Unpacking Modes of Experience
When we started this series on modes of experience, we were grappling with how a foundation of phenomenological understanding can help us slow down and carefully work through what we mean by firsthand, secondhand, and thirdhand experience so that we might discover something about how we talk and think about experience itself. We use these words all the time. We write in the first person or the third person. We talk about hearing a story secondhand. These phrases slip into our conversations so naturally that we rarely stop to ask: what do they actually mean? What assumptions hide inside them? What might they reveal about the way we encounter and make sense of the world? Now we’re at the point where we can ask ourselves: what did we learn from this conversation? And so what?
Recap
Firsthand experience feels, at least initially, like the most solid ground. It is the experience of being there - seeing, hearing, feeling for oneself. But even firsthand experience is not as simple as it seems. Memory intervenes. Interpretation is immediate. The “hand” we think of as closest to reality is already complicated by perception, background, expectation. And yet, there’s something undeniable about it: firsthand carries a weight. When someone says “I was there” it still matters.
Secondhand experience is where things get more interesting. This is the realm of testimony, storytelling, and relay. I wasn’t there, but you told me what happened. In everyday life, secondhand experience is everywhere. It’s how culture moves, how knowledge spreads, how families and communities share stories across generations. But secondhand experience also introduces gaps, distortions, and interpretations. And yet, in some cases, the secondhand version might matter more. I may never directly experience life in another country, but a loved one’s narrative might shape my worldview more powerfully than any statistics or travel brochures ever could. Secondhand is not simply derivative. It has its own force, its own authority.
If firsthand is about presence and secondhand is about relay, thirdhand experience is where the edges start to blur. This is the realm of collective knowledge: tradition, mythology, rumor, and abstraction. It’s not what you told me, but what she told you that I overheard. It’s the stories passed down over generations from grandparent to grandchild. It’s not the article itself, but the summary of a summary passed around on social media. Working through thirdhand examples was the hardest part of this project. The category felt slippery, even unstable. Thirdhand experience exposes how far we can drift from the anchor of direct encounter. It is experience mediated by layers, where the origin becomes almost impossible to trace. We live by stories we have never directly encountered.
Nth-hand
Oftentimes the PEXE lab exists in iMessage threads, emails, and instagram DMs. It’s our way of keeping conversations alive and our ponderings intact over time and as our brains decide to share with us some moment of enlightenment. While Matthew was writing about the thirdhand experience, we both had a similar thought. How far does this whisper-down-the-lane game go? Is an eighthhand experience different from a thirdhand? What about a hundredthhand?
We started calling this the “nth-hand” experience and realized that, as you go further from direct experience, the information gets a little more abstracted each time. This doesn’t devalue the information as this is how information spreads in the first place. Think about globally accepted knowledge - it all started with a discovery of information, a firsthand experience, and the knowledge was shared through chains of communication, nth-hand experiences. It is an epistemological chain of experiencing that pulls us toward tradition and story.
Understanding the chain of the nth-hand gives us a teaching tool too. In a critical age of (mis)information, the spread of conspiracy, and downright lies, the nth-hand experiential chain gives us a way of talking about the relationships of knowledge sharing. We can teach our students to consider the nth-hand experience chain and follow it back to the firsthand experience in an effort to uncover its meaning. We can ask our students to consider how an experience was interpreted before it was relayed to them, and where and by who it was relayed and for what purpose.
Big Fish
If you are teaching 6th grade science, like Sean did, you know the types of questions you’re going to get: “What happens if all of a sudden there’s a black hole in the classroom? Who would win: a 500 foot long boa constrictor or a 300 foot long viper? What if the earth just stopped spinning right now? If a mosquito sucked dino blood and then another mosquito bit that mosquito and another and another all the way up to now, could we take the blood from that mosquito and remake a dinosaur?” (By the way, all things Sean has been asked…) He personally loves these questions and loves answering them with equally ridiculous answers, but we also know a lot of teachers who are frustrated by them. This was something Sean constantly wrestled with: how far can we stretch these fictional situations in the service of teaching before they do some damage? It’s the Big Fish question. If you’re getting those questions in your classroom, then we have great news for you: your students are imagination powerhouses. Questions like these enliven students’ curiosity and imaginations as they fully embody the wonder that all teachers hope to see in their classrooms. Maybe they were already that way, but your pedagogy made it possible for them to feel comfortable tapping into this skill. We can tap into it too with how we share our secondhand experiences.
We’re not asking you to lie, this is not advocating for fabrication. What we are saying is that it is okay to stretch the truth to spark imagination and wonder without distorting meaning. Maybe your trip to the beach this summer was ordinary but you saw some dolphins a few hundred feet out that was cool to see. Or maybe your trip to the beach this summer was transformative, you were out jumping the waves and enjoying the sunshine when three dolphins leapt up just 10 yards in front of you, so close you could see the glimmer in their eyes. It was so shocking to you that you went straight to your phone to see if you could identify the dolphins. You found out they were Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins and did you know that their habitats are in danger?
Which one of those summer stories, no matter how truthful, is more likely to engage your students?
We think there is a ton of power in this idea, and there is much more research to be done here. Think about how documentaries direct their shots and narration, how factbooks publish images and factoids, and how politicians choose their messaging. These are all creative moves to a secondhand or nth-hand experience that have immense power.
