Constructivism

The focus of the first chapter is on the background and dimensions of experiential
learning, both as a philosophy and as a practice in adult education. Chapter 2 focuses on
the dominant understanding of experiential learning in adult education, called in this
monograph a reflection orientation, or “constructivism.” The corresponding educational
approach is a humanistic, learner-centered practice that assists adult learners in reflect-
ing on their experience in order to construct new knowledge.

This chapter presents the fundamental bases of this constructivist conception of experi-
ential learning and various prominent models that have influenced its practice in past
decades. Four roles for educators are discussed, with various practical suggestions for
activities and approaches generated by these roles. This information is presented for
readers’ cautious use, remembering the challenges to ideas for practice mentioned in the
first chapter.

Chapter 2 ends with a discussion of critiques that challenge the constructivist orienta-
tion to experiential learning in adult education. Of particular concern here is the poten-
tial for reductionism and overdetermination of complex human experience when trans-
lated into “objects” of knowledge. Even more serious, the potential for the educator to
colonize and regulate private human experience is great.

Learning through Reflection on Experience: The Theory

The most prevalent understanding of experiential learning is based on reflection. This
casts the individual as a central actor in a drama of personal meaning making. The
learner supposedly 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. Theo-
retical models in this perspective explain ways people attend to and perceive experience,
interpret and categorize it as concepts, then continue adapting or transforming their
conceptual structures. Individuals are understood to construct their own knowledge,
through interaction with their environments. This school of thought is commonly known
as “constructivism.” Critics of this perspective and alternative explanations of experien-
tial learning take exception to the way the “individual” is considered fundamentally
separate from his or her environment and relations with others. They argue that reflec-
tive processes cannot be separated from some sort of event called “experience.”

Constructivism has a long and distinguished history, although many different perspec-
tives coexist within it1 (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

1
Phillips (1995) identifies six distinct views of constructivism varying according to the emphasis accorded
either to individual psychology or public disciplines in constructing knowledge, the extent to which knowl-
edge is viewed as made rather than discovered, and the emphasis put on the individual knower as active 9
agent rather than spectator in the construction of knowledge.
 Constructivism

central premise: a learner is believed to construct, through reflection, a personal under-

standing of relevant structures of meaning derived from his or her action in the world.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1966), after observing children learn through play,
described this construction process as oscillating between assimilation and accommodation.
He suggested that learning happens when individuals interact with objects in their
environment (which can be material things, names for things, concepts, relationships,
etc.) to “build” and refine constructs of knowledge in their heads. Individuals sometimes
assimilate new objects of knowledge by incorporating them into their personal internal
network of knowledge constructs. Other times individuals accommodate, by altering
these constructs when confronting new experiences that may contradict their past
knowledge. The important issue is that each individual is active in the learning process,
not passively absorbing whatever happens, and each person may construct very different
understandings after interacting with the same objects in the same environment. This
notion challenged ideas of knowledge as a body of information created by scientists and
experts, existing outside of individuals, and “learning” as a process of ingesting these
others’ knowledge.

Lev Vygotsky (1978) emphasized the role of individuals’ interactions with their sociocul-
tural environment in this process of constructing knowledge. He developed a theory of
what he called the “zone of proximal development,” a time-bounded site of community
activity surrounding a person that can limit or enhance cognitive development. The
person learns by engaging fully in this zone, particularly through dialogue. Vygotsky’s
ideas have been influential in subsequent situative theories of learning, described in
chapter 3. However, Vygotsky, like other constructivists, believed that the outcome and
objective of learning was the development of individual consciousness, experiencing self-
mastery, through a process of reflection (what Vygotsky called “inner speech”) as well as
interaction with people and objects in the external world.

David Kolb: A Constructivist Model of Experiential Learning

In the literature of adult learning this constructivist view is embedded in the writings of
David Boud and associates (Boud and Miller 1996; Boud, Keogh, and Walker 1996),
David Kolb (1984), Dorothy MacKeracher (1996), Jack Mezirow (1990), Donald Schön
(1983), Jack Mezirow (1991, 1994), and many others. David Kolb (1984) developed a
theory that attempted to clarify exactly how different people learn by integrating their
concrete emotional experiences with reflection. For him, reflection is all about cognitive
processes of conceptual analysis and eventual understanding. Kolb believed that experi-
ential learning is a tension- and conflict-filled process that occurs in a cycle. New knowl-
edge and skills are achieved through confrontation among concrete experience, reflective
observation, abstract conceptualization, and subsequent active experimentation.

First, the learner lives through some kind of concrete experience. This could be a simulated
experience developed especially for a learning situation, such as a case study or role play,
or an exercise involving the learner in actually experimenting with the skills to be
learned. Or this could be a real life or workplace experience that the learner has encoun-
10
 Constructivism

tered. Second, the learner takes some time for reflective observation. The learner asks of
the experience: What did I observe? What was I aware of? What does this experience
mean to me? How might this experience have been different?

Third, the learner uses insights gained through the reflective observation to create an
abstract conceptualization. This is where the learner asks: What principle seems to be
operating here? What general ‘rule-of-thumb’ have I learned here? What new under-
standing does this experience reveal about myself, or people, or how things work in
particular situations? Finally, the learner applies the new learning through active experi-
mentation. The learner asks, What will I do next time? How will I adopt this principle for
other contexts? The new “principle” is tested out in similar situations, then in different
situations, and the learner continues to revise and reshape the learning based on what
happens through experimenting with it. The learner may not actually test out the new
skill, but may simply think through its application.

