Modes of Experience
What does it mean to experience something firsthand? How do stories shape our understanding when we weren’t physically present? What happens to knowledge as it travels from person to person, generation to generation?
These are the questions we’re exploring to better understand the different modes in which we experience and learn.
Experience in Education
We often think of experience as something that happens directly to us, but education unfolds through many layers of experience: the teacher’s story about their trip to Italy, the textbook summary of a historical event, or the documentary about climate change. Each of these are a different mode of experiencing, and each carries with it its own pedagogical power. At PEXE, we use a heuristic of three modes to help us think about how students encounter the world.
Firsthand Experience - direct, embodied, sensory-rich, and immediate. Concrete encounters that invite our full presence in the moment.
Secondhand Experience - mediated stories, narratives, and testimonies from those who have experienced something directly. A retelling that invites imagination and empathy.
Nth-hand Experience - abstracted knowledge that gets filtered through interpretations. Textbooks, syntheses, and accumulated wisdom that shapes collective understanding.
Teaching as Weaving
A pedagogy attuned to modes of experience recognizes that teaching is not about privileging one mode over another, but about thoughtfully weaving first, second, and thirdhand experiences together. Each serves different purposes and each opens different possibilities for meaning-making.
Understanding these modes of experience helps us to see and attend to experience in education that is always layered and always requires (re)contextualization - the guidance that helps students build their nexus of meaning. Teachers become ontological guides, not just content providers, helping students understand not only what they’re learning but how they are experiencing the emergence of that knowledge.
Read the full series exploring modes of experience on our blog.
Grappling with Modes of Experience
Visceral Learning: Reclaiming Firsthand Experience in Education
I Heard it from Someone Who Heard it from Someone: The Case for Thirdhand Experience