Orientation

Written by Sean Legnini & Matthew Kruger-Ross — Updated 2026

(Re)capturing Experience

In education, the word "experience" has been hollowed out. It promises engagement, relevance, and real-world learning while delivering a re-packaged version of the same mechanical assumptions that have dominated our understanding of what it means to learn and educate. Field trips, internships, hands-on activities, and project-based learning are all celebrated as "experiential" without any serious consideration of what experience actually is or how it shapes a student's becoming.

Reducing experience to a technique misses the ontological work that is always already happening in every educational encounter. Learning is not the acquisition of content in isolated subjects but an ongoing transformation of human beings in relationship with the world, others, and themselves. Education is not preparation for life — it is life, and life is the ground in which meaning emerges and identities dynamically evolve.

Think of a child learning to ride their bike. In the current form, we look at this moment unfolding in a neat cycle: getting on the bike (concrete experience), noticing what went wrong after they fall (reflective observation), understanding balance and momentum (abstract conceptualization), and trying again with adjustments (active experimentation). Through this cycle, the child has learned to ride a bike. But this account misses so much about what matters.

In the lived reality of that moment, something far more profound is unfolding. The child is not only learning a discrete skill through hands-on practice — they are entering into a new way of being-in-the-world. The discovery of balance is almost magical. The bike becomes a vessel of childhood freedom, the scraped knees a badge of courage, the patiently helping adult a deepened relationship of trust. The late afternoon light, the texture of asphalt, the particular quality of the air on a tree-lined street — these are all woven into what it means to be someone who can ride a bike, who can get up when they fall, who can be held up by a trusting relationship through the anxiety of risk.

This is the learning. More than the "hidden curriculum" or an aesthetic decoration of "real" learning, this is the ontological unfolding of a human being in relationship with the world, others, and self. What we call "riding a bike" is actually the emergence of new ways of dwelling in the world.

Experience as Mechanism

The architects of experiential education — Dewey, Kolb — were responding to genuine problems. Dewey's critique of abstract schooling called for education rooted in the lived experience of the child. Kolb's experiential learning cycle offered educators a practical framework for moving beyond passive consumption of information toward active engagement. Both were necessary interventions, yet they remain constrained by mechanistic assumptions that have turned learning into an act to be measured and analyzed as if a person's becoming can be reduced to data points on a scale.

Kolb's four-stage progression from concrete experience to reflective observation to abstract conceptualization to active experimentation treats learning as a mechanical process with predictable inputs and outputs. Experience becomes raw material for cognitive operation rather than the medium in which we come into relationship with the world. The model assumes a detached observer who stands outside experience in order to reflect upon it, missing the truth that we are always already immersed in experiential meaning-making.

The distinction is between aliveness and unaliveness. When education is overly mechanized and reduced to efficiency, it feels flat. Knowledge is chopped into units, scheduled by pacing guides, stripped of its lived context. Learning becomes something to get through. By contrast, when education is phenomenologically attuned, it feels alive. It engages emotions instead of pretending they are irrelevant. It grips attention and draws us into meaning. There is curiosity, surprise, even joy. At times there is laughter; at times a silence that everyone feels but no one wants to break.

The Phenomenological Alternative

Phenomenology reveals what mechanistic approaches systematically overlook: experience is always already intersubjective, emplaced, and temporal. We never encounter the world as detached observers but as embodied beings thrown into relationships with others and situated within particular places and historical moments that are already meaningful.

This co-constitution extends beyond humans. Because learning is always emplaced, it emerges and is shaped by the landscapes, communities, and more-than-human beings that surround us. The lighting of the classroom, the seasonal changes on the playground, the sounds and smells of the neighborhood — these are active participants in meaning-making. Place can never be neutral.

From the phenomenological perspective, the mechanistic separation of experience, reflection, conceptualization, and application dissolves. Rather than sequential stages, these are simultaneous dimensions of the same phenomenon: the ongoing becoming of human beings in relationship with their world.

All Education is Already Experiential

A simple and profound understanding emerges: there is no such thing as education that isn't experiential. Every moment of learning, no matter how concrete, abstract, engaging, or boring, unfolds within the lived experience of embodied beings in relationship with their world. It cannot be otherwise.

Consider a high school student working through algebraic equations. Phenomenological attention reveals something different from the dominant narrative. The student encounters these symbols from within a particular body, at a particular desk, surrounded by particular sounds and smells, carrying the weight of their mathematical history and the horizon of their mathematical future. Frustration builds when a problem won't resolve; satisfaction erupts when an elegant solution is found. The classroom itself participates in the experiential unfolding.

If all education is already experiential and if learning cannot be abstracted from embodied, emplaced, and temporal encounter, then the contemporary mode of education is not merely ineffective but is actively harmful in its displacement of learners from the spatial, temporal, and social grounds of meaning-making.

Toward a Phenomenological Mode of Education

The re-contextualizing and re-placement of education calls for a fundamental reorientation of practice toward a recovery of education's essential purpose: the cultivation of human beings capable of dwelling meaningfully with the world. A phenomenological mode of education offers this possibility by grounding learning in the lived experiences of students as embodied, relational, and emplaced.

The teacher in this mode becomes an ontological guide rather than a content deliverer. They attend not only to what students are learning but to who students are becoming through their learning. This reorientation draws us toward what we call a pedagogy of dwelling — a pedagogy based on attunement to the relationships of human existence.

A phenomenological mode of education does not call for a retreat from rigor or complexity but calls for a recovery. When learning is grounded in lived experience, students encounter ideas as responses to questions that emerge from their own engagement with the world.

Ongoing Questions

The path is long and winding. Here are a few of the questions guiding our way:

How can we translate phenomenological insights into practical application? How can we engage in phenomenological writing and practice in a way that illuminates education without slipping into metaphorical cliché? How do we describe the teacher's stance as cotraveler and ontological guide in ways that resist being reduced to technique? What does this look like in classroom practice? And how do we cultivate teachers who can see, think, and be in this new way?

PEXE emerges as a way to recover, with phenomenological attunement, what education has always been: the ongoing co-creation of meaning between human beings and the more-than-human world. We believe this work matters for the flourishing of our students, the vitality of educational practice, and for the possibility of cultivating the kinds of relationships with place, community, and the more-than-human world that our historical moment requires.