Kolb and other theorists maintain that, although all adults are exposed to a multitude of
life experiences, not everyone learns from these experiences. Experience alone does not
teach. Learning happens only when there is reflective thought and internal processing of
that experience by the learner, in a way that actively makes sense of the experience, links
the experience to previous learning, and transforms the learner’s previous understandings
in some way.

David Boud: Considering Context in Experiential Learning

Boud and Walker (1991) introduced a model of experiential learning similar to Kolb’s,
with two main enrichments: they acknowledged that specific contexts shape an
individual’s experience in different ways, and they were interested in how differences
among individuals—particularly their past histories, learning strategies, and emotion—
influence the sort of learning developed through reflection on experience. For Boud and
Walker, the extent of our learning corresponds to the way we prepare for an experience;
the noticing and intervening of our participation in the actual experience; and the processes
we use to recall and reevaluate an experience, attend to feelings the experience provoked,
and reevaluate the experience. In preparation we examine the opportunities of the milieu
and form particular intentions. We also bring certain skills and strategies of observation
and meaning making as well as personal histories of past experience.

During a particular experience we each notice and intervene with different elements of
the milieu depending on our individual predispositions. We balance our observations with
awareness of our own reactions; we choose ways to participate in the activity, name the
learning process, respond to different events, and deal with the unexpected—all by
reflecting in action. Afterwards we recall and reevaluate our experiences through four
processes. Association is relating new information to familiar concepts. Integration is
seeking connection between the new and the old. Appropriation is personalizing the new
knowledge to make it our own, and validation is determining the authenticity of our new
ideas and the feelings of the experience. Notice that this model dwells especially on
feelings, claiming that “negative” feelings, if not attended to, can block potential learning
11
 Constructivism

in the experience. Boud and his associates also show the importance of the preparation or
readiness the learner brings to the experience and the significance of the particular
context in which the learner is acting.

Donald Schön: Reflection-in-Action

Schön, whose books include The Reflective Practitioner (1983) and Educating the
Reflective Practitioner (1987), has been a significant promoter of constructivism to
understand workplace learning. Schön’s view is that professionals live in a world of
uncertainty, instability, complexity, and value conflict, where they often must deal with
problems for which no existing rules or theories learned through formal training or past
experience can apply. He was most interested in how reflection, and particularly critical
reflection, plays out in the ongoing learning of professionals in their practice. He pro-
posed that practitioners learn by noticing and framing problems of interest to them in
particular ways, then inquiring and experimenting with solutions. When they experience
surprise or discomfort in their everyday activity, this reflective process begins. Their
knowledge is constructed through reflection during and after some experimental action
on the ill-defined and messy problems of practice.

When these adults meet such unique problems or situations containing some element of
surprise, they are prompted to reflect-in-action by improvising an on-the-spot experimen-
tation, thinking up and testing out and refining and retesting various solutions for the
problem. Schön says professionals also often reflect-on-action in some zone of time after a
problem episode, when they examine what they did, how they did it, and what alterna-
tives exist. Other theorists of learning have continued to refine Schön’s ideas of reflective
practice. We have seen how Boud and Walker emphasized readiness and attention to
feelings in reflection. Watkins and Marsick (1992) formulated a theoretical framework of
informal and incidental learning to show how people’s experiential learning is not always
conscious and may simply reproduce the (sometimes dysfunctional or erroneous) beliefs
of their surrounding contexts. Watkins and Marsick stress the importance of Schön’s
notion of problem framing that tests the assumptions of our reflections. Garrick (1998)
also reminds us that experience is constituted by the particular discourses comprising a
situation: these shape the way we perceive “routine” and “nonroutine” problems, which
we approach and reflect upon differently.

Critical reflection, says Schön, is more than simply reflecting-in or reflecting-on action.
When people engage in critical reflection, they question the way they framed the prob-
lem in the first place. Even if no apparent problems exist, the practitioner questions
situations, asking why things are they way they are, why events unfold in the way they
do. This is critical reflection to problematize what otherwise are taken-for-granted situa-
tions. As well, people reflect critically when they problematize their own actions, asking:
Why did I do what I did? What beliefs inform my practice, and how are these beliefs
helping or hindering my work? Schön’s work celebrated the experiential learning of
practitioners in everyday action—what he called the “swampy lowlands” of actual prac-
tice—and attempted to challenge the “high road” of theoretical knowledge, technical
rationality, over which universities hold authority.
12
 Constructivism

Brookfield (1987, 1995) and Mezirow (1990, 1991, 1994) both have made considerable
contributions to constructivist views of adult learning by theorizing how critical reflection
interrupts and reconstructs human beliefs. Brookfield (1995) suggested that when we
reflect on our experience with skeptical questioning and imaginative speculation, we can
refine, deepen, or correct our knowledge constructions. He describes three stages in the
process of reflecting critically: “(1) identifying the assumptions that underlie our thoughts
and actions; (2) scrutinizing the accuracy and validity of these in terms of how they
connect to, or are discrepant with, our experience of reality; and (3) reconstituting these
assumptions to make them more inclusive and integrative” (p. 177).

