratives of oppression and power that de-value the power of individual agency. This sometimes makes it difficult to translate theory to practice. Indeed, experience as praxis, done poorly can be more damaging than maintaining more “traditional” curriculum orientations (Delpit, 1995). Freire (1987) makes this point when he refers to his image of an experiential educator, what he calls a dialogical teacher, in Pedagogy of Transformation, “…dialogical experience which is not based in seriousness, in competency, is much worse than a banking experience where the teacher merely transfers knowledge (p. 80, emphasis in text). In addition, the critical orientation to experience and education espoused by the proponents of this variation seem to overlook the significance of the obstacles to its implementation. As Freire (1987) again wrote, “[i]t would be tremendously naïve to ask the ruling class in power to put into practice a kind of education which can work against it”(p. 36). If experiential education is currently marginalized by the dominant modes of educational practice in schools today as most acknowledge that it is, what possible worth would there be in emphasizing its counter-hegemonic power? Those arguing from the pragmatic and phenomenological philosophical variations might argue that this emphasis on conflict as opposed to harmony makes it difficult to see “hope” and the possibility of progress in schools and in larger democratic processes.
Neo-liberalism and Experience: “Neo-Experientialism”
Finally, I believe a fourth variation exists that uses a notion of experience in the educational process, what I propose to call neo-experiential education. As I have argued elsewhere (Roberts, 2005), drawing from Ritzer (1996) and Giroux (1999), the defining characteristics of this variation are its emphasis on efficiency, individual performance, and consumerism. This is similar to what Apple (2001) described as the new managerialism that is rapidly restructuring schools. To Apple, this restructuring involves the encroachment of the private on the public sphere and the simultaneous importing of business models and discourse to public domains and institutions such as education. “It is an ideal project, merging the language of empowerment, rational choice, [and] efficient organization” (Apple, 2001, p. 30). In this variation, experience becomes something technical and instrumental. It is tightly bounded (in both time and space), rationally constructed, and efficiently controlled. “Normal” classroom or school activity stops and experiential activity then begins for a bounded and specific timeframe. Thus, experience becomes “neo-experiential” as it fits seamlessly with the current neo-liberal ideology dominating school structure and organization in the U.S. today. In utilizing the term “neo-liberal” I am drawing from the critical discourse within social theory and education which examines the ways in which the free-market, competition, and the individual consumer become “logics” that organize problem identification and solution in a whole host of public spaces (Apple 2003). In this view, the “means” of experience become secondary to the dominating “ends” of economy, efficiency, and control.
I believe this logic and its manifestation through the neo-experiential variation represents a growing trend in experiential education. The evidence of this can be seen in the predominance of “one-off” experiential programming whether that be half-day ropes courses or environmental education center field trips designed to fulfill curriculum content standards. Further evidence includes the use of mechanical belay devices that no longer require operation by a human being (and thus can move people more efficiently through an activity), and the “edutainment” of climbing walls on cruise ships, and zip-lines in amusement parks. Dan Garvey, the current President of Prescott College, in a speech entitled “The Future of Adventure Education” given at the 2002 Rocky Mountain Region Conference of the Association of Experiential Education discussed four areas that he believed are radically changing within the field of experiential education. In one area, “Learning What We Teach,” Garvey argues that we are experiencing a problem of “over processing” in modern applications of experiential theory. So many young people have now attended a number of experiential learning programs that they have become programmed in what to expect and how to respond to placate the teachers. The following portion of the speech is so revealing, it is worth quoting at length:
We may have to change the message we are delivering to our younger participants. I think we’ve got a generation of kids that has been overly processed. Many young people have attended a number of experiential activities, and they’ve learned that some instructors will accept any reasonable response when the student is asked to reflect upon the experience. They know what we want them to say. I joke that many of our current participants know there are two things they can say when they reflect on the power of an experience, no matter what the experience is. First, they say that they have learned trust. If they don’t get the appropriate approval, they add the word communication. We have a generation of kids who will give us exactly what they think we want to hear. (Garvey, 2002, p. 29 emphasis added)
The shift to a neo-experiential variation of experience, I believe, is the primary cause of this vacuous reflection. In all of these manifestations, the single greatest issue with neo-experiential curricula is the fact that nowhere does the actual organization and purpose of schooling itself get questioned. A “little bit of teambuilding” is done without examining the real role of community in education. Students experience an environmental field trip without a more fundamental questioning of how current schooling practice normalizes certain attitudes and behaviors toward the natural world. Service learning projects are designed as isolated and disconnected “events” marginally integrated to superficial and uncritical curricula in the classroom.
