Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Second Edition

2. The Process of Experiential Learning

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets*

* From Little Gidding in FOUR QUARTETS, © 1943 by T.S. Eliot; renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Experiential learning theory offers a fundamentally different view of the learning process from that of the behavioral theories of learning based on an empirical epistemology or the more implicit theories of learning that underlie traditional educational methods, methods that for the most part are based on a rational, idealist epistemology. From this different perspective emerge some ...