Jack Mezirow: Reflection on Experience for Transformation

In 1978 Mezirow presented a theory of learning, explained exhaustively in his book

Transformative Learning (1991), in which reflection on experience and particularly
critical reflection are central. Transformative learning has become one of the most influ-
ential ideas in the field of adult learning and development to emerge in the past 20 years.
Mezirow has continued to argue, throughout the exhaustive debates gathering around his
theory,2 that when individuals cognitively reflect on their own fundamental understand-
ings (formed through their biographies of experience), they transform these basic knowl-
edge structures or “meaning perspectives” to become more “inclusive, differentiating,
permeable, critically reflective, and integrative of experience” (Mezirow 1991, p. 14).
This process of perspective transformation is fundamentally based upon a “reflective
assessment of premises … [and] of movement through cognitive structures by identifying
and judging presuppositions …. Reflection is the apperceptive process by which we
change our minds, literally and figuratively” (pp. 5, 9).

Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning is based on a trilevel concept of critical

reflection on experience. Mezirow suggests that when an adult encounters a “disorienting
dilemma,” a problem for which there is no immediately apparent solution suggested by
past experience and knowledge, reflection is often triggered. First, individuals often
reflect on the content of the experience—what happened—which may or may not lead to
learning. If individuals find and test a solution to the problem that produces undesirable
outcomes, they often reflect upon the process they employed—how did it happen. Thus
procedural learning results as learners analyze and learn from faulty choices. But when
the reflection process probes the very premises (deep-seated beliefs and assumptions
guiding action) upon which we have based our problem-solving processes, then critical
reflection results. Others’ views can act as mirrors for our own views, opening a dialectic,
helping us “unfreeze” our “meaning perspectives” (Mezirow 1991) and assumptions. In
this third level of reflection we confront and challenge the taken-for-granted norms—
what’s wrong with how I am seeing what happened and how it happened?—leading to a
dramatic shift or transformation in the learner’s way of viewing the world. Mezirow (1991)
describes this process of transformative learning as the “bringing of one’s assumptions,
premises, criteria, and schemata into consciousness and vigorously critiquing them” (p.
29).
2
For a clear and thorough explanation of both Mezirow’s theory and his many critics, as well as empirical
studies applying the theory of transformative learning to various contexts of adult experience, consult The 13
Theory and Practice of Transformative Learning by Taylor (1998).
 Constructivism

Roles for Adult Educators Suggested by the

Constructivist/Reflective Orientation:
Facilitator, Instigator, Coach, and Assessor
In this constructivist view of experiential learning, in which individuals are presumed to
interpret their worlds actively and create their own knowledge through different pro-
cesses of reflection, adult educators have suggested various ways for themselves to assist
and perhaps enhance learners’ reflective processes. In this section, four main educative
roles are discussed:

• Facilitator—adult educators encourage people to recall, value, talk about, and per-
haps critically analyze their own past experience to construct knowledge from it.
• Instigator—educators create a happening during instruction designed to engage
learners “experientially” and thus encourage construction of knowledge.
• Coach—an educator guides learners to reflect on choices in the “hot action” of
experience, so they will analyze undesirable outcomes and make corrections.
• Assessor—educators represent, judge, and give credit to people’s experiences in terms
of the kind of knowledge they have constructed from these experiences.

Obviously these roles are not distinct and separate in practice, but are often blended.

A model created by Caffarella and Barnett (1994) suggests that, in any one of these roles,
issues of program planning, philosophy, learning activity and assessment are entwined.
Caffarella and Barnett created this model for educators working with experiential learn-
ing based on constructivism. It points to four basic elements deserving consideration by
any educator or educational intervention, regardless of which of the four roles form the
central orientation: understanding learner differences and needs, applying concepts of
reflection on concrete experience, using experiential methods and techniques, and
assessing learning in ways that honor experience.

Characteristics and Needs of Learners

attending to learners’ prior knowledge and experience, their different pro-
cesses, the contexts of their lives, and their affiliation (belonging) needs

Conceptual Foundations of Experiential Learning

constructivist understandings of learning, especially Kolb’s theory of concrete
experience with reflection on that experience and Schön’s theory of reflective
practice

Methods and Techniques for Engaging Learners in Experiential Learning Activities

designing in-class activities, designing field experiences, and creating situations
where learners’ past experiences are discussed and processed

Assessment Processes and Outcomes

such as portfolios and other self-assessment practices that honor individual
14 experiences and personal knowledge constructed from them
 Constructivism

Although these considerations should be integrated into any educator’s intervention, the
four roles described next each illustrate a different emphasis that educators appear to take
when employing experiential learning. These four roles are presented as suggestions for
educators incorporating experiential learning. They share a particular assumption with
the Caffarella and Barnett model—that an educative event involves a classroom, an
educator programming and evaluating people’s progress, activities specifically focused on
learning, and an assumption that people learn by reflecting on experience. It is important
to note that this assumption is not shared by all writers advocating experiential learning.
In chapter 3, suggestions for educators are rather different given very different premises
about what comprises an educative event.

