Experientialism

Experientialist curriculum theory and practice is a category, tendency, or school of thought in curriculum studies. The position asserts that curriculum should consist of learning experiences, not merely academic content or behavioral skills. For learning experiences to be internalized, a learner must relate them through careful reflection to previous experiences in life and aspirations for the future. The experientialist line of curriculum studies originated at the beginning of the 20th century, though its roots can be traced from John Dewey to Francis Parker and earlier to Johann Friedrich Herbart, Friedrich Froebel, Leo Tolstoy, Johann Pestalozzi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, humanist, and humanist educators of the Renaissance, who revived the work of Quintilian and others.

Experientialists are associated with traditions of progressive education and the emphasis that John Dewey placed on learning from experience. Interests, perceived needs, and concerns of learners are seen as legitimate starting points for education. Teachers, thus, need to be aware of [Page 363]student histories, contexts, and autobiographies and they need to involve students in decision making so they can learn to self-educate, becoming their own curriculum directors. Surface interests, when pushed to the deeper levels, reveal shared or common human interests. For example, these might include birth and death, justice and equity, love and hate, peace and war, how to live together, anxiety and depression, humor and joy, and more. The experientialist position is not content-free as some critics contend. Rather, the disciplines and informal areas of study are tapped by students to enhance reflection and to make their pursuit of interests more robust. The theory holds that expansive understandings will evolve as students deepen and broaden their interests as facilitated by good teaching. Moreover, experientialists advise that interests pursued lead on to other interests, in and out of school, and evolve for a lifetime.

Many different educators are considered as contributors to the experientialist line of thought. Early in the 20th century, Dewey and his progressive followers, such as Harold Rugg, Ann Shumaker, William H. Kilpatrick, Caroline Pratt, and L. Thomas Hopkins, are key examples. Rugg and Shumaker are known for the term child-centered school, Kilpatrick for the project method, Pratt for emphasizing that teachers should learn from the children they teach, and Hopkins for emphasizing integrated curriculum that led to democratic forms of interaction to enhance the emerging self. The Eight Year Study of the 1930s and early 1940s offered insight into school practices that actualized the potential of such ideas. In this landmark study, both students and educators learned from experience of their experimentation. Origins of both integrated curriculum and core curriculum can be found in reports and interpretations of The Eight Year Study. Such experi-entialist practices criticized the organizing center of curriculum as knowledge presented in an encyclopedic manner. Alternatively, the student became the organizing center. For Hopkins, fostering or facilitating the emerging self became the hub around which all learning experiences turned, and for Harold Alberty, the core of studies was social problems that directly affect student lives and the seed of concern for both personal and democratic growth—in search of a better life. One can turn to work by James Beane on integrated curriculum in middle schools for contemporary versions of core and integrated curriculum.

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