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Coming to know oneself throughexperiential educationRobyn Zink aa Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, W1-34 Van VlietCentre , University of Alberta , Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H9,CanadaPublished online: 26 Apr 2010.
To cite this article: Robyn Zink (2010) Coming to know oneself through experientialeducation, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31:2, 209-219, DOI:10.1080/01596301003679727
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Coming to know oneself through experiential education
Robyn Zink*
Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, W1-34 Van Vliet Centre, University of Alberta,Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H9, Canada
This article draws on the work of Foucault to explore why students on aresidential program talk about learning about themselves as if it were an epiphanyand one of the most empowering aspects of the program. Foucault’s schema ofturning to the self suggests that the pleasure students experience at ‘discovering’themselves is a logical response to what he terms as one of the most powerfultechnologies of the self. Butler’s work on giving an account of oneself is used toinvestigate the terms through which learning about the self occurs. She extendsand inverts Foucault’s schema, suggesting that one is only required to give anaccount of the self in the face of another. To become self-knowing requiresrecognition by another and recognition of others. While contemporary experi-ential education has been shaped by the maxim that nothing is more relevant tous than ourselves, I argue that perhaps this maxim should read; ‘Nothing is morerelevant to us than those around us’.
Keywords: experiential education; Foucault; Butler; technologies of the self
Introduction
The good thing about this place is that it teaches you about yourself. (Brian)1
This comment is made repeatedly by Year 9 students when asked what they have
learnt as they come to the end of a nine-week residential program. When they talk
about learning about themselves it is as if it is some sort of epiphany. Alan’s
declaration that, ‘I never really knew myself before. I thought I knew who I was ’til I
came here. Then I realised I was quite different to what I thought I was’ is a
sentiment shared by many of the students. Along with being a revelation to
themselves, many consider that ‘knowing who they are’ will be one of the most useful
aspects of the program they will take into their everyday lives. Students describe
knowing who they are as enabling them to be better learners and to work more
effectively with other people. I was struck by how powerful these young people found
learning about themselves to be. A number expressed a degree of anger and
resentment that this was not something they had already learnt. Some of the students
were so passionate about the power of learning about themselves they were
determined to get their schools to introduce some of the concepts and activities
used on the residential program.
In this article I draw firstly on the work of Foucault (2005) to explore why coming
to ‘know who I am’ appears to be such a powerful learning experience for these
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 0159-6306 print/ISSN 1469-3739 online
# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01596301003679727
http://www.informaworld.com
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Vol. 31, No. 2, May 2010, 209�219
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young people. Secondly, I use Butler’s (2005) work on giving an account of oneself to
examine the terms through which learning about the self occurs. I begin with a brief
description of the residential program and some of the tools the students felt enabled
them to learn about themselves. This is followed by a discussion of experiential
education as this pedagogical approach informs everything that occurs on the
residential program, and then an outline of the research process for this study.
Foucault’s work on technologies of the self is utilised to examine why these studentsfind learning about themselves so empowering. I draw on Butler’s work on ‘Giving
an account of oneself ’ to consider the relationship between coming to know oneself
and being recognised by an Other. This is a reminder that experiential education is a
social process where relationships with others are fundamental to developing an
understanding of self, rather than the individualised and the interior process it has
become in many contemporary contexts.
The residential program
The nine-week residential program is run by a State-funded school in Australia with
the aim of delivering innovative and high-quality leadership and enterprise
educational programs. Groups of six to eight Year 9 students from eight different
State secondary schools attend the program for a term. The pedagogical approach of
the school reflects current research about how young people learn (see, for example,Bahr & Pendergast, 2007; Carrington, 2006; Cole, Mahar, & Vindurampulle, 2006).
Both the nature of residential living and the curriculum requires students to engage
in collaborative and team activities. Building relationships between students, and
students and staff is a central focus of the program. For many students the
friendships they develop and the relationships they have with staff contribute to this
program being the highlight of their schooling thus far. Students progressively take
on more of the day-to-day running of the school through the term along with
increasing responsibility for ensuring the well-being of the school community.
Students participate in a range of experiential and outdoor activities and
problem-based learning projects to develop specific leadership and teamwork skills.
The students often comment that one of the differences between the teaching on this
program and at their home school is that they are left to work out the problem
themselves, whereas at school the teachers tell them how to do everything. Reflection
is a key pedagogical tool utilised on this residential program to facilitate students to
identify and articulate learning. Students participate in half an hour of unguided
reflection every day. Each activity culminates in some form of reflection. This is thefirst time that many of the students have engaged in formal reflection as a
pedagogical process.
