Visceral Learning: Reclaiming First-Hand Experience in Education
The Language of the Visceral
Did you know that the word visceral can be traced back to our internal organs? To our bowels? We often reserve the word visceral for moments that feel especially important. “I felt it viscerally,” we say. Or, more colloquially, “I felt it like a gut punch.”
For something to be visceral, it must engage our emotions, our inner felt sense, at the deepest part of us. We can trace its meaning through French and into Medieval Latin, where it emerges as a verbal form of the noun vital. In other words, our insides are indicated: the “visceral organs of the body” are those essential to life processes.
This connection between language and the body also shapes how we talk about experience itself. When we think of experiencing something first-hand, the most immediate examples come from our bodies. Think of those times when words fail us: when we are in pain, when we are grieving, or when we feel the flutter of new relationships.
In those moments, we still reach for words, and often imperfect ones. Pain means something. Grief means something. And when ordinary language falls short, we lean on metaphor. The butterflies in our stomach, for example, let us call upon the natural world to express the nervousness and uncertainty of encountering another person.
Staying with First-Hand Experience
As I struggled over the past few days to grapple with how to present and unpack first-hand experience, I had to retrain myself not to skip ahead to second- and third-hand experience. We will get to those, but when I finally stayed with something that happened to me, the first-hand experience, the slipperiness of objectivity pulled me almost immediately toward generalizations and summaries.
This is something I often see in my graduate students’ writing. They struggle when they cannot begin with themselves, with the “I.” We have trained advanced writers to write themselves out of their own writing, emphasizing instead the voices and words of others to represent and confirm their ideas. To unlock what they really want to say, I often suggest simply writing the way they experience it: “I think this is important because…” Once the idea is out, we can revise and adapt it to whatever the genre requires. Sometimes that means second or third person, and other times it can stand as first person. Our first-hand experience is immediate and right there. Like it or not, we are stuck with it.
Yet our schooling has successfully, for the most part, trained the “I” out of us. That is considered “subjective” and thus cannot be trusted. It could be biased. It is “just your opinion.” In other words, do not rely too heavily on immediate experience or you will fall into solipsism and magical thinking.
When Expertise Ignores Experience
But consider this: in the recent New York Times podcast series Serial, the producers highlighted a fact hidden in plain sight within the medical community: many women who receive anesthesia (epidurals) during birth are still able to feel significant pain during these procedures. I was, to be blunt, shocked. It is 2025. How do I, a moderately informed professor, not know this? Yet it is true. In what might be the ultimate third-hand experiential profession of medicine, doctors, nurses, and anesthesiologists rely on expertise and established procedures. But in doing so, they often forget one thing: to ask the patients.
When these new mothers are asked, they reveal a range of complications. They feel the procedure. They feel pain. And when they try to say something, when they try to indicate and share what they are experiencing, surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists often deflect, defer, or ignore them. The key insight and takeaway is that the medical profession, so steeped in third-hand experience, can fail to understand or honor the lived, first-hand experience of the patient.
Reclaiming “I” in Education
Education is not immune to this dynamic. In our schools and universities, we also rely on standards, rubrics, and data systems designed to capture “what works.” These are useful, just as medical expertise is useful. But in the process, we can fail to listen to students as people. We can overlook their first-hand experience of learning, the confusion, joy, fear, and insight they bring into the classroom every day.
When we tell students to remove the “I” from their writing, or when we push teachers to rely only on abstracted best practices, we risk cutting off the most immediate source of meaning: their own felt experience. And yet, this is where authentic and experience-based learning begins.
First-hand experience is a visceral, direct, and personal engagement with an event, situation, or phenomenon. It is experience attuned through one’s own senses, actions, and emotions rather than through the reports, interpretations, or representations of others. To be sure, and not to bend the brain too much, even second- and third-hand accounts are always truly experienced first-hand but we overlook this obvious fact (and even this requires more unpacking).
What would it mean to teach in ways that start from experience rather than abstract expertise? What would it mean to invite students to trust what they feel and think before rushing to the textbook or the standardized answer? First-hand experience does not mean abandoning rigor or expertise. It means valuing the human, embodied, visceral starting points of learning and building outward from there.