Adult Educator as Facilitator of Experiential Learning

When Knowles (1984) focused attention on the importance of adults’ experience in their
learning and the value of reflecting on that experience as a pedagogical process, adult
educators began to view themselves as facilitators of learning. Their role was not so much
to dispense information and concepts as to encourage people to reflect upon and analyze
their experiences. Educational suggestions grounded in Knowles’ concepts included
directives such as the following:

• Learners’ past experience should be honored and given voice;

• Learners’ past experience should be shared and compared;
• Learners should be assisted in actively seeking links between specific past experience
and their current situations;
• Learners’ past experience should be analyzed and perhaps reconstructed; and
• Learners should be helped to form links between their past experience and their beliefs
about themselves, how things work, what is important, and what things mean.

Experiential learning, as Boud and his associates pointed out, often involves strong
emotions. Therefore, a key responsibility of the facilitator of such learning is creating an
environment of trust, authenticity, integrity, and mutual respect—as well as patience with
each other on the part of all participants, learners as well as facilitator. For many people,
self-disclosure is uncomfortable and inappropriate in group settings. They would prefer
solitude and self-dialogue to critical reflection in conversation. And as Boud also con-
cluded, there may be periods in our lives when we are more predisposed to reflection on
experiential learning. There may be a “readiness” factor at work, a reflective learning
style, or a lifespan issue of particular crises or transitions that prompt our motivation to
reflect critically on who we are and where we’re going. Some theorists have questioned
the assumption that every adult is capable of or even interested in critical reflection.

Brookfield (1995) reminds educators that they need to revisit and analyze their own
“visceral” experiences before asking learners to do so. Similarly, Cranton (1996) suggests
that above all educators should be “adult learners striving to update, develop, expand,
and deepen their professional perspectives both on their subject areas and on their goals
and roles” (p. 228). Thus in this role the educator intends to facilitate, as Taylor (1998)
puts it, “a learning situation that is democratic, open, rational, has access to all available
15
 Constructivism

information, and promotes critical reflection” (p. 49). However, balancing this role with
the educator’s own healthy and critical self-reflexiveness about one’s intents and perspec-
tives is crucial.

Adult Educator as Instigator of Experiential Learning

As discussed earlier, experiential learning can result from eliciting adults’ past experience
and encouraging focused reflection and analysis of it, from coaching someone to reflect
during actual situated experience, or from creating an “experiential happening.” Usually,
the latter approach is related to formal education, an institutional classroom or training
session in which an educator wishes to engage the learners physically and emotionally.
Such created experiences are considered most effective when reflection for learning is
carefully layered into the experience, usually through dialogue debriefing the experience.

Educators can introduce “experiential” learning into a formal learning situation in a

variety of ways. Three are described here: (1) experiential classroom exercises; (2) adven-
ture activities; and (3) problem-based or project-based learning.

Adult educators have experimented with a variety of creative ways to involve learners
physically, emotionally, and relationally as well as cognitively in learning activities. Simu-
lations are one example. (For example, give everyone in the group a particular role with
its own agenda, history, and resources, then assign a task requiring each participant to
interact with others to achieve his or her goal.) Instructional games and icebreakers are
widely available, e.g., Games Trainers Play by Newstrom and Scannell (1980) or
Renner’s (1994) The Art of Teaching Adults. Role play is often used to practice interper-
sonal skills, for example, having pairs act out situations to explore possible approaches to
handling them or improvise a scenario to see what might happen if particular actions are
taken. Popular theatre technique has been adapted in adult education as an instrument
of personal empowerment and cultural intervention (Prentki and Selman 2000). Short
physical team problem-solving activities have been borrowed from adventure education.
The point of such “experiential” classroom exercises is to stimulate participants’ creativ-
ity and holistic engagement by leading them to act in unfamiliar situations.

Adventure activities are becoming increasingly popular in workplace training, particularly

leadership education and team development (Richards 1992). The facilitator designs a
sequence of concrete problem-solving challenges, usually set outdoors, and groups of
learners work together to solve them. These might be specific challenges of risk taking
such as scaling a mountain or challenges of survival in the wilderness. According to
Richards, proponents of adventure activities believe the challenge and unusual setting
engage and motivate learners; supposedly increase risk taking, communication, produc-
tivity; and help increase insights into barriers to their team processes. However, purveyors
of organizational training and development using adventure education report the diffi-
culty of assessing in any reliable way the learning outcomes of such programs and their
impact on individual and organizational effectiveness. Educators may be more concerned
about the personal and political consequences of a collaborative “managed” adventure on
workers and their organizational relationships in the return phase.
16
 Constructivism

Problem-based learning (PBL) typically organizes curriculum around a series of cases,

each presenting a dilemma of practice (Albanese and Mitchell 1993; Norman and
Schmidt 1992; Walton and Matthews 1989). These cases are usually prepared in detail,
researched and based on an actual situation. Learners read, “diagnose,” and discuss the
case, exploring strategies for analyzing the issues and taking action on the problems.
Some, such as Fenwick and Parsons (1998), have criticized this approach for predeter-
mining problems and removing them from the multiple pressures and political dynamics
of actual situations—in other words, for defeating the point of learning amidst the unpre-
dictable, multidimensional, and fluid nature of living professional practice. Project-based
learning involves structuring a curriculum around projects that the learners formulate.
Unlike PBL, learners choose and take responsibility for completing a concrete project
that is “authentic” (similar to or driven by an actual work task requiring completion). In
the process of working through the project, learners must solve a variety of practical and
philosophical problems.

