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While Adult Learning practice often describes the critical importance of experience, a complete theory of experience in learning which includes neurology remains an open issue. This paper is an attempt to bridge the gap.
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Toward a theory of experience
p. 1
Toward a theory of experience
James Bohn, Ph.D.
Proaxios.com
“You live; you learn
you laugh, you learn; you breathe, you learn;
you lose, you learn; you choke, you learn;
you cry, you learn. ~Alannis Morisette
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to
the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the
sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then --- learn.” The Once and Future King, T.H. White.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 2
ABSTRACT
An essential tenet of adult education is the notion that learning from experience separates children’s learning from adult learning. This principle is central to adult learning theory. While many authors maintain this principle, the concept has received little in-depth analysis. This analysis, however, is needed if we are to make practical use of the experience principle. The goal of this paper is to assess experience along several different vectors, including the level of neurology, so it may be more clearly understood and thus useful to the adult learning and training community. Experience in the business community is analyzed at length. The paper is arranged in four parts: experience defined; range of experience; the components of experience, and recommendations for future analysis.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 3
INTRODUCTION
If you ask any adult educator what they believe is the primary tenet of
adult education, you would very likely hear the word “experience”. Experience
is dogma in the adult learning community (Knowles 1990, Brookfield 1986).
Adult education authors persuade us that adults have spent more time on the
planet and thus have had more time to “gain experience” but we are left trying
to understand what that means. What exactly is adult experience, and how
can adult educators can learn to use it? It appears there is a demand for this
kind of knowledge. Bennet and Fox (1993) wrote, “A significant proportion of
changing and enhancing professional performance is a function of learning
embedded in the day-to-day experiences of professional practice” (Challenges
for Continuing Professional Education, p. 263). So understanding experience
would be valuable in improving workplace performance.
Experience is happening to all of us all the time. I spilled coffee at work a
while ago, due to a lack of understanding of how a coffee system worked in a
learning lab. Having nearly burned myself (and embarrassed myself) I learned
from the “experience”. In other words, the incident caused me to identify a
situation which could hurt me, and allow me to recognize it next time around.
We could call this a new experience.
In another situation while driving: I pulled out from a curb to go a different
direction because I knew, from past situations, that the traffic would be so heavy
that I would never be able to cross it. Let’s call this learning from existing
experience.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 4
The goal of this paper is to assess experience along several different
vectors to more clearly understand it, and thus make it practically useful to the
adult learning and training community. It is arranged in four parts: experience
defined; range of experience; the components of experience with
recommendations for future research.
Experience defined
Defining experience is a bit tricky, since it tends to be solipsistic. In other
words, experience is in the eye and cognition of the beholder. Yet, in an attempt
to generalize some observations, this paper defines experience as:
A retrievable interpretation and memory of sensory and cognitive inputs
arising from an event or situation, which is embedded in the neurological
processes of the human brain.
Range of experience
“The word experience derives from the Latin experientia, meaning trial,
proof or experiment” (Daudelin, 1996, p. 36). Experiences come in all shapes
and sizes, some of which stay with people for a long time, some of which merely
fade away (Jarvis, 1987, p. 167). As one attempts to organize thinking about
experience, it becomes obvious that experience comes in a wide range of
actions both simple and complex, impressions both boring and sublime, and data
transformation both joyful and painstaking. Experience is a vast subject matter.
Throughout the paper, the following table will help organize multiple
aspects of experience and elaborate the relationships between them. The table
is arranged as a continuum ranging from left to right. It is suggested that as the
Toward a theory of experience
p. 5
experience data moves from left to right, a greater depth of experience is
attained.
Figure 1. Experience Continuum
Category Range of experience
Impact of the experience
Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Starting at the left of the table we see mere impressions or data that
simply pass by. Day-to-day events that merely pass by us automatically can, in
a sense, be called “experience.” In that mode our senses are picking up
impressions and sending impulses to the brain, yet that kind of experience rarely
constitutes long term change. I quote Jarvis (1987) at length to clarify this
distinction:
“In everyday experience, individuals may be barely conscious of the passing of time and they frequently respond to their experiences in a rather automatic manner. The fact is that as a result of previous learning experiences, people build up a stock of knowledge, biographically based, which is useful to their performance in such situations. For instance, people who drive their cars thousands of miles every year may rarely consider the intricacies of driving a car to work each day. Their response to the stimulus is almost automatic” (p. 167). We all have had these types of experience, and their very automaticity
allows us to move efficiently through life once we have grasped something
difficult. As Jarvis notes, driving a car is a difficult and challenging experience
Toward a theory of experience
p. 6
when we first start, but as time goes on, it becomes nearly automatic. He notes
in a chart defining learning that in such an automatic response a person “…is
reinforced but relatively unchanged” (1999, p. 39). This notion has been
challenged philosophically by Ostrow (1987), stating that habits we have may not
be as taken-for-granted or automatic as we might expect, in that habit is a
meaning perspective that we trust to make sense of our world. Yet, we have all
had day-to-day experiences that have vanished within moments never to return.
