Philosophy of Experiential Education

Donald Winnicott's radical existential psychoanalytic understanding of transitional awareness and transitional relatedness is an amazing and little used doorway for today's psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. In today's cognitive clinical culture we have become cognitions tampering with cognitions. Life as cognition. Existential Ontology Winnicott's creative understanding of our capacity for transitional awareness and transitional relatedness intertwines both our personal psychology and our innermost experience of our own existential ontology. Transitional knowingness intertwines both our mind and our primordial awareness field. Our field of awareness knows the field of Being since awareness is the field of Being. Transitional awareness intertwines both our mind and our psyche. Donald Winnicott's phenomenological understanding of the self radicalizes our sense of self from being a representational picture or cognitive affective schema or synthesis of disparate psychological part's to a fluid sense of self as a direct experiential felt sense of ongoing continuity of Being. Our knowingness though the medium of awareness, opens for us the direct knowing of the experience of Being. The experience of Being is for us our sense of natural spirituality. Our liminal transitional awareness field opens us into the immediate ongoing intimate experience of Being. This experience of Being is of Being within our very own self and of Being within our very own relational life-world. Ordinary Personhood We, as a most ordinary person, can experience the unfolding movement of the experiencing of Being within our own self as our self, and simultaneously, the unfolding experiencing of our own being as the being-ness of Being which is the Being of the world. As we experience the Being .

In this book we take the reader on a journey through the various curriculum reforms that have emerged in the USA around the idea of conducting education outdoors – through initiatives such as nature-study, camping education, adventure education, environmental education, experiential education and place based education. This is a historical journey with an underlying message for educators, one we are able to illuminate through the educational theories of John Dewey. Central to this message is a deeper understanding of human experience as both aesthetic and reflective, leading to a more coherent comprehension of not just outdoor education, but of education itself.

The international volunteer and academic service-learning market is expanding rapidly, despite critics’ assertions regarding the dangers of development amateurism. We provide a framing of growth and concerns in the sector, along with an explanation of emerging best practices. We elucidate through four cases – two that illuminate extremes in partnership potential and two African cases that illustrate the challenges involved in implementing an ideal partnership type termed Fair Trade Learning (FTL). We conclude with a call for increased transparency in the international volunteer sector. We offer this article as an initial consideration of a current change process that is integrating increasing community voice, economic power and iterative feedback in international service programming.

In its ontological presuppositions, epistemological interests and methodological deliberations, critical theory of environmental education research (EER) is simultaneously scientific, normatively (and reflexively) critical, and non-idealistically practical. It is, therefore, a theory of practice, or praxis. Critical EE and its research aim for personal, social and ecological forms of justices achieved transformatively through the de and reconstruction of pedagogical, curriculum, policy and research practices that reconstitute various injustices. Missing from this reconstructive critique is the crucial role of aesthetics and the importance of affectivity in generating meaning about the agency of the researched by the researcher/actor. In this small scale self study of aesthetics and affectivity, we report on the deliberations of a workshop spread over two days about the aim of framing EER as a triad of environmental aesthetics-environmental ethics-ecopolitics. We emphasize how sensuous ethnography in walking provided a methodological means within the mobility genre of interpretive research. We aim to generate meaning about the concept of ecosomaesthetics needed in a new language and images of environmental education. Some key images are included in the following text while others are referenced and available on-line (see footnote 7).

For many years now, those of us engaged with outdoor education curriculum work in Australia have been debating questions
which orbit around the issue of defining outdoor education. We claim to be doing so in order to clarify what we are pursuing
educationally, our purpose, not only for ourselves but for others, so that we can legitimately stake out our position, our own
little piece of educational turf, amongst the other subjects in the school curriculum. However, this debate has never been
easy and any attempts to bring it to a resolution inevitably, it seems, settle some issues while heightening tensions in other
areas. In this paper I explore two of the more recent approaches to the question of outdoor education’s positioning in the
school curriculum: the question of distinctiveness and the question of indispensability. Then, through an historical excursion
involving Australian and US curriculum history, I highlight some of the difficulties created by shifts in language use. Finally
I argue, using definitions of outdoor education that emerged in the United States in the 1950s, that the distinctiveness of
outdoor education lies in neither a body of knowledge (content) nor skills and practices (process) but in a deeper level of
educational understanding which emphasizes ways of being.

