Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

534 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
acquisitive conception of experience as capital to be obtained and parlayed into credit, income,
or profit.
Excluded are realms of experiential learning that do not correspond to knowledge categories
most recognized in education, such as disciplinary knowledge driving curriculum areas, technical
vocational knowledge, communicative knowledge (understanding people and society), or moralemancipatory
knowledge (discerning systemic injustice, inequities, and one’s implication in
these). Sexuality, desire and fantasy, for example, tend to be ignored in educational discourses of
experiential learning. Nonconscious and intuitive knowledge, knowledge of micro-negotiations
within systems that struggles in bodies and discourses, and knowledge without voice or subject
that lives in collective action also tend to be bracketed out of these discourses.
CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO UNDERSTANDING
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Given these four problems in educational theory of experiential learning of mind–body separation,
emphasis on reflection, managerial disciplines, and exclusion, why not simply jettison
the experiential learning discourse? The short answer is that its democratic intents are important
in an institutionalized world where the cult of credentialing challenges any knowledge generated
outside market usefulness. Experience focuses on the messy problems and tedious practices of
everyday life which continue to run counter to the logic, language, and disciplines of science
and the academy, particularly those privileging the rational and, increasingly, the linguistic and
discursive. Experience exceeds language and rationality, because it emphasizes the crucial locatedness
of bodies in material reality that cannot be dismissed as a solely linguistic construction,
as certain forms of postmodern thought would try to do. Indeed, this signifier of experiential
learning is useful to challenge assumptions about the nature of reality and of experience. When
reexamined in terms of its textures and movements, attention to experience has the potential to
unlock a liberal humanist preoccupation with individual minds, knowledge canons, and rational
reflection, and shift the focus to embodied, collective knowledge emerging in moments and webs
of everyday action.
The embodiment of experiential learning is an ancient concept: indigenous ways of knowing,
for example, have maintained that spirit, mind, and body are not separated in experience, that
learning is more focused on being than doing, and that experiential knowledge is produced
within the collective, not the individual, mind. For example, a Canadian researcher named Julia
Cruishank shows how the life stories and knowledge development of the Yukon First Nations
people are completely entangled with the glaciers around which they live. The glaciers are not
inert environment, but alive and moving, rumbling and responding to small human actions; the
lines between human and nonhuman, and social history and natural history, are fluid. Writers on
Africentric knowledge, so named to distinguish it from eurocentric perspectives that fragment and
rationalize experience, have also shown how learning is embodied and rooted in collective historic
experiences of oppression, pain, and love which are inseparable from the emotional, the spiritual,
and the natural. The difference here from mentalist or reflection-dependent understandings of
experiential learning is accepting the moment of experiential learning as occurring within action,
within and among bodies. An embodied approach understands the sensual body as a site of
learning itself, rather than as a raw producer of data that the mind will fashion into knowledge
formations.
Embodiment however must not be mistaken for essentializing the individual physical body.
The body’s surfaces can be misleading; while sites for sensuality, they are neither identifiers
nor boundaries separating what is inside from what is outside. The core conceptual shift of
an embodied experiential learning is from a learning subject to the larger collective, to the