They are merely data that was briefly absorbed, then lost.
In the middle of the table we see experiences that hold our attention for
a while, yet eventually vanish. Experience that sticks with us for a while but
doesn’t really last is a common occurrence. Consider for example the
experience of taking an accounting class. Unless one becomes an accountant
who will use the material in day to day activity, the cognitions disappear very
shortly after the class is over. In other words, one cannot recall Generally
Accepted Accounting Principles, but the experience of having attended an
accounting class remains (McKeachie, 1988, p. 11).
As we follow the arrow to the far right end of the table, we all have
experiences that shock us or cause us to change direction. In one way or
another, a new experience demands our attention, “forces us to think”, “wakes us
up,” and has the potential to change us forever. Here Jarvis helps again. “There
are also situations in which people’s own stock of knowledge is insufficient for
them to cope with situations in a taken-for-granted manner. That is, when
people have a new experience, the stock of knowledge acquired through the
Toward a theory of experience
p. 7
process of living is not able to provide an automatic response” (1987, p. 167).
Jarvis refers to this new situation as a “disjunction” (1999, p. 38) and that brings
us to the first major component of experience, a new situation.
THE COMPONENTS OF EXPERIENCE
The next three sections of the paper isolate “components” or aspects of
experience. This paper takes the position that experience has three major
components: (1) A situation, (incident or event), (2) a cognitive engagement with
the situation or event, and (3) neurological/biological change as a result of the
cognitions.
Component #1 – The Situational Component of Experience
Situations are the grist for the mill of experience. Jarvis wrote, “When
there is a disjunction between individuals’ own biographies and the socio-
cultural-temporal world of their experience, then a potential learning experience
has occurred. This type of situation sometimes results in individuals having
such an experience exclaiming ‘Why has this happened to me?’ Other such
questions may also be posed; the point is that the situation may no longer be
taken for granted” (p. 168).
The notion of experience as an event or situation seems to be a
common observation. At it’s most rudimentary level “Experience is generally
defined as events that occur in an individual’s life that are perceived by the
individual” (Quinones, Ford & Teachout, 1995, p. 890). In a study of managerial
developmental experiences, Davies and Easterby-Smith (1984, p. 175-176)
noted that developmental experiences always “…included a significant element
Toward a theory of experience
p. 8
that was completely new to the manager. This meant that when he [sic] took up
the job it was no longer possible for him to use tactics and routines that he had
worked out in previous jobs: it was necessary for him [sic] to work out things
from scratch”. This sounds a great deal like Jarvis’ notion of a disjuncture
(1999, p. 66). So one major component of experience is situational: a new
setting or event that a person confronts.
Novelty as an aspect of a situation
Without some novel setting or aberration, our experience runs from day-
to-day in a hum of order, and we remain at stasis (see Table 1). Said another
way, “Each Monday morning is an experience, but not all are equally powerful.
Though most people emerge from the vast majority of our experiences
unchanged in any significant way, some experiences do have a significant
impact on one’s understanding of oneself, one’s view of the world, one’s sense
of right and wrong and one’s subsequent behavior. All experiences are not
created equal.” (Morgan, 1998, p. 62). He continues, “Transformational
experiences almost always forced people to face something different from what
they had faced before”. Morgan elaborates it another way later in the chapter
on experience as a teacher of managers: “One rule of thumb for the research
is that ‘a little more of the same’ is rarely powerful for development” (p. 81).
Therefore, we add a line to the experience continuum showing the importance
of the novel experience to forcing one out of one’s comfort zone to move
toward more learning.
Figure 2. Experience continuum – adding the novelty component
Toward a theory of experience
p. 9
Category Range of experience
Impact Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
Situation Familiar situations Novel situations
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Comparison between children and adults
As we proceed through each component of experience, we will consider
the difference between children and adults. Novelty could better describe
children’s experiences more than adults. Nearly everything is new to them for
many years of their lives. In fact, many of the novel experiences that children
have become the building blocks for other experiences later in their lives as
adults. Novelty probably grows broader for most adults, since they have
access to more money and deeper experiences as they grow old, but in
general novelty is common to both children and adults. The work world is the
great divide between children and adults, and it is to there we proceed to clarify
the novelty component a bit more.