The challenge course (CC) is a popular element in experiential education, providing individuals with activities and reflective debriefing that build numerous social and psychological processes. To date, little research shows if CC activities can be successfully implemented in a college classroom setting. Using an introductory course at a U.S. liberal arts university, this study examined the perceived strengths and limitations of a classroom-based CC intervention with intentional follow-up activities throughout the semester. Employing a qualitative, descriptive study design, the class instructors (n = 5) and CC facilitators (n = 9) described their experience in two separate 1-hr focus groups. Three overarching themes emerged from the data: (a) perceived benefits of the intervention, (b) perceived challenges of the intervention, and (c) pedagogical recommendations for future interventions. In addition, several subthemes within each theme were also revealed. Despite noting several obstacles, the participants indicated that CC programs provide a unique learning experience that can be modified for the college classroom.

Of enduring interest to philosophers of education is the intimate connection Dewey draws between Democracy and Education in this now century-old seminal work. At first glance the connection may appear quite simple, with the two terms commonly combined today as 'democratic education'. But there is significantly more to Dewey's connection between democracy and education than 'democratic education' suggests. Evidence for this greater depth can be seen in Dewey's choice of subtitle for his text: an introduction to the philosophy of education. In this article I illuminate some of the further riches Dewey offered to understanding democracy and education, central to which is his theorization of 'occupations' as this aligns with his attempts to articulate a 'coherent theory of experience'. As with democracy and education, the educational import of occupations cannot be captured with a mere combination of terms as in 'vocational education'. In both cases we are simply appending an adjective to education, which Dewey found problematic. What we need, he argued, is a sense of education 'pure and simple' with 'no qualifying adjectives prefixed'. An existential consideration of occupations enables just that, wherein occupations define the functional unities of life, the character of social groupings, the ways in which growth is arranged. As such they provide us with new ways of conceptualizing the structure of schools and the nature of learning. Here, democracy and education come together in a much more fundamental sense as expressions of life.

Using a dual neurocognitive systems framework, Piaget’s ideas are elaborated to allow for executive processes and post formal thinking. Developing imagination, emotional expression, and creativity through the ‘arts’ should not be seen as educational luxuries that are to be argued for in terms of philosophical ideals, rather, they should be seen as important for mental health, and essential aspects of nurturing the psyche in accordance with its evolving biological nature.

Scholars in outdoor studies have long engaged with the notion of experience in education. This effort is necessitated by its status as a ‘field based’ endeavour, one that often attempts to challenge educational orthodoxy. The construct of experience offers a possible way through the thicket of educational questions entailed within any programme of reform, but its interpretation remains an unresolved issue.
Any focus on experience draws education together with philosophy, as the two are intimately entwined. John Dewey – widely regarded as the chief architect of experience in
education – argued, ‘if we are willing to conceive education as the process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow-men [sic.], philosophy may even be defined as the general theory of education’ (1916, p. 383). In this chapter we build on Dewey’s pragmatism to outline an account of experience for outdoor studies, crafted also from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Purpose: Discourses celebrating Kurt Hahn's practical and intellectual contributions to the field of progressive education are ubiquitous. However, the centrality of sexuality in Hahn's educational aims is often misrecognized in contemporary accounts. The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical and historicized contextualization of Hahn's hypervigilance on young male sexuality as it pertained to his educational aims.

Design/methodology/approach: This is an historical analysis of sexuality in Kurt Hahn's educational aims and practices. It draws on Hahn's own writings and speeches, coupled with documents from his students and colleagues, educational historians, German historians and historians of both world wars. The paper is informed by critical theory as well as critical approaches to gender, sexuality and pedagogy.

Findings: Contrary to contemporary accounts, Kurt Hahn was neither a liberal nor modernizing progressive educator, nor was he interested in generalized sexual repression. Hahn developed a homophobic pedagogy due to his belief that inside all young males were the latent capacities to either be homosexual or contribute societal value. His political-aristocratic allegiances, desire to identify and educate future ruling classes and fear homosexuality was the death of social value led to the use of adventure as a form of preemptive conversion therapy.

Originality/value: This paper links several historical threads and analyses to provide a unique vantage point for understanding the origins of adventure as pedagogical intervention and Kurt Hahn's aims of education.