The school uses a range of tools to help students learn about themselves, about
leadership and about other people. One tool which students find particularly useful
is what they call the ‘brain theory’, which refers to Ned Herrmann’s Whole Brain
thinking model. This model provides a metaphor for describing four different
preferences people have for taking in and processing information. The model divides
the brain into four quadrants. The left brain is either blue, representing logical and
analytical thinking, or green, representing organised and sequential thinking. The
right brain is either yellow, for holistic and intuitive thinking, or red, representing
interpersonal and feeling-based thinking. The Herrmann Brain Dominance
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Instrument (HBDI) allows people to identify their preferred method of taking in and
processing information (Herrmann International, 2008).2
Experiential education
Experiential education is the primary pedagogical tool utilised at the school and is
commonly defined as learning that involves participants in direct experience and
focused reflection (Association of Experiential Education, n.d.). There are many
models of reflection in experiential education, but they generally follow John
Dewey’s (1938/1997)3 model where there is an action directed by an idea, an event or
action with consequences takes place, followed by reviewing or reflecting to identify
what occurred and what can be taken from this experience onto other events (Beard
& Wilson, 2006; Dewey, 1938/1997). This model is infused in the curriculum at the
residential school as students are exposed to increasingly complex situations and are
required to progressively take greater responsibility for their actions.
Experiential education tends to be seen as a methodology which can be applied
to many learning contexts (Beard & Wilson, 2006). There is much less literature
addressing the question of what is to be learnt through experiential education
(Hovelynck, 2001). Luckner and Nadler (1997) express a common sentiment when
they state: ‘The effectiveness of experiential learning is derived from the maxim that,
nothing is more relevant to us than ourselves’ (p. 3). Dewey (1938/1997) argued thatexperience is ultimately social as we live in a world of things and people. He warns
that experience becomes something that belongs exclusively to the individual having
the experience when this is ignored. One of the critiques of contemporary
experiential education is that the sociality of experience is overlooked; experience
and learning from experience have come to be seen as individual processes. Fenwick
(2001), for example, suggests that a major conception of experiential education
presumes ‘an independent learner, cognitively reflecting on concrete experience to
construct new understandings’ (p. 7). Beard and Wilson (2006) point out that all
learning is personal and the filtering of experience is an individual process. The
students on this residential program conceive of their learning largely in this way, in
that they had a personal experience which they have filtered in such a way as to make
sense to them.
The research process
The data which has prompted the questions of why students find learning about
themselves such a revelation, and what the terms are through which this learning
occurs, comes from a two-year study at the residential school examining students’
perceptions of the program. The study included pre- and post-program question-
naires and focus group interviews with students near the end of the nine-week course.
I was one of the principal researchers on this project and conducted many of the
focus group interviews. Students were asked what they liked and did not like about
the time at the school, and what they thought they were taking away with them. The
quotes used in this paper are drawn from focus group interviews. Many of these
interviews occurred in the latter part of the study when we started to ask students to
elaborate more fully on why they thought it was good to learn about themselves. This
was in response to earlier interviews where students clearly identified learning about
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themselves as one of the best parts of the program. All of the students we interviewed
saw learning about themselves as a positive aspect of their time at the school.