Novel business scenarios as developers of experience
One way to examine the impact of novel situations as a component of
experience is to look at specific types of experience. McCall, Lombardo and
Toward a theory of experience
p. 10
Morrison, in their book Lessons of Experience (1988) give us insight into how
executive employment situations pose experiences to learn from. We will use
this as a structure to analyze experience. For example, experiences that
successful executives said made the most difference in their growth or learning
were: “fix-its, starting from scratch, projects, line-to-staff moves, and
exceptional bosses” (p. 124). They go on to further levels of detail to describe
what specific behaviors built experience, including dealing with the boss,
dealing with staff, having high stakes, adverse business conditions, change in
scope and scale. Every one of these “experiences” is a situation that a
manager had to face and overcome. In many ways, these kinds of experiences
generalize beyond the business world and transfer into the world of human
experience in general.
Meaningful versus meaningless experience
Experiences provide varying depths of impact in our lives. Experience
that happens under pressure tends to stay with us; when we are accountable
for an outcome, when something is at stake, we remember and learn more,
often retain more. We assign meaning to depending on the importance of the
event. As an example: I taught my fifteen-year-old daughter to fix a guitar
string. She had little interest in the activity until she had to fix one for me while
we were on stage. At that point, accountability changed the meaningless to
meaningful. She took it a step further and was able to change a string on her
own guitar a few days later with no help from anyone: she was alone at home,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 11
but wanted to use her instrument. What was meaningless to her became
meaningful and changed her skill level.
Figure 3. – Adding meaningless vs. meaningful
Category Range of experience
Impact Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
Situation Familiar situations Novel situations
Situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Comparison between children and adults
While meaningless and meaningful experiences happen to both children
and adults, it could be argued that the depth of adult’s prior experience builds the
meaning perspectives by which they see the world. As children, something very
meaningful could become the basis of even greater meaning later in life and
vice-versa.
I suggest that the activities of engaging a novel situation or assigning
meaning to a situation are ultimately the work of the mind, which brings us to the
Toward a theory of experience
p. 12
second component of experience. Before we take the next step, we revisit the
definition of experience presented at the beginning of the paper:
A retrievable interpretation and memory of sensory and cognitive inputs
arising from an event or situation, which is embedded in the neurological
processes of the human brain.
Component #2 – The Cognitive Component of Experience
If “Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental events,” (Gagne,
p. 4) then cognitive psychology has a place in the study of experience, since a
great deal of what we call experience is happening within the mind. “A major
goal of cognitive science is to formulate and test theories that underlie people’s
abilities to learn, understand and remember information” (Bransford, 1977, p. 4)
which in many ways is the essence of experience. McKeachie (1988) integrates
cognitive psychology and experience by saying “Well, cognitive psychology is
how we get organized and store in formation---how we make sense out of our
experiences, and then remember and use our past experience to guide behavior”
(p. 3, italics mine). Daniel Siegel, (1999), a medical doctor whom we will refer to
later in the paper, gives an interesting insight into the perspective of organizing
information “Experiences can shape not only what information enters the mind,
but the way in which the mind develops the ability to process that information” (p.
16.) Finally, “Learning involves the reorganization of experiences in order to
make sense of stimuli from the environment” (Merriam & Caffarella, p. 129).
These authors are saying is that cognition is a key component of arranging data
to shape our experience.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 13
During a study of acquisition of experience from a management game,
Dill&Doppelt (1963) stated that understanding cognitive processes were critical
to understanding how people learned from experience (p.44). To gain some
insight into what may be happening from a cognitive standpoint when someone
engages an experience, it is helpful to look at a cognitive information-processing
model.
Cognitive Psychology – Using an Information Processing Model
as a Structure for the Analysis of Experience
The following model is taken from Ellen Gagne (p. 9 –12), which shows an
information-processing model of cognitive activity using six components of an
input-output model.
Figure 4. – INFORMATION PROCESSING MODEL
1. Cognition starts with the transformation of energy (light, sound) to
electrochemical impulses.
2. Sensory register – This is a place in the central nervous system that holds
information for about a quarter of a second (p. 10).
3. Selective Perception (from among sensory register) - This is a reduction
or selection process which collects information from the sensory register
and prepares it for submission to short term or working memory.
4. Short term or working memory – this is the component of cognition which
stores data for about 10 seconds.
5. Long term memory - From an experience perspective, it appears long
term memory is the most important area of cognition, since for sensory
Toward a theory of experience
p. 14
input to become experience, it must make it to long term memory where it
can be retrieved in the future. If the senses register but nothing
transpires, the effect is lost in short term memory.
6. Effectors (action) muscles, voice, movement. This is simply the output of
cognition: action.
We now add the cognitive component using the information-processing
model to explicate the relationship between the situation and cognitions. While
each situation probably involves transformation of energy and some selective
perception, not all experiences become part of long-term memory. It is likely that
novel and meaningful situations are far more capable of entering long-term
memory and thus become part of our repertoire of experience.