Adult Educator as Coach of Experiential Learning

Mentors and coaches usually work one on one with someone in situ, that is, within the
actual context of a person’s practice. For Daloz (1999), mentors play a significant role in
an adult’s development and transformation by providing support, structure, positive
expectations, self-disclosure, challenging tasks and questions, advocacy, high standards,
modeling, maps, language, and a mirror for an adult’s growth.

In contrast, coaching is usually associated with specific skill learning. For example, profes-
sional practitioners such as teachers, doctors, nurses, accountants, and lawyers experi-
ence a period of internship as part of their training, when they are assigned to a particular
organization to carry out regular duties with the assistance of a coach—an experienced
practitioner familiar with the organizational context. Schön described the role of coach in
detail in his influential book Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987). The coach
provides encouragement, asking Where does it go from here? The coach also draws
attention to strategies the student already knows or can observe from fellow students and
other available models. The coach often shares personal experiences and encourages
other learners to do the same to show the universal commonality of problems they experi-
enced and demonstrates alternative strategies to achieve the desired effects. Above all,
coaches must help learners accept that learning takes time.

Adult Educator as Assessor of Experiential Learning

Prior Learning Assessment (PLA), Assessment of Prior Experience and Learning (APEL),
or Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) are processes being adopted by many postsecond-
ary institutions and adult education programs through which learners seek academic
course credit for their life experiences. As Harris (1999) explains, adults have often
developed valuable knowledge and skills throughout their study, work, travel, volunteer,
family, and leadership experiences in contexts and social practices that do not easily fit
the disciplinary concepts valued in a formal education program. PLA tries to recognize
this life experience so that learners can avoid repeating courses presenting knowledge
17
 Constructivism

they have already gained and show they have met the requirements to enter courses at
their own level of understanding and skill. Hull (1992) describes the variety of tools
employed in PLA processes to help learners reflect on, articulate, and demonstrate their
past learning. Examples include portfolios, skill development profiles, written analysis of
life experience, and challenge tests to demonstrate sufficient prior knowledge to obtain
credit for a course.

The institution then matches the learner’s experiential learning as reflected in PLA to its
own established academic standards, so that credit can be awarded by a credentialing
body. Many learners need help completing a PLA process, and institutions often provide
workshops to assist in the process. PLA provides a rare opportunity to explore life experi-
ences and accomplishments in depth, and so can really build learner’s confidence and
pride. PLA also can be a helpful ongoing process of reflection and self-assessment for the
learner. It focuses on competency and understandings rather than grades, and it is often
billed as a useful career planner. It helps learners actually recognize what they know and
can do.

The downside of PLA, as Michelson (1996) points out, is the difficulty of articulating
experiential learning. Not all learners have the means to express or demonstrate their
understandings, especially when PLA often depends on writing ability. In addition,
institutions ask learners to organize their life experiences according to only those compe-
tencies and concepts that the institution has decided are valuable. This may narrow and
exclude the rich experiences of many adult learners. As Harris (1999) notes, processes
commonly used for Recognition of Prior Learning can be prescriptive and limiting. They
can be easily dominated by the excessive power of institutions to determine where the
knowledge boundaries are placed and how the learner’s experience is to be “regulated” to
fit particular hierarchical categories of experience that are deemed worthy of recognition.
Harris also suggests that there are different, more inclusive ways to assess adults’ prior
learning. She suggests that knowledge boundaries be negotiated among learners, academ-
ics, and representatives of workplace or other contexts in which learners must function.
These negotiations may encourage a permeability of boundaries and recognize
contextualized, action-oriented knowledge produced in social practices, as well as knowl-
edge that fits disciplinary categories.

In reality, these four educator roles in experiential learning—facilitator, instigator, coach,

and assessor—often blur within the actual activities that unfold in a learning event and
embrace the four basic instructional elements described by Caffarella and Barnett (1994).
Overall, four themes are apparent throughout this discussion of the educator’s role
according to the constructivist orientation:

1. Engaging learners in concrete experience as a starting point for building new

knowledge
2. Creating conditions for educative dialogue during and after the concrete experience
3. Encouraging learners’ focused reflection at different levels
4. Providing support, as experiential learning can be confusing, emotionally challenging,
unfamiliar, and uncomfortable for learners.
18
 Constructivism

The following section presents theoretical challenges to the assumptions underpinning

these forms of educational intervention.

“Using” Experience for Learning?

Critiques of Experiential Learning in Adult Education
Critical challenges to experiential learning have employed a rich variety of arguments to
question its educational conceptualization. These are presented here not to negate the
previous sections of theory and suggestions for educators, but to encourage more
thoughtfulness in their adoption. Some of the critiques open insights about the repressive
potential of harnessing experiential learning for educative purposes. Some raise concerns
about inserting an educator into adults’ processes of learning from experience. Many ask
difficult questions about the meaning and relationship of experience and reflection,
wondering whether certain models of experiential learning are too simplistic. If engaged
with an open mind, these critiques encourage us as educators to become more “integra-
tive, permeable, discriminating, and inclusive” (Mezirow 1991, p. 225) about our under-
standings of experiential learning and our role in it.