More fundamentally, the kind of citizen we produce under the neo-experiential variation is insufficient both specifically for the objectives of the field of experiential education and for the larger goals of a democratic society. Indeed, our very sense of unity and solidarity becomes based upon consumption rather than creation and participation (Molnar & Reaves, 2002). For Dewey (1934),
…it may be a loss rather than a gain to escape from the control of another person only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice, that is, at the mercy of impulses into whose formation intelligent judgment has not entered. A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most the illusion of freedom. Actually he is directed by forces over which he has no command. (pp. 64-65)
Thus, in a general sense, the neo-experiential variation becomes part of a larger problem, rather than a potentially powerful and transformational curriculum response. Pre-packaged and sweet (like candy), efficiently and predictably managed (like McDonald’s), and slickly produced (like Disney), it can give us only the illusion of freedom. The shifts in experiential education theory and practice are indicative of larger shifts within educational progressivism as a whole. If experiential education practicioners are to address real concerns of inequality, marginalization, hegemony, and injustice, we must learn a new civichood, one that is based upon the ideals of participation, deliberation, community, and responsibility.
Conclusion
My aim here was not necessarily to lay out a neat and clean evolutionary perspective of theorizing experience in experiential education. Indeed, as I have tried to emphasize, while there is some historicity to each of these variations, all three types remain active and alive today (this is why I refer to them as variations here as opposed to stages or traditions). Rather, what I hoped to do was open up theorizing on experience. Clearly, we must reject monolithic and “taken-for-granted” constructions of experience and experiential theory and see things as much more complex and contested than they have been heretofore. I have laid out three variations: experience as interaction, embodied experience, and experience as praxis in an attempt to reveal the ways in which “experience” is both a constructed and contested notion associated with larger discourses in education, philosophy, and social theory. I have also argued that there is mounting evidence that each of these variations is currently marginalized under the rise of a new variation (neo-experientialism) that poses a threat to democratic aims within the intersections between experience and education. While I have my own biases, I strongly believe that each of these variations do not represent the “true” or final answer to what experiential education is. Each tackle particular curricular problems and agendas. This isn’t to say that everything is relative or that there is no point in making distinctions. Each has significant limitations and discerning best courses of action require careful consideration of the purposes of schooling and education. This is, at heart, a philosophical query and one that has not been sufficiently explored in the field. As Gee (2005) notes:
So, in the end, it’s really about goals we as a society are interested in and the track record of various theories of various domains in meeting them. So who decides what goals we ought to be interested and invested in? That is, by and large, and rightly so, a social and ‘‘political’’ question that ought to be debated thoroughly in the public sphere… At the same time, educators and policy makers on all sides of the political fence have spent too little time engaged in rigorous inspection of the theories that give research results and the research that produced them meaning in the first place. (p. 18)
There are some distinct advantages to this type of work. It will likely yield a more inclusive and diverse intellectual ancestry as the connections between experiential traditions move beyond the current “dead white male” genealogy. It will also open up space for alliances across disparate strands of progressivism. This sort of coalition building is considered crucial for progressive educational reform (Apple, 2001; Carlson 2002). More theoretical and philosophical work can also strengthen (and trouble) representations of experience in connecting curricular traditions such as environmental education, service learning, outdoor education, place-based learning, and brain-based learning to name just a few. Finally, it can create the opportunity to discuss more forcefully the role experiential education has within the current school reform zeitgeist and the role it could and should play in the future. We should not shy away from questions, and particularly not critical ones. Nietzsche once said that a great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized. For those who believe in the transformative power of experience in education, there is important work yet to be done.
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