Figure 5. Experience continuum – adding the cognitive component
category Range of experience
Impact Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
Situation Familiar situations Novel situations
Situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations
Cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long
of energy perception memory term memory
Toward a theory of experience
p. 15
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Comparison between children and adults
The cognitive processing model presented is one that accounts for both
children and adults. Theoretically, there is no difference between the
information processing of children and adults. “Although there is little empirical
evidence to support or refute the idea that adult thought patterns are
qualitatively different from those of children, the notion is intriguing” (Merriam
and Cafferella, 1991, p. 196).
Many meaningless and “familiar” situations have little or no experiential
power, possibly because there is little interaction on the cognitive continuum
beyond transformation of energy. This may explain why “rote” learning does not
stick very well. It is consistent with research that shows executives learn very
little in the classroom, but learn a great deal on the job (McCall, Lombardo &
Morrison). What is meaningless in the classroom takes on meaning in the face
of adversity and hardship and accountability.
Having set the stage with a cognitive information-processing model, we
articulate more deeply the ways which cognitions are processed. Knowledge
is represented in two primary ways in the ways in the mind, one of which
appears to have more impact on what we call experience.
Representation of knowledge
Toward a theory of experience
p. 16
Peter Jarvis tells a story of a minister who studied theology at a renowned
university and received a complete theological education, but found himself
stymied when he had to conduct his first wedding. “In short, he had mastered
the high-status subjects that classified his occupation as a profession. He had
learned his theory – his ‘knowledge why,’ …but he had not learned any
‘knowledge how’”(1999, p. 35). This distinction is important in our continued
assessment of experience, because it appears that one kind of knowledge is
more closely aligned with what we tend to call experience.
We refine the cognitive aspect of experience a bit more by showing how
information is represented in the mind. Once this information process occurs,
knowledge from the experience is registered in memory. In other words,
knowledge must be organized and categorized to be retrievable in the future.
This knowledge is generally divided into two categories: Propositional or
declarative knowledge and Procedural knowledge. “Propositions are used to
represent declarative knowledge. Procedural knowledge is represented by
productions. Declarative knowledge is knowledge that something is the case,
whereas procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do something” (E.
Gagne, 1985, p. 48, italics hers). Declarative knowledge is static; procedural
knowledge is dynamic. Quinones, et al, help make this distinction by stating that
“…attending a lecture describing the workings of an internal combustion engine
may increase a person’s level of declarative knowledge, and to some extent,
procedural knowledge. However, procedural knowledge is more likely to
increase as a result of hands-on experience repairing an engine” (p. 889).
Toward a theory of experience
p. 17
Propositional knowledge
Propositional knowledge refers primarily to semantic or declarative
knowledge: words, facts, and data. A proposition is more or less a complete
idea (E. Gagne, p. 37). “Information acquisition is a process in which new
propositions are created in working memory and then shipped off to long term
memory,” (Gagne, p. 42). This is important in the study of experience because
cognitions about data, facts, and words are a building block of experience.
“It appears that people attend to and store the meanings of sentences
(propositions) rather than the particular words used” (Gagne, p. 40). In other
words, we generally remember ideas, but not necessarily, the exact words.
Mezirow states this from a more philosophical perspective, yet seems to be
getting at the same thing when he explains, “Meaning perspectives refer to the
structure of assumptions within which new experience is assimilated and
transformed by one’s past experience during the process of interpretation
(1990, p. 2).” This is similar to Gagne’s statement, “Steps in acquisition make
no provision for learning totally meaningless information. This is because a
requisite for learning is that some connection be established between new and
prior knowledge” (p. 77). Here we see a delineation of child and adult
experience. The more meaningful information we have to build on, the more
powerful the experiences become. Adult generally have more experiences to
tap, by virtue of their years on the planet.
Procedural knowledge
“Procedural rules are involved in the application of scientific principles to real-world problems. But beyond the various subjects of school learning,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 18
procedural rules govern a great many common activities of our daily lives – driving an automobile, using a lawn mower, making a telephone call, o shopping in a supermarket. Think of what kinds of knowledge are possessed by a technician in a nuclear power plant or by an aircraft mechanic. Obviously, the knowledge most highly relevant to jobs like these, or to a whole host of other jobs, involves items of procedural knowledge, ranging from the simple to the complex. There should be little doubt, then that intellectual skills of this sort occur in an enormous variety of essential human activities” (R. Gagne, p. 379). So what does this cognitive knowledge mean to the world of adult
experience? What does the distinction between semantic/declarative and
procedural knowledge mean to the study of adult experience? Semantic
knowledge is important in the experience classification, but it appears that
procedural knowledge is the more important of the two, since experience yields
improved speed of processing and data acquisition. Bruce Bower writes “…the
mind’s limitations dictate that people use hueristics, or simple rules of thumb
derived from experience, to exploit consistent information patterns in their
surroundings” (p. 348). So developing procedural knowledge is critical to
thought efficiencies. Experience apparently helps that process.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 19
Figure 6. Experience continuum – Semantic/declarative vs. procedural
category Range of experience
situation Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
situation Familiar situations Novel situations
situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations
cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long
of energy perception memory term memory
Cognitive component
Knowledge
categories
Semantic/declarative knowledge
Procedural processing
Data, facts Rules of thumb
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Here we do not make a distinction on the continuum from left to right,
since both procedural and declarative knowledge can occur at any stage.