This paper uses an unconventional format to problematize a common dichotomy found in the theory and practice of experiential education. The paper comprises the contributions of five authors and begins with one author’s description of a potential real-life scenario that provokes the question of whether or not an art history lecture might be understood as experiential
education. Three of the remaining co-authors respond individually and independently to this question and the final author joins with the first in the concluding comments section. The key consensus of the responding co-authors is that simplistically equating the Deweyan notion of
primary experience with physical, tactile activity is a limited and limiting understanding of experience in education and that in fact, under the correct circumstances, a lecture can and even should be part of experiential education. Beyond this, the authors encourage educators to think carefully about the educational trajectory and contextual histories of the learners with whom they
work. Finally, the two authors of the concluding comments suggest that the field, in order to do justice to the educational possibilities of all experiences, must begin to move beyond John Dewey while at the same time finding ways to overcome the deeply entrenched dualistic concept of experience that continues to affect our practices and theorizing.

The article focuses on spirituality on two semantic levels: the first one analyses participants’ experiences during a winter expeditionary course on snowshoes and considers the question of whether residing in the winter landscape with a community of other people may acquire a spiritual dimension in spite of the non-religious environment. The second level verifies whether the trans-rational method of systemic constellations may be used as a research tool, that is, as a specific source for data collection (different from other sources and methods). The research applied a phenomenological approach to the analysis of unstructured interviews (n = 12) and constellation insights; the result confirmed indisputably
that certain kinds of experiences obtained in a completely nonreligious environment (namely, during a winter expedition on snowshoes in the mountains) can be considered spiritual. The answer to the second question is also positive, since the application of systemic constellations results in different data in comparison with their verbal acquisition. Symbolic images that point out the system and its unaccepted elements deepen the understanding of both the individual and the nature of their
spiritual experience.

A number of commentators have identified and critiqued an approach to outdoor experiential learning as, variously, Priestian , American and algorithmic. These comments raise the questions of what are the characteristics of this algorithmic paradigm of outdoor experiential learning and what are thought to be the problems with it? This paper will address these questions and describe what the author believes to be a new, emerging practice defined by these critiques that he has called the Generative Paradigm after Robin Hodgkin. This paradigm is described and placed in the western and global cultural and educational debates responding to issues of sustainability and human purpose.

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community.

In this piece I wonder within what archetypal configuration(s) American schooling largely takes place. I look at the present and give a brief review of the past to conclude that education denies archetypal experience by denying experience itself, thus itself being "godless" (except for the senex aspect of all institutions). Experiential learning—the life of soul and senses—is left to popular culture. Comparing Joseph Campbell's four mythological functions to the function of education, I find function three is the both the raison d'être and the modus operandi of most American schooling. By looking at the reaction to the loaded term "drugs" as a metaphor, I conclude both American education and the "general public" deeply fear transformative experience. I suggest no reforms, but offer only this lament.

In this piece I wonder within what archetypal configuration(s) American schooling largely takes place. I look at the present and give a brief review of the past to conclude that education denies archetypal experience by denying experience itself, thus itself being " godless " (except for the senex aspect of all institutions). Experiential learning—the life of soul and senses—is left to popular culture. Comparing Joseph Campbell's four mythological functions to the function of education, I find function three is the both the raison d'être and the modus operandi of most American schooling. By looking at the reaction to the loaded term " drugs " as a metaphor, I conclude both American education and the " general public " deeply fear transformative experience. I suggest no reforms, but offer only this lament.

Making educational places more inviting to learners is a key aspect of Invitational Theory. This paper introduces a simple technique for sensitizing learners and instructors to how their environment affects their feelings and ability to learn. It describes a learning exercise that may be used to assess, evaluate and transform places, to promote either calm reflection or creative energy as well as some experience based on three years of application in a college-level Geography course. The approach, founded in the S!mkhya–Yoga conception of the three modes of material nature, asks learners detect the roles of Sattva (peace, harmony, tranquility, awareness), Rajas
(energy, action, creativity, destructiveness) and Tamas (inert, veiled, ignorance) working together in their habitat and to think about how this balance may be adjusted to positive effect.
Learners found the approach novel but many welcomed this new way of envisioning their world.

