a theory of experience (for training and learning)

Toward a theory of experience

p. 1


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.


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.


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.


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


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


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


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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


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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


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Impact Mere sensory Change


Situation Familiar situations Novel situations






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


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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,


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but wanted to use her instrument. What was meaningless to her became

meaningful and changed her skill level.

Figure 3. – Adding meaningless vs. meaningful





Situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations







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


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:




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.


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


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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





Cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long

of energy perception memory term memory


p. 15







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


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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).


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,


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.


p. 19

Figure 6. Experience continuum – Semantic/declarative vs. procedural


situation Mere sensory Change


situation Familiar situations Novel situations

situation Meaningless Situations Meaningful situations

cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long


Cognitive component

Knowledge

categories

Semantic/declarative knowledge

Procedural processing

Data, facts Rules of thumb






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.


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:




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,


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


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


p. 23






Cognitive 1 Transformation 2 selective 3 working 4 long


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






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.


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


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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


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,


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,


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.


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


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,


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


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


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.


p. 34

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