Semantic and procedural knowledge are in a parallel path on the chart.
However, the emphasis for procedural knowledge is more to the right of the
continuum, since procedural knowledge seems to be most closely associated
with what we call experience.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 20
Thus a second component of experience is the cognitive aspect of how a
situation is represented in the mind. Before moving on, we again revisit the
definition at the beginning of the paper:
A retrievable interpretation and memory of sensory and cognitive inputs
arising from an event or situation, which is embedded in the neurological
processes of the human brain.
Component # 3
Physical mechanisms to acquire, store and retrieve experience
As we move from the cognitive aspect of experience to the physical
retention of experience, Ellen Gagne’s clarification is useful. “A Propositional
Network is a hypothetical construct and should be kept distinct from the notion of
a neural network which is potentially observable” (Gagne, p. 40).
The next section of the paper is admittedly an area where angels fear to
tread, since it is the biology of the brain, and it requires a special expertise that
the author cannot claim. However it is a major component of experience, and
requires some discussion. Little has been written to clarify this important point.
Siegel (1999, p. 13) explains: “The brain’s development is an ‘experience-
dependent’ process, in which experience activates certain pathways in the brain,
strengthening existing connections and creating new ones.“ Physical
mechanisms in the brain store our experiences, so having some insight into them
does aid our understanding. “…as we develop from infancy to adulthood, the
design of the brain circuitries that represent our evolving body and its interaction
with the world seems to depend on the activities in which the organism engages,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 21
and on the action of innate bioregulatory circuitries, as the latter react to such
activities” (Damasio, p. 111).
Although models of cognition in the brain are debated and inconclusive
(Harpaz, [2.4]), the physiological system can be described as follows: (1) Human
cognition is implemented by neurons in the cortex. (2) Learning is done by
changing the strength of connections between the neurons. (3) Each cognitive
element corresponds to a large number of neurons that are distributed over large
regions of the underlying physical system (cortex) (Harpaz, Section 3.).
What is important for this paper is the fact that cognitive, situational
experience is stored in a physical mechanism, albeit very complex. Siegel
writes, “Experiences lead to increased activity of neurons, which enhances the
creation of new synaptic connections” (p. 14). “One neuron may
communicate with thousands of other neurons, and many thousands of
neurons are involved with even the simplest behavior. It is believed that these
connections and their efficiency can be modified, or altered, by experience”
(Encarta). “The cells that create brain activity – about one in ten of the total –
are neurons, cells which are adapted to carry an electrical signal from one to
another. Each neuron connects with up to ten thousand neighbors” (Carter,
1998, p. 14; also Siegel, 1999, p. 13). Therefore, we could say that the more
powerful the experience, the more likely it is that connections between neurons
would be strengthened. Damasio amplifies this more by stating,
The human genome does not specify the entire structure of the human brain. There are not enough genes available to determine the precise structure and place of everything in our organisms, least of all the brain, where billions of neurons form the synaptic contacts. This disproportion
Toward a theory of experience
p. 22
is not subtle. The are probably about 105
genes, but we have more than 10
15 (10 trillion) synapses in our brains. Moreover, the genetically
induced formation of tissues is assisted by interactions among cells, in which cell adhesion plays and important role. What happens among cells, as development unfolds, actually controls, in part, the expression of the genes that regulate development in the first place. As far as one can tell, then, many structural specifics are determined by genes, but another large number can be determined only by the activity of the living organism itself, as it develops and continuously changes throughout its life span” (Damasio, p. 108-109).
In other words, we do indeed learn through experience. He continues:
“Now I can say that since different experiences cause synaptic strengths to
vary within and across many neural systems, experiences shapes the design of
the circuits. Moreover, in some systems more than others, synaptic strengths
can change throughout the life span, to reflect different organism experiences,
and as a result, the design of brain circuits continues to change. The circuits
are not only receptive to the results of first experience, but repeatedly pliable
and modifiable by continued experiences” (Damasio, p. 112, italics mine).