This paper connects Democracy and Education to Dewey's wider corpus. It argues that DE's central objective is to offer a practical and philosophical answer to the question, What is needed to live a meaningful life, and how can education contribute? It argues, further, that DE is still plausible as " summing up " Dewey's overall philosophy due to its focus upon " experience " and " situation, " crucial concepts connecting Dewey's philosophical ideas to one another, to education, and to democracy. After a brief synoptic analysis of DE's major philosophical ideas, sections are devoted to experience and situation before a brief conclusion. Some mention is made throughout about the surprisingly significant role art and aesthetics can play in education.

The article focuses on spirituality on two semantic levels: the first one analyses participants' experiences during a winter expeditionary course on snowshoes and considers the question of whether residing in the winter landscape with a community of other people may acquire a spiritual dimension in spite of the non-religious environment. The second level verifies whether the trans-rational method of systemic constellations may be used as a research tool, that is, as a specific source for data collection (different from other sources and methods). The research applied a phenomenological approach to the analysis of unstructured interviews (n = 12) and constellation insights; the result confirmed indisputably that certain kinds of experiences obtained in a completely nonreligious environment (namely, during a winter expedition on snowshoes in the mountains) can be considered spiritual. The answer to the second question is also positive, since the application of systemic constellations results in different data in comparison with their verbal acquisition. Symbolic images that point out the system and its unaccepted elements deepen the understanding of both the individual and the nature of their spiritual experience.

Effective communication skills demonstrate the capacity and efficacy of any business graduate; however, the business industries have continuously raised their concerns on the lack of effective business communication (BC) skills, to serve the requirements of rapidly growing communication within and outside the organizations. Among many factors, teaching methods at higher education have been identified as a major factor that does not allow working skills to be developed. Scholars and researchers have tried to explore and test Experiential Learning (EL) techniques in teaching different courses of business administration programs. EL theory presents a playfield where learners can learn the best by doing (Kolb, 1984). Although business education around the world has already inculcated EL strategies into its system, in Pakistan EL theory is at its initial stage. In this regard, the researcher developed an ERE cycle which was based on Kolb's (1984) EL theory and tested its impact on the grades of the students of oral and written communication skills. The study was conducted using one sample t-test in the paradigm of quantitative research. Three classes of BBA and MBA from oral and written communication courses were selected for this study. This research compared mean scores of these classes with the population mean over the last three years. The results showed a significant positive difference between the sample mean scores and population mean. The study proved that EL based ERE cycle could prove very effective in the enhancement of the skills of business communication students that were reflected in their performance in exams. The study aimed to provide communication faculty, trainers and institutes the opportunity to explore and utilize the effectiveness of the ERE cycle and perform further researches to extend the utilities of EL based teaching methods.

Study abroad programs in the United States make great claims about the learning outcomes of an experience overseas. Beyond cultural orientation sessions, however, many do not address intercultural or cross-cultural issues. This study brings together two conceptual axes, experiential learning and cultural adaptation, to provide a teaching model for an introductory intercultural communication course that is specifically geared to the needs of American study abroad participants, but that can be adapted to function well in a variety of contexts in which learners from different cultures come into contact with one another.

This nonfiction essay tells the story of developing, instructing, and researching a field philosophy course in Isle Royale National Park for five years. Rooted in research on the ethic of care, environmental ethics, experiential education, and environmental pedagogy, this first-person narrative explores the the process of field-based teaching, the learning curve of becoming a researcher who is deeply involved in the studied phenomena, and the great joy of creating community in the learning group and with the natural world.

Loy n e s, C h ri s t o p h e r (2 0 0 2) Th e g e n e r a tiv e p a r a di g m. Jou r n al of Adv e n t u r e E d u c a tio n a n d O u t d o o r L e a r ni n g, 2 (2). p p . 1 1 3-1 2 5. Do w nlo a d e d fro m: h t t p://i n si g h t. c u m b ri a. a c. u k/i d/ e p ri n t/ 7 7 7/

Wellness je v českém prostředí vnímáno zejména v kontextu lázní, vířivek a masáží. Teoretický koncept wellness však nabízí více než fyzické a psychické uvolnění. V tomto příspěvku si přiblížíme tři modely, které tvoří základní pilíře wellness hnutí ve Spojených státech. Modely, které společně tvoří jeden z možných rámců pro práci v oblasti osobnostně sociálního rozvoje.