In the following paragraphs, critiques of experiential learning are grouped into five areas:

1. Challenges to the primacy placed on “reflection” as a cognitive activity and the limita-
tions of this focus
2. Challenges to the view of experience as something concrete to be reflected upon
3. Challenges to the lack of robust consideration of interplay between people and “con-
text”
4. Challenges to the notion of “learner” as a unitary self who can reflect
unproblematically
5. Challenges to educators’ intervention as “managers” of others’ experiential learning

Challenges to Understanding Reflection as a Cognitive Activity

Critics such as Britzman (1998a) and Sawada (1991) maintain that the focus of experien-
tial learning theory on cognitive reflection is somewhat simplistic and reductionist. First,
this focus justifies and emphasizes rational control and mastery, which feminist theorists
of workplace learning have criticized as a eurocentric, masculinist view of knowledge
creation (Hart 1992; Michelson 1996). Second, this reflective constructivist view does
not provide any sophisticated understandings of the role of desire in experience and
learning, despite its central tenet that a learner’s intention guides the inquiry process.
Desire is a foundational principle in human experience and knowledge, according to
psychoanalytic theories of experience and learning. Third, the focus on rational concept-
formation through cognitive reflection sidesteps what Britzman (1998a) calls the ambiva-
lences and internal “vicissitudes” bubbling in the unconscious. According to Britzman,
they direct our interpretations and therefore our meaning making of experience in unpre-
dictable ways. (This view is more fully developed in chapter 3.)

19
 Constructivism

Britzman also argues that the emphasis on conscious reflection 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
resistance in the learning process, the active “ignore-ances” that Ellsworth (1997) con-
tends are as important in shaping our engagement in experience as attraction to particu-
lar 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 continua from
concrete to abstract engagement).

Sawada (1991) argues that understanding reflection as “processing” reinforces a conduit

understanding of learning, relying on an old input-output metaphor of learning in which
the system becomes input to itself. Furthermore, constructivism falsely presumes a “cut”
universe, in which subjects are divided from the environment and from their own experi-
ences and reflection is posited as the great integrator, bridging separations that it creates,
instead of reorienting us to the whole.

Challenges to the Representation of Context

A second area of challenge to reflective constructivism is its separation of the individual

doing the learning and the individual’s context. Context involves the social relations and
political-cultural dimensions of the community in which the individual is caught up, the
nature of the task, the web of joint actions in which the individual’s choices and behav-
iors are enmeshed, the vocabulary and cultural beliefs through which the individual
makes meaning of the whole situation, and the historical, temporal, and spatial location
of the situation. Obviously, these dimensions are crucial to understand how learning
unfolds in experience.

In Kolb’s model of experiential learning, context is given little consideration. “Experi-

ence” and “reflection on experience” are portrayed as if this “learning” exists in what
Jarvis (1987) called “splendid isolation.” Jarvis suggests that context is constituted partly
by the different ways a person interacts with it. He proposes an altered model of experi-
ential learning portraying a person, shaped by a particular sociocultural milieu, moving
into and out of various social situations. The person’s response might be reflective learning
(contemplation, problem solving, or active experimentation), or it might be nonreflective
learning (absorbing information, unconsciously internalizing new understandings, or
mechanically practicing new skills). A response might even be nonlearning (rejecting
learning, too preoccupied to learn, or just interacting mechanically).

Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning has been criticized for proposing “a concept
of rationality that is essentially ahistorical and decontextualized” (Clark and Wilson
1991, p. 90). Although his later revisions of his theory recognized learning as situated in
a social context, Mezirow, according to Taylor (1998), failed to maintain the connection
between the construction of knowledge and the context within which it is interpreted.
20
 Constructivism

Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1996) presented context as a significant dimension of experi-
ence, with learners reflecting before, during, and after their immersion in events in this
context. The context presents possibilities from which learners presumably select objects
of knowing with which to interact. However, context here is portrayed problematically as
a static space separate from the individual. 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 taken to be 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 of experiential

learning outlined in chapter 3. Situative theorists,3 for example, criticize the constructiv-
ist separation of person from context, as if “context” is a container in which the learner
moves, rather than a web of activity, subjectivities, and language. When context is
viewed as this web, elements of experience such as “learner,” “event,” “action,” “object,”
and “setting” do not appear to be so distinct as the reflective view portrays them.
Michelson (1996, 1999) suggests alternative understandings of experience that destablize
unitary identity and social categories, recognize the interplay between body and world,
and challenge binaries such as person/context and reflection/action in experiential learn-
ing.

Challenges to Understanding Experience as Concrete

Many have critiqued Kolb’s assumption that experience is “concrete” and split from
“reflection” as a sort of dichotomy. With the proliferation of postmodern understandings
of the relationship between person, context/culture, and experience (e.g., see Usher,
Bryant, and Johnson 1997), it has become commonplace to assume the discursive pro-
duction and fluidity of experience. As Michelson (1999) has argued, experience exceeds
rational attempts to bound, control, and rationalize it according to preexisting social
categories and sanctioned uses. From a feminist perspective, Michelson (1996) observes
that emphasis on (critical) reflection 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. In her later work she draws attention
to experience that is “outrageous and transgressive, experience not easily reduced to
reason and coherence” (Michelson 1999, p. 145). She suggests that reflective theories of

See for example the works of Greeno (1997), Gold and Watson (1999), Lave and Wenger (1991), and
3
21
Wilson and Myers (1999), which are discussed in further detail in chapter 3.
 Constructivism

experiential learning dominating adult education have actually repressed possibilities of

meaning, knowledge, and identity. Working from the ideas of Bakhtin (1981), she sug-
gests that the notion of “carnival” might help open our theories of experiential learning.
Carnival is “a site for transgressing repressive, overdetermined meanings and creating
knowledge within a wider play of possibilities … where we can welcome the excess of
experience and with it, the contingent quality of both meaning and identity” (pp. 145-
146).