Experience directly influences the brain. Researchers subjected 22
women who had been sexually abused as children to stressful situations. They
found elevated levels of corticotropin-releasing factor, a stress hormone. “All of
the women who experienced early trauma reacted to the stress with elevated
stress hormones. The levels were highest in those with current major
depression” (Marano, p. 72). She concluded that the consensus of the
scientific community is that “…early life experience counts…because it shapes
wiring patterns in the brain and sets the sensitivity level of the molecular
machinery behind all nerve-cell operations.”
Figure 7. – Adding the physical level to the experience continuum
Toward a theory of experience
p. 23
category Range of experience
Impact Mere sensory Change
Impressions Retention, memory
Situation Familiar situations Novel situations
Situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations
Cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long
of energy perception memory term memory
Cognitive component
Knowledge
categories
Semantic/declarative knowledge
Procedural processing
Data, facts Rules of thumb
Physical
(neuro-logical)
level
Little or no change Extensive change
in connections between in connections between
neurons neurons
Common way to describe experience
Things that don’t stick
“day-to-day” routine
Things that change us for a while
Things that change us permanently
Brief observations concerning child and adult experience
The table shows multiple aspects of experience. We are at a point
where we can make some comparisons between the experiences of children
and adults, since it has been argued that experience separates adults from
children.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 24
Where specifically on the experience continuum would adults be
qualitatively and quantitatively different from children? While children and
adults both have sensory and life changing experiences, the amount of major
life-changing events is generally far greater for most adults than it is for
children. This is perhaps why someone is considered “old beyond their years”
or “they appear to be very grown up” because in part they have had many
crises at a young age that might normally be experienced by adults.
In general, most adults will have a greater quantity of general
experience, simply because of years of the earth. Qualitatively, each person
may be dramatically different, depending on SES, geography and other factors.
For example, a child reared in Belfast during the “Troubles” will be more street
wise and experienced in many things than an adult in suburban America who
has never experienced violence in their backyard. Even with that as the case,
however, an adult in Belfast during the same time would have a wider range of
experience to link to and elaborate.
A prominent adult education theorist Steven Brookfield asserted, “this
childhood-adulthood difference is not a hard and fast distinction, however.
Chronological age is not necessarily correlated with increased breadth and
depth of experience. An adult’s work life can be forty years in which one year’s
activities and experiences are repeated forty times. A ten-year marriage can
be one year’s habitual interactions repeated ten times. There are single
teenage mothers living on the streets in my own neighborhood whose
Toward a theory of experience
p. 25
experiences of certain realities of life in New York are far more intense and
varied than my own” (Brookfield, 1991, p. 37).
Add to this a quote from Phyllis Cunningham, a primary thinker in adult
education:.
“Critical reflection is for Mezirow an adult activity and thus perspective transformation is an adult learning theory. This promotion of adult learning as distinct from children’s learning is problematic since Mezirow is limiting his adult learning to communicative action, as defined by Habermas. Presumably, any aged learner in the instrumental, hypothetical, deductive world apparently would learn the same way. This seems contradictory but Mezirow does not clarify the point. When reading Mezirow’s assertion that critical reflexivity is uniquely adult, I thought about the Intifada. Depending on the social context, might not children through praxis, gain insights and strategies for action, demonstrating critical awareness? To what degree does perspective transformation depend on cognitive structure development? At issue here is an impassioned search for a theory of adult, rather than human, learning” (Cunningham, p. 185, italics mine).
Novel situations happen to both adults and children, but quantitatively,
adults simply have more access to more novel situations. Meaningful and
meaningless situations happen alike to adults and children, yet again, the
sheer quantity of days an adult has gives them an edge in this race.
CONCLUSIONS
Experience can be evaluated from multiple angles. We have suggested
three major components of all experiences: a situation, cognitions, and the
physical machinery to absorb the experience. This theory is consistent with the
work of Siegel, a psychiatrist and medical doctor, who maintains “The mind is
created within the interaction of physiological processes and interpersonal
experiences. The structure and function of the developing brain are determined
Toward a theory of experience
p. 26
by how experiences, especially within interpersonal relationships, shape the
genetically programmed maturation of the nervous system” (p. 2). Antonio
Damasio concurs “ Herein lies the center of neurobiology as I see it: the process
whereby neural representations, which consist of biological modifications created
by learning in a neuron circuit, becomes images in our minds; the process that
allows for invisible microstructural changes in neuron circuits (in cell bodies,
dendrites and axons, and synapses) to become a neural representation, which in
turn becomes an image we each experience as belonging to us” (Damasio, p.
90).
