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Conceptualising learning from experience: Developing a model for facilitation

The key feature of adult learning is the the experience which learners bring with them. Whatever else they may be, adult educators are essentially workers with the experience of others. This paper describes a model designed to aid thinking about learning from experience and how it can be facilitated. How little we know about learning from experience Increasingly we are confronted with situations in which adult educators are working with many different learners and attempting to help them learn from their experience. This may be in the context of the recognition of prior learning and returning to study, adult basic education, vocational training and workplace learning or community intervention. What does adult learning theory tell us about how we can operate effectively in such situations? What research is there that can inform the decisions we make on a day-to-basis when we make an educational intervention in the classroom, workplace or the community? There is a lot of research and writing, of course, about teaching in which the teacher is the authority and the learner acquires knowledge from this source, but literature offers relatively little assistance when learners’ experience is the central resource for learning. What does the literature offer? While much has been written about the importance of learning from experience, the present literature falls short in providing frameworks that aid the facilitation of such learning. There is also a lack of attention in adult learning literature to the work that has been done, predominantly with adults, in the field of experience-based learning. Schön (1983, 1987) has drawn attention to the place of reflective practice, particularly reflection-in-action in learning in the professions, but his metaphorical modes of description mean that application to practice must necessarily be indirect. Kolb (1984) has produced a useful pragmatic device in his version of the Lewinian experiential learning cycle, but it is insufficiently wide ranging to sustain the weight of situations to which it has been applied. Jarvis (1987) has stressed the importance of the social context of learning from experience and developed a model, but this is complicated and limited by the particular empirical data set he used. Although Heron (1989, 1993) has provided the most sophisticated and theoretically rich accounts of the facilitation of adult learning so far; his models place much more emphasis on the role of the facilitator than on the features and dynamics of experience-based learning. None of these authors have sufficiently addressed the needs of those confronted with the typically context-specific and personally-embedded learning which characterises the tasks which adults face. Development of a model The paper explores the use of a model of learning from experience to aid learners, and those who assist them, to examine and remind them of their own facilitative practices. Such a model will succeed only if the elements represented are both central to an appreciation of learning from experience and if they are formulated in a way which ‘makes sense’ and are useable by practitioners. The key elements of such a model are presented in the paper and interrelated in a form designed to guide the design andprocessing of learning from experience in any setting. The proposed model represents a critical reflective approach which is context conscious. The model has been developed from the experiences of members of the Australian Consortium on Experiential Education (ACEE), an extended group of researchers and practitioners mostly based in Sydney, Australia who have been concerned with finding ways of conceptualising their own practice as learners and facilitators of learning. It originated in two parts. The first stage of development, which focused on reflection on experience, emerged following consideration of a