Reflecting & Guiding
In our last conversation, Matthew and Sean reconnected with some of the original and most popular theories of experiential education, particularly Dewey and Kolb’s theories that reinforce a cyclical series of experience and reflection. Matthew shared a story of a time when he was in an art museum, staring at a painting and not truly connecting with it. The painting caught his eye with many shades of yellow, but its meaning was evading Matthew. He turned to read the plaque and learned that the painting was one of van Gogh’s paintings of Sunflowers and that the painting was considered innovative for his use of these specific shades and pigments. Instantly the painting felt meaningful to him. This quick moment, a moment of reflection and learning, completely changed the firsthand experience for Matthew. But we asked ourselves - would you really call that reflection? For Kolb and Dewey, that is exactly what happened: Matthew experienced something, took a minute away from that experience, and then returned to the experience with renewed meaning. For us, we landed on a different word: (re)contextualization.
Sometimes a firsthand experience is not meaningful without the valuable context provided by a guiding force. For Matthew, it was the description on the plaque at the museum. For our students, it is us. Every day, our students are building their nexus, developing their ways of being, and establishing their ontological rootedness for which they will frame their future experiences. They are building that nexus through the first, second, and nth-hand experiences in which they are participants. Reframing “reflection” as “(re)contextualization” gives teachers the pedagogical power to help craft these moments of actualization where an experience becomes meaningful.
What we find so interesting about this is that these moments of (re)contextualization can happen in a matter of seconds or over life times. Sometimes it is a quick scan of a plaque next to a painting, sometimes it is a career of scholarship and adventure. Either way, ontologies are built from these contexts. Maybe teaching, then, is less about finding ways to make the content interesting and more about stitching together context for student’s lived experiences through guidance. Teaching is being an ontological guide.
A Phenomenology of the Process
When we first began drafting these pieces, we imagined it might be straightforward. Collect some examples of each - firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand - compare them, find the commonalities, maybe extract a few principles. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the process forced us to slow down. It may sound trivial, but it is worth naming that the process itself was rewarding - not just the product.
It was a give-and-take. We thought on our own, but we also responded to each other, pushed a little, tested boundaries. The push wasn’t hard or adversarial, but exploratory. It felt like wandering in the dark together with a flashlight, not to solve the mystery once and for all, but to illuminate corners we hadn’t noticed before. In that sense, the process was itself experiential. It modeled what we were writing about: that knowledge is not just transmitted but lived, that reflection is not just about clarity but about dwelling with uncertainty.
Language & Embodiment
Why do we talk about firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand? One thing that tugs at us is the language itself: hand. Hands are embodied, tactile. They grasp, they hold, they pass along. There’s something deeply human about using “handedness” to mark levels of experience. It’s not just a linguistic accident; it reveals something about how we imagine knowledge as something that can be passed from one to another, like an object. We can imagine our own hands experiencing something, a second hand holding our hand in guidance toward an experience, and a chain of hands pulling us toward an epistemological agreement. “It takes a village” comes to mind. Perhaps slowing down with these words nudges us toward that embodied dimension: experience not just as abstract knowledge, but as something handled, touched, and carried.
A Phenomenology of…
So where does this leave us? We can’t say we’ve come away knowing a lot more about experience in some definitive sense. We can’t claim to have a theory ready to publish or a model to teach. But something has happened. Something has shifted. Maybe what we’ve been engaged in is, quite literally, a phenomenology of phenomenology, or an attempt to experience the experience of experience, to slow down with the words we use and see what they disclose.
That may sound circular. But circles, as Heidegger reminds us, are not always vicious. Sometimes they are hermeneutic - paths that return us to the same place with a deeper appreciation of where we’ve been. Moments of (re)contextualization in our own phenomenological methods.
…Experience
Throughout this process, we sometimes worried that we were drifting away from the central theme: experience. But looking back, the theme was always there, if a little hidden. Experience has become our “big E” phenomenon—the horizon against which all of this work unfolds. Just as phenomenologists have rallied around concepts like Husserl’s bracketing, Heidegger’s Da-sein, or Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment, perhaps what we are circling is experience itself.
The work of unpacking firsthand, secondhand, and thirdhand was less about taxonomy than about vocabulary. It was an attempt to listen carefully to our words, to see what they already carry, and how they shape the way we grapple with experience. If there’s a conclusion here, it’s tentative. Perhaps what we started was the beginning of a phenomenology of experience itself. A project that doesn’t end with neat definitions of first, second, and thirdhand, but begins with them, as handholds, as footholds, as invitations to think more carefully about what it means to experience.
And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough for now.
What’s to come
If you’re still with us after this series of posts, you’re starting to understand why we think it is necessary to tap into phenomenology when we think about experience. It certainly feels, to us, that the word “experience” in “experiential education” is not quite doing it justice. What this series revealed to us is that “experience” in education cannot be reduced to a field trip or a project. It is always layered - first, second, nth-hand - and always interpreted through acts of (re)contextualization. For teachers, the task is to frame, guide, and honor the ways students encounter experience. For students, these moments accumulate into their nexus of meaning, shaping who they are becoming. That is why this conversation mattered: It reclaims experience as the ground of education, not its supplement. Our goal now is to use our research and our thinking at the PEXE Lab to find out how we can tap into these modes of experience, as teachers, to help our student’s ontological development, not as content providers, but as guides.