This presentation formed part of the HEA-funded workshop 'Critical thinking in action: developing analytical skills in Criminology students. An experiential learning approach' The workshop presented research and facilitated discussion on developing critical thinking skills in criminology students. Discussion of research results and use of a case study approach to teaching and learning highlighted how student views/concerns about their failure in developing critical thinking skills can be addressed via new directions in teaching. This presentation forms part of a blog post which can be accessed via: For further details of HEA Social Sciences work relating to active and experiential learning please see: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/detail/disciplines/Soc_Sci/Strategic_2013/ActiveandExperiential

1. What sort of agency is involved in
experiential learning? Learning
through action
Kevin McDonald
Middlesex University

2. Classical model of experiential learning
(thanks to HEA)

3. Characteristics and questions
- emphasis on process
- disconnection from personal narrative of learner, task
focused
- why learn is not addressed
- ‘experience’ is cognitive
- learning is cumulative
- absence of affect
- not embedded in social relationships within which
learning takes place
- evokes Herbert Simon’s theory of ‘problem solving’
- experience of ‘doing’ – perform a task – adequate?

4. ‘Experiential’ learning – but what is experience?
‘Experiencing something means much more than encountering
persons, events, or things of which we merely take notice. In
most encounters, we merely confirm a set of orientations we
have already acquired… But we ‘experience’ something when
the situation is so unfamiliar to us, so novel, that we cannot
apply our familiar knowledge and are surprised by the confused
state of our intentions, knowledge and moods. In situations
such as these, the significance of what we encounter is still
unsettled, and we lack the interpretive tools to get control over
this confusing and multilayered situation…. This is the case
whenever the novelty of a situation captures us… such that we
cannot escape the confusion of our intentions, knowledge and
emotions’, Axel Honneth, 2010 (emphasis added)
Suggests displacement, surprise, and openness

5. ‘Learning as problem solving’
constructed
against a world
that no longer exists:
- university as institution
- authority based on science
(transcendent authority
reflecting religious origins
of university, lecturer as
priest incarnating transcendent)
- strong programme of socialisation (ex patient role, student
role mirroring doctor and teacher)
- institution as ‘other worldly’ – sanctuary, universal values,
where ‘instrumental’ is less worthy
- the institution integrates the students experience and gives a
reason to study

6. Today: Students must construct experience through
holding together three fields of agency in tension: (Dubet
2005) Subjectivty
Imagination
Loss of meaning
(meaning)
Strategy
(opportunity)
Wonder
Passion
Dignity
Autonomy
Creativity
Uncertainty
Self-asopaque/incomplete
Emptiness
Routine
Competition
Opportunity
Cost/benefit
Career
Purely instrumental
relationship to study
Lack of professional
outcomes
Community
(norms)
Student culture
Us/them
Socialisation
Disorganization
Fragmentation
Disconnection
Hazing

7. Disassociation of dimensions of student experience

8. Previously:
- institutional power of university meant it could integrate
- student culture
- engagement with labour market
- experience of learning
Today,
- university is deinstitutionalising, its core dimensions are
separating/transforming:
- student culture youth culture
- university degree declining economic value
- increasingly difficult to construct relationship with study

9. Critical challenge for students:
less ‘how’ to learn
more how to make my experience of learning ‘my
experience’:
- ‘it doesn’t interest me’
- ‘I’m going through
the motions’
- ‘I don’t care about
the quality of what I do’
- ‘I don’t understand
what I’m doing here’
Disengagement as subjective defense
- weakness of ‘role’ means ‘I’ is more exposed
- ‘I don’t study, so failing doesn’t matter’
- drop out rather than fail (7.4% UK, range 1.3% - 25%)

10. To respond to this demands we think about agency:
- shift from discourse to practice (Whatmore 2006)
- break with logocentric model (I think therefore I am)
- practice turn
- new focus on making and doing
- ‘Making is connecting’ (Gauntlett 2011)
- building, sharing, doing, connecting
Particularly evident in changing forms of social action
- changing relationship with space: marching
occupying

11. The rhythm of the march, order and repetition,
individual relationship to ‘the whole’ – class, party,
organization etc

12. Tahrir Square: embodied experience: recognition of shared
vulnerability and care

13. Breaking gender roles

14. Embodied need for rest and protection

15. Other embodied needs

16. Care for place and each other

17. Life

18. Agency:
Vulnerability - need, food, security – shared and made public
- Importance of the embodied process of making – filming,
building websites, puppet, images, cooking, cleaning
- ‘sensory politics’
- type of communication very different from conference
- personal implication, embodied connection

19. Art and cultural action
Silmiyya (peaceful)
Strangeness: breaking ‘us’ ‘them’ dichotomoy
Art displacing the observer

20. Embodied presence in the Square brings politics into
being:
‘to suffer and to move, to engage other bodies… could
we understand action, gesture, stillness, touch, moving
together, if these were all reducible to the vocalization
of thought through speech?’ (Bulter 2011)
- what implications for the agency involved in ‘sensory
learning’?

21. The importance of improvisation:
- action guided by bodily experience and the senses
- intention exists, but goals can transform
- draws on DIY cultures
Nostalgic analysis: return to ‘craft’, imperfection is desirable,
sign of authenticity as opposed to industrialised perfection
Improvisation:
- ethic of co-creation
- temporal dimension: being in and attentive to the present
- cultural dimension: opportunity afforded by the particular
Relationship to the particular:
- break with ‘tyranny of generality’ (Wittgenstein)
- opens out to an ethic of care

22. Themes can be embedded in experiential learning:
- move from ‘testing ideas’ to ‘collaborative knowledge
building’ (Noguera Fructuoso 2012)
- complex and real tasks that justify transaction costs of group
work, with an outcome that matters
- use communications platforms in education context
Recognise different dimensions of learning:
- cognitive (debating, finding and using information, linking
ideas and contexts)
- affective (reacting emotionally, sharing emotions, chatting,
seeking general feedback)
- metacognitive (planning, clarifying, monitoring)

23. Collaborative knowledge building (teaching critical
thinking in action) (Noguera Fructuoso 2012):
TASK
RESPONSIBILITY
Design
Teacher
Organization – identifying
resources, negotiating,
Teacher/students
Execution
Students
Evaluation – what learnt, what Student/teacher (Teacher
experienced
responsible for accreditation)

24. Simple messages:
1. We need to move critical thinking out of an excessively
cognitive framework
2. The problem is not primarily the capacity of students to
undertake logical operations, but the capacity to encounter
themselves in experiences of learning
3. Social world is ‘deinstitutionalising’, highlighting the need to
understand agency (particularly in education)
4. The practice turn is critical, underlining embodied affective
creative learning to the ‘experiencing subject’
5. Improvisation is a key dimension of contemporary culture,
not nostalgia for past, but a situated ethic of the particular, the
basis of care
6. Critical thinking is built though action combining increasing
clarity around rules and procedures with openness to context,
intercorporeality and and improvisation (not unlike musical
improvisation)

25. thank you!