Beyond the Learning Machine: Reclaiming Experience in Experiential Education
Originally published in 1984, David Kolb’s experiential learning theory offered an account of experiential education that, even if misunderstood and underappreciated, continues to hold sway as a framework for understanding learning across domains, from corporate training to counselor preparation. His cyclical framework makes intuitive sense to the beginner. We begin, in Kolb's terms, with concrete experience, then transition to reflective observation, leap up into abstract conceptualization, return to active experimentation, and repeat the cycle back to concrete. There are verbal cues for these four stages in the cycle that, if you try on, also make sense: feeling, watching, thinking, and doing.
An arm of Kolb’s framework is his account of four learning styles (Diverger, Converger, Assimilator, Accommodator), which still appear in syllabi and personality inventories across education and business contexts. While widely misunderstood, these styles are not the focus here. The more fundamental challenge to Kolb’s theory of experiential learning is the lack of clarity and attention paid to the experience that is so critical in his account of learning. What counts as an experience?
That experiential learning theory lacks an account of experience is not a new claim. In 1987, Richard Hopkins offered a searing critique of Kolb’s work, calling out its "structuralist reductions" and its failure to engage with phenomenology, a philosophical tradition that takes lived experience seriously. Nearly forty years later, Hopkins’ critique feels more urgent than ever, especially in the context of our ongoing research investigating experiential learning through museum visits, place-based pedagogies, and peace education.
As we guide students and educators through truly lived experiences in classrooms, communities, and field-based research, we ask: does Kolb’s model actually help us understand how people learn from experience?
The Problem with Kolb's "Learning Machine"
Kolb presents experiential learning as a loop: experience, reflection, abstraction, and experimentation. Learners move through this cycle and develop preferences or "styles." In theory, it is a tidy and practical way to talk about learning. But as Hopkins pointed out, and as I have seen firsthand in student narratives and interviews, Kolb's model treats learning as a machine: something with inputs, predictable outputs, and fixed gears.
But human experience is not mechanical. When we talk with students and engage with their reflections on fieldwork, the stories they share are rich, fluid, and often contradictory. They show dissonance and depth, an awareness that who they are is shifting, that place and time matter, and that meaning is co-constructed. Experiential learning theory, as currently understood, simply does not hold space for this kind of dynamic, relational learning that is grounded in the lived experiences of students.
Psychologism and the Loss of the Person
Hopkins accused Kolb of psychologism, or a tendency to reduce all aspects of learning to psychological laws and traits. We see this most clearly in the Learning Style Inventory (LSI), a self-report tool that sorts people into categories based on preferences. But these categories risk turning people into abstractions. Divergers do this. Convergers prefer that. These are not actual people but constructs. In Kolb's world, the learner is not a person embedded in a lived world. The learner becomes a component in a theory.
This is where phenomenology becomes so important. Experience, as thinkers like John Dewey and Calvin Schrag remind us, is not just what happens to us. It is how we live through and make sense of the world in motion. It is relational, contextual, and intentional. It cannot be fully captured by a forced-choice inventory or a conceptual quadrant. In fact, trying to do so risks stripping experience of its meaning.
Phenomenology and the Return to Lived Experience
Phenomenology is not a method in the traditional sense, nor is it a branch of psychology or a descriptive tool borrowed from anthropology. It is a way of attending to the world, a discipline of noticing, rooted in the effort to describe lived experience without reducing it to explanation or theory. Edmund Husserl, its founder, called for a "return to the things themselves" a move that shifted attention from abstraction to the immediacy of perception and consciousness. Later thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasized embodiment and situatedness: we do not merely have bodies, we are bodies, always in relation to our environments.
Phenomenology matters in education because it draws us into the lifeworlds of students and teachers. It resists instrumental views of learning and instead asks: what does it feel like to learn? To dwell in uncertainty? To be changed by an encounter? Max van Manen describes this as pedagogical thoughtfulness, a mode of reflection rooted in lived meaning, not performance.
Hermeneutics and the Interpretation of Experience
Where phenomenology turns our attention to lived experience, hermeneutics invites us to interpret it. Understanding, in this tradition, is never passive. Hans-Georg Gadamer reminds us that we always approach experiences with prior understandings, historical horizons, and a language already shaped by culture. In this sense, learners are not empty vessels; they are meaning-makers situated in time, place, and history.
Hermeneutics challenges us to recognize the interpretive nature of all educational acts. When a student is silent, when a classroom feels tense, when an assignment is misunderstood, we are interpreting. Teaching, then, is not only the delivery of content, but the co-creation of meaning in context.
What Our Research Shows Instead
In our ongoing work, we have encountered a more nuanced view of learning from experience. Students do not move through a set sequence. They wrestle with questions. They feel transformed by places. They rethink what they thought they knew. They are not just reflecting on content, they are reflecting on who they are becoming. Their learning unfolds in dialogue with others, in specific places, and often through tensions and ruptures.
When students describe moments of insight or change, they rarely map neatly onto Kolb’s stages. One student described standing in front of a mural and suddenly thinking about their grandmother. Another recounted how confusion and discomfort eventually led to deeper engagement. These stories resist linearity. They resist reduction. And that is the point.
Dewey’s Habits, Not Kolb’s Styles
John Dewey, one of experiential learning theory’s founding fathers, offered a more dynamic concept of learning through "habit." Habits, in Dewey’s sense, are not fixed traits but evolving ways of engaging with the world. They are plastic, revisable, and responsive to new contexts. Learning, then, is a constant negotiation between what we have done before and what we might do next.
Unlike Kolb’s styles, which are typologies that sort and define, Dewey’s habits remain open to revision. They acknowledge agency, intentionality, and the shock of the new. They also acknowledge the role of community, culture, and context in shaping how we learn and who we become.
Toward a More Human View of Experiential Learning
Kolb’s theory might still be useful as a conversation starter, but it cannot be the destination. As educators committed to relational, critical, and context-rich learning, we need frameworks that account for intentionality, for the richness of place, and for the becoming-nature of human experience.
To do that, we have to shift away from mechanical metaphors like Kolb’s "learning machine." Instead, we might embrace metaphors of emergence, resonance, or even improvisation. Learning from experience is more jazz than symphony, more weaving than blueprint. It requires a language that reflects its fluidity and honors the personhood of learners.
It is time to retire the machine and reclaim the mystery. Not everything that matters about learning can be measured or mapped. Sometimes, it just needs to be lived, and reflected upon in community, with care.