Education as Experience, Experience as World-Making
Experience Matters
The earliest thinkers in education tell us that experience matters. From Plato’s “turn the soul toward the light” and Rousseau’s argument that direct interaction is how children truly learn, to Dewey’s profound statement from Democracy and Education (1916) that “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself,” education by experience has been a core tenet of progressive education. Today, experiential education continues to dominate conversations about “modern learning”, especially when referencing project-based learning, place-based learning, or hands-on learning. Alice and David Kolb, Scott Wurdinger, David Sobel, and many others offer ways to implement experiential and place-based teaching in our everyday pedagogy. It is very clear in educational research that experience matters.
The Mechanics
Up to now, these thinkers and theorists have considered, successfully, the mechanics of experiential education. Kolb’s learning cycle, for example, emphasizes the concrete experience, the abstract conceptualization, and the cyclical moments of experience as the mechanics to developing understanding or skill. Sobel emphasizes a need for localizing education in place to connect students to community or processes. Dewey argues that a focus on the student’s interests can lead to powerful learning moments. These mechanics of experience are valuable insights into how we can teach through experience.
The problem is that these mechanics don’t explain how experience shapes identity, meaning, and purpose in students. There is no sense of world-building, no look at the interpretive lens that students are developing as they experience.
Experience isn’t just about what we do, but how we live and interpret through what we do. This is where phenomenology can help us.
From Mechanics to Meaning
Phenomenology is the study of lived experience. The founding thinkers in phenomenology like Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others offer tools to understand the inner dimensions of experience and how things show up as meaningful in our consciousness. Phenomenology pushes us to ask questions like: What is it like to experience something? What meanings does an experience make possible? How does an experience shape our lenses and how is an experience shaped BY our lenses?
With phenomenology we can get to the core of experience. We can see how experiences build a nexus of meaning in students - how experiences develop an inner network or web of values, purpose, and identity.
For Education
Understanding the phenomenology of experience in education emphasizes that, in the day to day schooling of a person, students are not just learning skills and knowledge, but adapting and adopting modes of interpretation. Their being is coming into existence. In a world of crisis, disconnection, and digital overwhelm, understanding how their being is building offers us insight into the students' sense of connection, identity, and reflective presence. Through this understanding, we can design. Our belief is that experiences in education can be designed with the student’s nexus of understanding in mind. We can design experiences that build being.
The PEXE Lab
The PEXE Lab (The Phenomenology and Experiential Education Lab) is a hub for research, professional development, and curricular thinking that integrates experiential learning theory, phenomenological inquiry, and a broad view of education and the places where we educate. Through this integration of theory and philosophy, The PEXE Lab embarks on empirical and conceptual scholarly research, works with educators to design experiences that build being, and teaches students to adopt phenomenological approaches to their practice. At the forefront of this hub of thinking, we argue that by understanding how experience actually works at the level of perception and identity, we can design better learning environments. We argue that teaching becomes not just about transmitting information, but shaping a student’s way of being in the world.
An invitation
To educators and to the curious, follow along as the PEXE Lab explores what it means to live and learn meaningfully. Keep an eye out for upcoming research, professional development, conference presentations, and webinars.
Share with us how you use experience as a mode of teaching. To researchers, join in on the inquiry into how meaning is made through lived experience. Consider the phenomenological inquiry of your research, and share with us your findings.
By bringing phenomenology into conversation with experiential education, The PEXE Lab invites educators, researchers, and curriculum designers to see experience not just as a method of learning but as the very ground where meaning, identity, and human becoming take shape.