Learning from Experience

Imagine this: You’re backpacking in a foreign country, and your phone doesn’t have data. To prepare, you’ve studied the language online, and memorized vocabulary and grammar, but now you’re face-to-face with a local, trying to ask for directions to a good restaurant. As you stumble through unfamiliar sounds and cultural structures, you realize this is where the real excitement and development happen. This is experiential learning – it’s messy, it’s real, and it’s where you truly grow.

The roots of experiential learning stretch back much further than modern educational theory. For Indigenous Peoples, experiential learning has been foundational for generations. Communities have long passed down knowledge, values, and skills through hands-on experiences (Battiste, M., 2002). Different than much classroom learning, experiential learning draws heavily on emotional, relational, and contextual knowledge  (Battiste, M., 2002; Howe, S., 2023).

Observation and Reflection as Central to Learning

Experiential learning is a cycle of action, reflection, and change. David A. Kolb, is well known for describing this as a “learning cycle” with four phases. You can start at any point in the cycle:

• Concrete Experience (CE): This stage emphasizes personal involvement with people in everyday situations. The learner relies on their senses and is open-minded.
• Reflective Observation (RO): In this stage, the learner takes a moment to pause and reflect. They recall important details and emotions associated with the experience.
• Abstract Conceptualization (AC): This stage results in the creation or modification of ideas. Here, learning involves using ideas, theories, morals, and logic to understand problems or situations. The learner looks for uniqueness, patterns, connections, and gaps between the new and old information.
• Active Experimentation (AE): This stage involves naming insights or ideas to test further and then putting these new or modified ideas into practice, testing them out, and using the feedback to shape their next experience.

There is potential to learn in almost every situation you encounter in life if you use this cycle, and remember, if your thoughts and actions didn’t change, you havn’t truly learned.

Reflecting Critically

“There are lessons in everything…Experiences aren’t truly yours until you think about them, analyze them, examine them, question them, reflect on them and finally understand them. The point … is to use your experiences rather than being used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so that experiences empower rather than imprison.” Warren Bennis, in his book On Becoming a Leader

Every interaction, every conversation, every task, is a chance for personal growth and development. But the key to unlocking this potential? Critical reflection.

• If critical thinking is “thinking about a concept in a systematic, intentional way and coming to a reasoned conclusion”
• then, critical reflection is “thinking about your experience in a systematic, intentional way and coming to a different way of thinking or being.”

Critical reflection is different than everyday thinking. The difference between casual ‘remembering’ and ‘critical reflective practice’ is that reflective practice requires a conscious effort to think about events, develop insights into them, and apply those insights deliberately to future events. A commonly used method of critical reflection includes progressing sequentially through three questions.

• What? This involves a descriptive and objective review of the event or experience. The goal is to recount what happened without judgment or interpretation. This stage focuses on gathering factual information and details about the situation.
• So What? The “So What?” stage is the interpretive phase where you analyze the significance and implications of the event. This involves exploring your feelings, reactions, and the impact of the experience on yourself and others. It’s about understanding why the event was ‘ponderable’ and what it means in a broader context.
• Now What? The “Now What?” stage is the action-oriented phase where you consider the next steps and how to apply the lessons learned. This involves planning how to test, improve, or change your behavior/thinking in the future based on the insights gained.

Reflecting on Product, Processes, Context, and Premise

During the “abstract conceptualization” or “so what” stage of critical reflection, you can reflect at different levels. You do not need to reflect at all of these levels for every reflection but thinking in terms of the levels helps you push your thinking. People most commonly reflect at the product level and never move beyond this however reflecting on related processes, contexts, and premises are more likely to lead to transformative learning:

• Product: You evaluate the idea or project. Here you look at the concrete content of an event, or something you did, saw, or heard and plan for similar future situation.
• Processes: You focus on the methods and processes used. Here you consider what worked, what didn’t, and how these processes influenced the outcome. Insights can apply to future similar and different situations to because you are going to a deeper level of abstraction.
• Context: You consider the broader circumstances that surrounded the experience, including external factors like environment and culture. Once again insights can apply to future similar and different situations to because you are going to a deeper level of abstraction.
• Premise: You examine the underlying assumptions, beliefs, and values that guided the decisions. Here you question their meaning and effect on the events. Looking at this level provides insight into similar situations, different situations, and your own belief system.