Her critique of educators is aligned with other feminist poststructuralists such as Orner
(1992) and Tisdell (1998), who argue that the assumption of (distorted) “concrete
experience” leads to a mistaken educational orientation of freeing people from their
misconceptions, ideologies, false consciousness, and colonized lifeworlds. Instead, argues
Michelson (1999), educators should be assisting learners in exploring the availability of
meanings within our cultures and societies. We cannot deny people’s historically embed-
ded subjectivity or the boundaries of self. Instead, we should be committed to opening
self “to the transgressive, oppositional Other within our own discourses and societies” (p.
146). These ideas are developed in chapter 3.

Challenges to Understanding a Learner as a Unitary Self

The constructivist view considers the individual a primary actor in the process of knowl-
edge construction, and understanding as largely a conscious, rational process. Clark and
Dirkx (2000) show that in this dominant humanist view, the learner is assumed to be a
stable, unitary self that is regulated through its own intellectual activity. Access to experi-
ence through rational reflection is also assumed, as is the learner’s capacity, motivation,
and power to mobilize the reflective process. As discussed in more detail in chapter 3,
this view of the learning self is challenged by psychoanalytic, situative, and enactivist
perspectives. Suffice to state again here that poststructural, feminist, postmodern, and
other views argue that self is multiple and shifts according to context. “Self,” argue some
poststructural writers in terms of discursive reality, is an illusory image.4 In fact, we are
“subjects” brought into presence through discourses. What we construe as our unitary (or
authentic) self having “experience” are stories we tell in particular contexts for particular
purposes, which can be reshaped by infinite configurations and voices. Others argue in
terms of the fluidity and interdependence of material reality (us in our worlds): the
boundaries between self and nonself are actually more permeable and the flow between
them far more continuous than we might be prepared to accept.

4
Usher, Bryant, and Johnson (1997) describe this as a postmodern, “decentered” view of the self: “Subjectiv-
ity without a centre or origin, caught in meanings, positioned in language and the narratives of culture. The
self cannot know itself independently of the significations in which it is enmeshed. There is no self-present
subjectivity, hence no transcendental meaning of the self. Meanings are always ‘in play’ and the self, caught
up in this play, is an ever-changing self” (p. 103). Michel Foucault (1980) even suggests that our society has
tried to invent the illusion of a self through technologies such as counseling, journal-writing, and autobiogra-
phy. Orner (1992) explains that the switch from conceptions of “self” to “subjects” encourages us to “think
of ourselves and our realities as constructions; the products of meaning-making activity which are both
22 culturally specific and generally unconscious. The term ‘subject’ calls into question the notion of a totally
conscious self” (p. 79).
 Constructivism

Michelson (1999) shows the evolution of this concept of a unitary self beginning in the
Enlightenment view of an interiorized subjectivity, in which body became the ground for
an individual autonomy (separate from Other) and inner experience became privatized.
In this movement toward privileging self came freedom and agency, along with the
internalization of social control. As Kolb (1984) maintained, the modern discovery of a
private inner realm of experience granted to individuals their worth, dignity, and liberty
to make choices. However, the management of inner experience became important to
ensure discipline and regulation of these choices as a bourgeois society arose. Michelson
goes on to show how mainstream theories of experiential learning that arose gradually
became tied to social relations of capitalism. As discussed in the following section, this
movement to “manage” experiential learning poses grave concern for adult educators.

Challenges to Educators’ “Management” of Experiential Learning

Ironically, experiential learning’s focus originated in political attempts to resist the au-
thority and hegemony of academic and scientific knowledge and to honor people’s own
unique experience. Also, as Michelson and Kolb both point out, experiential learning was
politically focused on celebrating through acknowledging the importance of inner experi-
ence, human dignity, and freedom to choose. However, several writers have challenged
mainstream experiential learning as becoming focused on managing this domain.

From her own long experience working with APL (assessment of prior learning) programs
in the United Kingdom, Fraser (1995) explains the unfolding history of this approach.
The objective of programs such as Making Experience Count (MEC) was to legitimize
prior learning within vocational and nonvocational certificating bodies toward awarding
National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) and granting access to or standing in higher
education. MEC also intended to facilitate understanding and thence ownership of the
learning process, to enhance self-esteem and confidence in a process designed to be
“andragogical” in the humanistic tradition of Malcolm Knowles. The original MEC
walked a careful line between the demands for accredited outcomes to their courses—
and perhaps a reductionist educational framework—and a philosophy of empowering
students, upholding their own life experience, and making it count.

