Learning to Learn from Experience

By Edward Cell

Subjects: Developmental Psychology
Paperback : 9780873958332, 245 pages, June 1984
Hardcover : 9780873958325, 245 pages, June 1984

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Table of contents

Preface

I. Effective and Ineffective Uses of Experience

ONE Learning and the Struggle to Be

Learning to Be a Significant Person

Dysfunctional Learning: A Humanistic View

TWO The Four Kinds of Experiential Learning

A Story of Learning From Experience (Dorothy Canfield)

A Model of Experiential Learning

Applying the Model

THREE Mapping Experience

FOUR Resistance to Learning

II. Learning In Three Areas of Life

FIVE Changing Our Emotions

Emotions, Feelings and Judgments

Functional and Dysfunctional Emotions

SIX Learning to Know Other Persons

Empathic Knowing

The Content of Personal Knowledge: Images

The Content of Personal Knowledge: Style

Seeing a Pattern

Doubting That We Can Know

SEVEN Learning and Life in the Organization

III. Some Strategies and Tools

EIGHT Active and Passive Experiencing

Asking the Right Questions

Cleansing the Doors of Perception

NINE Different Ways People Learn

A Profile of Learning Skills

Basic Skills in Experiential Learning

Creating a Profile of Your Skills

TEN The Journal as a Tool in Experiential Learning

Notes

Index

Description

Our success in life and living depends largely on our ability to learn from experience. Direct contact with things and persons affects every facet of our lives—behavior, perception, autonomy and creativity.

This overview of experiential learning explores the process of learning from experience, showing how it affects one's personality and offers means to cope with feelings of powerlessness and insignificance. The book describes the conditions under which experiential learning results in personal growth and those in which growth is inhibited. It shows how we test the validity of our interpretations and how we resist such tests.

Learning to Learn from Experience examines the learning process in various types of social relationships. It shows how learning in large groups differs from that in intimate circles. Finally it illustrates the interrelationships between experiential and academic learning.

This book also provides a wealth of practical strategies and tools enabling the reader to prepare for useful experiential learning.

Edward Cell is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of the Philosophy Program at Sangamon State University, Illinois, where he led an extensive revision of the Program for Self-Directed and Interdisciplinary Studies. A former Program Officer for the Division of Education of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is the author of Understanding Oneself and Others: Epistemology of Personal Knowledge, as well as books on philosophy and religion.