How do you start?

Reflective practice starts with disciplined observation – watching, listening, and noting what’s happening around you (like an ethnographer). It’s about being aware of biases and trying to see the world as it truly is, not as you expect it, or want it, to be.

Sometimes it may include identifying a “critical moment”. This is when something happens that’s unusual or challenging, and it really grabs your attention. These moments challenge your assumptions and have the potential to make you think. Some examples of critical moments include when your actions do not produce the predicted outcome (whether it is a worse or better outcome); when you are confused, frustrated or excited about an outcome; or when something you saw or overheard was different than you anticipated. However it can also be something every-day, basic, and simple (Ethnographers are also drawn to these to understand a context and culture).

Why do it?

Many of us navigate through our daily lives without actively seeking out lessons from our experiences. Or we actively avoid thinking about difficult situations or get stuck in the “what” stage of rumination, without progressing to the consequential “so what” and “now what” stages. There can be great relief in pulling out an insight from surprising situations and using it in future scenarios. This practice fosters resilience. If you’re open to experimenting with this approach, you’ll likely find it beneficial in both your professional and personal life.

• Boyd & Fales (1983 p.100) claim that DEEP or transformational critical reflection “is the core difference between whether a person repeats the same experience several times becoming highly proficient at one behaviour, or learns from experience in such a way that he or she is cognitively or affectively changed”.
• As Robert Dilworth observed, “It takes time and practice to unlock the ability to reflect. The art of critical reflection takes even longer, and some never get there … When the reflection pushes to the deeper levels of self, it becomes possible to jettison dysfunctional assumptions and behaviors. Deep learning can then occur. It can become transformative learning.”

Reflective practice has huge benefits in increasing self-awareness, which is a key component of emotional intelligence, leadership, empathy, and in developing a better understanding of others.

Reflection and Ethnography

Ethnography is grounded in observation, reflection, and interpretation which are the very same elements that define experiential learning. When ethnographers enter a field site, they are engaging with lived experience. They watch, listen, participate, and then reflect critically on what those experiences mean within a broader cultural context. The emphasis on critical reflection also mirrors ethnographic rigor. Ethnographers interrogate what they see, theorize on what it means, and ask what to do with this new understanding.

The deeper levels of reflection (process, context, and premise) are especially relevant to ethnography, which seeks to uncover not just surface behaviors but the underlying systems of meaning and power. Additionally, the idea that experience isn’t truly yours until you reflect on it resonates with the ethnographic commitment to reflexivity. Ethnographers must constantly examine how their own identities, assumptions, and emotional responses shape their interpretations. This is not a weakness…it’s a strength. It allows them to produce richer, more honest accounts of human life.

For students in internships like you, every moment whether confusing, exciting, or mundane is a potential site of learning. And when approached with ethnographic attention, those moments can reveal not just what is happening, but what it means, and how it might shape who you are becoming. Although it will take time to adopt the technique of reflective practice, it will ultimately save you time and energy as it is a skill you will use your whole life.

References

Battiste, M. (2002). Indigenous knowledge and pedagogy in First Nations education: A literature review with recommendations. Apamuwek Institute. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

Howe, S. (2023). The current state is a crime: Decolonizing experiential education on the Brock University campus (Master’s thesis). Brock University.

Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.

Moon, J. (1999). Reflection in learning and professional development: Theory and practice. Kogan Page.

SkillsYouNeed. (n.d.). Reflective practice. Retrieved from https://www.skillsyouneed.com/ps/reflective-practice.html