However, Fraser argues that, although originally designed to value diverse individual
experience, formal and informal, APL has become restrictive about what counts as
experience. Much of the potential for valuing individual experience and finding creative
outlets for its expression is being eroded as market forces hold sway over issues of voca-
tional and educational relevance. Fraser describes this as a disjuncture between public
discourse and private experience, producing a fundamental paradox when the private
journey of discovery and learning is brought under public scrutiny and adjudication. The
underlying assumption is that a coherent unified self exists who is a narrator, who can
recollect experience and turn it into learning. Experience is assumed to be coherent,
consistent, and a site for rational intellectual excavation. The process compels adults to
construct a self to fit the APL dimensions and celebrates individualistic achievement:
adults are what they have done. This orientation does not address social inequities or the
issue of different and often painful lessons learned from experiences related to our subjec-
23
 Constructivism

tivity as members of different cultural, economic, gendered environments. The “disad-

vantaged,” claims Fraser, often experience great barriers to opportunity and fulfillment; it
is unfair to measure them by “what they have done” according to institutional categories
of valued and recognizable knowledge. One important area of inequity relates to the
gendered nature of standards for assessing adult experience. In one example she describes
how, at the School for Independent Study in London, student autobiographies were
adjudicated. Fewer than 60% of women’s autobiographies “passed” compared to 80% of
men’s. Fraser claims this was because men’s life patterns—as self-chosen events pursuing
rational goals—were more aligned to institutional ideas. Women’s life stories were parts
of others’ lives, with diffuse voices and shifting identities.

Experiential learning cannot be discussed apart from its political, social, and cultural
contexts. Like Fraser, Michelson (1996) shows how the interests, authority, and under-
standings of knowledge pervading higher education institutions distort people’s experi-
ence in the process of assessing it, dividing experience into visible/invisible categories,
creating identities, and generally colonizing people’s experience by squeezing them into
preset categories. Michelson (1999) claims that “the management of experience has
become a way of regulating how people define themselves and construct an identity” (p.
144).

Critical analysts of learning initiatives in workplace contexts have pointed out that, in an
environment where “production is, above all, production for profit; that nature is dead,
malleable matter entirely at our disposal” (Hart 1992, p. 26), workers’ experiential
learning is often viewed as “human capital” with great potential economic benefits for
the organization. Usher and Solomon (1998) write:

The educational discourse of experiential learning intersects happily with the

managerial discourse of workplace reform … since both shape subjectivity in
ways appropriate to the needs of the contemporary workplace. (p. 8)

This shaping of the continuous (experiential) learner is perhaps the most troubling of all
criticisms of the discourse of experiential learning in adult education. In the reflective/
constructivist orientation, subjectivities that are potentially multiple, shifting, transgres-
sive, and spontaneous are recast as coherent, stable, rational, and self-regulating. Their
experience is raw capital to be processed into knowledge. Tennant (1999) has shown how
the educational issue of “transfer,” when brought to learning in human experience,
implies an excavation of fluid experience to capture knowledge, generalize it, and apply it
in different contexts. In this process, living human experience becomes normalized,
standardized, then commodified and sold in the labor exchange relations defining capital-
ism.

In this configuration of human experience, organizations’ fight to remain competitive in a

global market of overproduction, underemployment, and impossible pace of technological
change (Garrick and Usher 1999) can be transformed into a learning problem that is
devolved onto individuals. Their “responsibility” is continuous (experiential) learning,
which educators and managers assess according to knowledge claims recognized in their
24
 Constructivism

own particular sociocultural milieu. As Edwards (1998a) argues, reflection, though

differentiated, becomes a basic pedagogic stance for all workers, because nonroutine tasks
are part of everyone’s everyday work activity, not just professionals:

A more intense working environment may require the reflective practice of

workers being able to respond “on their feet” … Here self-management within
organization frameworks displaces the forms of autonomous activity which are
often associated with professional work. In this sense, reflective practice may
be well part of the “moral technology” and forms of governmentality through
which work is intensified and regulated … Engaging in reflective practice,
bringing together thought and action, reflecting whilst you are doing, are key
conditions of flexibility …. The reflective practitioner signifies the worker in
reflexive modernization par excellence. (p. 387)

Conclusion
In sum, this chapter reviews the explanatory concepts and applications to practice of one
particular orientation to experiential learning that has sustained a prominent position in
the field of adult education: the constructivist perspective, called reflection in this mono-
graph. The discussion shows how this perspective essentially privileges individual human
consciousness constructing knowledge by engaging in a cognitive process of reflection
upon episodes of lived experience. Influential theorists within this general orientation
each emphasize different elements of this process: Kolb, Boud, Schön, Mezirow, and
Brookfield. Some, such as Vygotsky, lay foundations for more sociocultural and psycho-
analytic perspectives. Implications for practice based on this reflective/constructivist
orientation are presented in terms of four roles for educators: facilitator, instigator, coach,
and assessor of people’s experience. Finally, this discussion gives examples of critical
challenges to certain models within this reflective orientation, particularly critiquing the
focus on reflection as a mental activity; the separation of cognition and situated, embod-
ied experience; the failure to acknowledge the discursive production of experience; the
representation of learner as a unitary self; and the managing role educators sometimes
enact.

In chapter 3, alternate perspectives of experiential learning that in part attempt to ad-

dress these and other conceptual problems are presented.

25
 Constructivism

26