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

5. The Structure of Knowledge

Experience is not a veil that shuts off man from nature, it is a means of penetrating continually further into the heart of nature.

—John Dewey

No account of human learning could be considered complete without an examination of culturally accumulated knowledge, its nature and organization, and the processes whereby individual learners contribute to and partake of that knowledge. Individual learning styles are shaped by the structure of social knowledge and through individual creative acts; knowledge is formed by individuals. To understand learning fully, we must understand the nature and forms of human knowledge and the processes whereby this knowledge is created and recreated. Piaget, in the conclusion to his 1970 ...