It also seems then that the majority of what we call experience is in the
cognitive domain. The utilization and orchestration of many, many cognitive
resources including locus of control, self-efficacy, problem solving, decision-
making, judgment, analysis (sizing up a situation, sizing up people), creativity,
cause and effect, trial-and-error are the essence of experience. It is a mental
event and mental transactions, along with mental or cognitive storage of the
event.
Distinction between novices and experts
If experience makes a difference in adult lives, one thing should be clear:
those adults with experience should show some evidence of the experience of
experience. In point of fact, they do. First of all, experts (chess masters for
example) recognize meaningful patterns more quickly than novices. “In each
case, expertise in a domain helps people develop a sensitivity to meaningful
patterns of information that are not available to novices” (Bransford, et al, 1999,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 27
p. 20). Secondly, experts organize knowledge more effectively around
“principles” or big ideas” (p.25-27). They also tend to see interrelationships
between knowledge whereas novices are sequential. Thirdly, experts have
“fluent retrieval” of knowledge (p.32), that is experts “chunk” knowledge more
effectively and thus can hold more in working memory.
Fogarty, Wang and Creek (1984) note that research between novices and
experienced practitioners “a general finding is that expertise often involves the
presence in memory of a well-organized knowledge base and the ability to apply
knowledge effectively to environmental cues and problem features” (p. 22). In
other words, experienced people have a set of rules of thumb that guide their
thinking. This fits with cognitive theory in that procedural knowledge, the going
over and over of situations that have happened to the person, builds a stock of
procedural knowledge that they can quickly tap.
A sense of having done something before, “been there; did that” provides
a quicker solution and a cue for the person to follow. The experience component
is having seen the situation before. That’s where the speed of processing
comes in. Experienced people “…do not consider a large number of
alternatives in solving problems in such domains as chess, algebra word
problems and mechanical problems in physics. Instead, they rather quickly
access an appropriate solution path based on their mental representation of the
domain” (p. 23). This suggests that experience seems to be procedural
knowledge. A person with experience more quickly assesses the hazards,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 28
benefits and complexities of a situation than a novice. There is a sense of “I’ve
seen this before.”
Experienced people also can “get more mileage” out of a situation,
because they can use a situation more effectively than a novice can. In the study
of novice and experienced teachers, they noted that when confronted with
student initiation of behavior, novices used more “management” strategies in the
classroom, whereas experienced teachers used more addition strategies. For
example, when students initiated ideas spontaneously, novices tended toward
management or control of the class, whereas the experienced teachers used the
student input to increase the learning. Experts used prior knowledge more often
(83% as opposed to 40%); Experts used more goal strategies (83% as opposed
to 60%). For example, experts used “curriculum integration” as a goal strategy
9% of the time as opposed to 3% for the novice teachers. The point is that
experience does make a difference in the cognitive strategies used.
This is consistent with the author’s experience interviewing a nurse (Sue,
trip to Las Vegas, 3/23/2000, Sun Country Airlines) who said that you would
“never put a novice into the ER. People need baseline knowledge of healthcare
to be effective under pressure, and your experience with other patients, reading
vitals, observing conditions, and other interactions, builds your self-confidence.”
Benefits of Understanding Experience
If people gain experience throughout their lifetimes, and that experience is
accessible to them, there should be some benefits. The following are suggested
practical benefits gained through experience.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 29
Capacity for assessing situations, including emotional risks – been there;
did that – I’ve been burned.
Empathy – The ability to understand someone else.
Truisms that are shared by others with similar experience – Jarvis makes
a point of this when he writes about how students react to into a job and are told
by “experienced practitioners, ‘forget everything you’ve learned in school’. When
they return to the school they frequently complain, ‘all this stuff we learn here is
irrelevant,’ or ‘theory is worthless!’ Nearly all express the excitement of being in
the practice situation and bemoan how boring and useless it is to learn this
theoretical knowledge. Educators in all professions have experienced this” (p.
14). While a novice might say, “I think I know what you mean”, an experienced
person would relate to another experienced person by using the phrase: “I know
exactly what you mean.”
Tacit knowledge -The most experienced among us have access to
something called “tacit” knowledge, that we don’t even know what we know.
Jarvis, (1999) wrote “Tacit knowledge, then, is learned from experience, either
preconsciously - - - that is, without having entered the conscious mind, or
consciously, and has been forgotten or even repressed” (p. 47).
Rules of thumb
The speed of procedural processing has additional benefits. In the June
27th
, 1999 edition of the Milwaukee Journal, Joan Lloyd asked people what they
had learned from experience. “A few weeks ago, I shared some life lessons
learned though experience on the job. It appears that a number of you have
Toward a theory of experience
p. 30
earned your Ph.D., in the school of life as you responded to lessons you’ve
learned” According to Lloyd, those lessons were as follows (p. 1 – Employment
section): “Be careful what you say. Never steal the credit for someone else’s
idea. Never forget that the workplace is like a submarine. Make new people feel
welcome. People eventually move along. Choose your battles carefully,” etc.
Note that all of these “lessons” are rules of thumb based on experience.
“Experiential learning seems to be restricted to a particular type of learning that
involves participation or emotional involvement” (Jarvis, p. 164).
Suggested further research in the HRD community
Since we have this understanding of experience, what advantages might
we obtain in the HRD community? The following areas would be of great utility
to the human resource community in particular and to organizations at large.
People pay other for “experience” so it might be worthwhile to engage research
to tap the value of the experience.
Hiring – tell me about your experience. Learning effective ways to
analyze experience would improve hiring practices.
Meaning: Ensure that learning experiences will have some meaning to the
attendees. Have them assign meaning, perhaps in the presence of others.
HRD teams need to understand that rote learning is not likely to “stick”
Training and development must require experiential activities to integrate
Propositional learning with Procedural learning. McKeachie wrote, “…in any
course there are several levels of learning going on. We tend to focus on
learning and knowledge in the course. We know now that these individual facts,
Toward a theory of experience
p. 31
individual bits of knowledge are not retained very well and seldom are retrieved
once the examination is over” (p. 11).
Using experienced people to teach in a seminar. Rather than being
intimated by an experienced person within a class, facilitators would do well to
take advantage of those with extensive experience.
Ask experienced people what rules of thumb they have learned. Since
experienced people have “cut neurological ground” they have valuable resources
to offer to others in a learning situation.
Mentorships have empirical validity. Those with experience can indeed
help others to avoid problems and pitfalls.
Capability to anticipate – Experience should be helpful during strategic
planning or other exercises requiring foresight based on judgment and rules of
thumb.
Paying for experience really does have some value. People who have a
network within a company, who have taken the time to build relationships with
others so those things move smoothly, are worth paying for. An example: Within
my company, we recently hired two VPs who are both still learning their way
around the organization. The time it takes them to learn and gain experience of
the organization affects the rest of the team. Now this is not to say that
someone who just stayed at a place for 25 years and did the same job has
valuable experience. It is to say that those who have a “track record” of being
able to deliver on projects and lead teams are very likely to have a network which
Toward a theory of experience
p. 32
allows them to do so. In other words, they have the procedural knowledge at a
tacit speed level.
What this chart shows is that propositional knowledge or factors are
where we start, but the more familiar we become, the better our performance.
Here’s where the opportunity is – helping employees to learn faster so they can
be productive quicker. This needs to be done without fear.
Figure 8. Comparison of a new person versus and experienced person in the
workplace.
NEW PERSON EXPERIENCED PERSON
FEAR COMFORT
Needs to learn names Already knows the important people in his or her work group
Needs to learn places
Knows the buildings and grounds
Needs to learn policy Knows which are relevant, which are meaningless and which are often violated
Needs to learn the communication practices of the organization
Knows how information travels
Needs to learn the communication practices of individuals
Knows who likes what kind of communication product (e-mail, paper, face-to-face, etc.)
Needs to learn individual psychology: what makes people in this organization tick?
Already know the hot buttons of others, who is sensitive about what
Needs to learn other resources that are available to him or her
Already know where corporate keeps the cash, etc.
Needs to learn what groups are in or out
Already knows who has influence and who is an orphan
Needs to learn traffic patterns Has been going to work for multiple years and has it down to seconds
Needs to learn organizational history Knows the past
Needs to learn culture – the way things are done around here
Knows the rules
Needs to learn the unwritten rules Knows the unwritten rules
Needs to learn people networks Knows how information travels on the grapevine
Toward a theory of experience
p. 33
NOVELTY FAMILIARITY
CAVEATS
The reality of experience is one thing; the validity of experience is quite
another. Simply because one has experience in something, that does not mean
the experience is accurate, useful, meaningful, valuable or even interesting to
others.
Secondly, our experiences may become limiting. In other words, they
may become the basis of our prejudices.
Thirdly, our experiences may limit us in seeing clearly. When someone
has had an experience of injustice, and they see someone in a similar
circumstance, they may be reacting to their own situation of injustice and support
the person, rather than seeing the situation objectively.
Finally, having an experience does not necessarily prevent us from
making a similar mistake. Just because we have had a bad experience, other
factors may contribute to us repeating a bad experience over and over again.
Although we retain our definition of experience as a retrievable
interpretation and memory of sensory and cognitive inputs arising from an event
or situation, which is embedded in the neurological processes of the human
brain, ultimately experience is still solipsistic – it belongs to the person alone.
Toward a theory of experience
p. 34
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