Foucault and turning to the self
Students saw the problem-solving tools they learnt to use at the residential program
as useful, but learning ‘who I am’ appeared to be the most powerful thing they
learnt. They talked about it as if discovering themselves was a revelation to
themselves. It is to the question of why it is they find coming to know themselves so
powerful that I now turn. Foucault’s work provides some useful insights into this
question, as one of the things that he was concerned with was the ways in which
humans develop knowledge about themselves (Foucault, 2000a). Foucault did not
see human beings as substantial subjects, but there are ‘only different technologies
through which the subject is created or by which (s)he creates him or herself ’ (Besley
& Peters, 2007, p. 6). Foucault saw the subject as a process of becomings that were
historically contingent and open to change, rather than consisting of essences
(Foucault, 2000b). He became particularly interested in the techniques of self-
formation in his later work. By this he meant those
technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or withthe help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls,thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain acertain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 2000a,p. 225)
Foucault traces how technologies of the self shifted from an injunction to care for
oneself, where if one seeks one’s own good, one acts for the good of others, to an
injunction to know oneself (Foucault, 2005). In Greco-Roman cultures, care for the
self was fundamental to social and personal conduct and prepared one to participate
in the State (Foucault, 2000a). Care of the self required one to transform oneself, to
become something other than what one was. He argues the injunction to know
oneself became the more important of the two principles, in part, due to Christian
morality where to know oneself is necessary for self-renunciation. Second, but more
importantly, Foucault describes the Cartesian moment as a conceptual turning point
where knowledge of the self became the first step in the theory of knowledge
(Davidson, 2005). Prior to this, Foucault argues, the subject was not capable of truth
unless one changed one’s mode of being. Paras (2006) points out that, for Foucault,
the crux of the modern subject, which emerged through the Cartesian moment, ‘was
the very notion that the subject possessed a truth, and that this truth could be
attained through a process of introspection and discovery’ (p. 140). The subject
followed the same logic of ‘reason’ to access knowledge about themselves as they
applied to the world around them. This method of developing knowledge of the self
constituted a relationship of the self to the self as if there were an essence to the
subject (Foucault, 2005).
Foucault likens knowing the self for itself to a form of conversion. He suggests an
image of ‘turning around towards the self by turning away from what is external to
us’ (2005, p. 207) to describe the shift from care of the self, to the injuncture to know
the self for itself. He suggests a schema by which one establishes such a relationship
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of the self to the self. In applying ourselves to ourselves, Foucault described how we
are required to
turn away from everything around us. We must turn away from everything that is notpart of ourselves but which might grab our attention, our diligence, and arouse our zeal.We must turn away from this in order to turn round to the self. Our attention, eyes,mind, and finally our whole being must be turned towards the self throughout our life.We must turn away from everything that turns us away from our self, so as to turnourselves around towards our self. (Foucault, 2005, p. 206)
Wisdom and knowledge are found by seeking the centre of ourselves and fixing
ourselves to this point, away from those things external to us. It is this which
Foucault refers to as anticipating a notion of conversion. Within this schema, all
that is required is for man [sic] to break the repressive deadlocks imposed by the
external world and man will be reconciled with himself, rediscover himself and re-
establish a full and positive relationship with himself (Foucault, 2000c). Foucault
suggests, ‘the return to the self, of the turning around towards oneself, is certainly
one of the most important technologies of the self the West has known’ (2005,
p. 208).
If, as Foucault suggests, turning to the self is one of the most important
technologies of the self in the West, then the pleasure the young people on this
residential program experience when they ‘find’ themselves makes sense. In the way
Foucault suggests, they do experience a type of conversion. It is as if they are given a
‘key’ that allows them to pull back all of the layers that have hidden who they are
from themselves. Alan’s comment that ‘then I realised I was quite different to what I
thought I was’, suggests they have come to know a ‘truth’ about themselves and
through this have come to know the world.
The revelation of coming to know ‘myself ’
When asked why they thought it was important to know who they were, the students
often talked of now understanding why they have not done well at school in the past
and how they needed to change to become a successful student. The following
conversation is an example of the way many students conceptualised this.
Bob: Just like learning your thinking preferences and your brain quadrantsand all that. It lets you understand about yourself.
Interviewer: And why is that a good thing to understand?Mel: It’s like you learn about the different ways you work and stuff. And you
pick up different skills that you didn’t know you had. Like, it reallyhelped me, like I’d just get bored with it, like easy work. But like, we’vebeen taught how to find ways to stay interested in our work, to make ourwork interesting to us and people around us.
Having found out who they are, they perceive that they have an increased ability to
make decisions and act in accordance with those decisions. The ability to tell a ‘true’
story of the self enables a sense of agency in that the stories the young people tell of
their experiences on this residential program is of recognising themselves as
autonomous beings who have responsibility for their actions (Besley & Peters,
2007). The students speak as if the ‘I’ they have found is one they have discovered
themselves. The conditions of possibility for the emergence of an ‘I’ which is
autonomous and able to take responsibility for decisions and actions have been
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examined at some length (see, for example, Butler, 2005; Fendler, 1998; St Pierre,
2000). One of the more recent manifestations of the autonomous self relates to the
ways in which, young people in particular, are expected to understand themselves as
an enterprise that seeks to maximise all their opportunities throughout their lives
and fashion themselves as responsible citizens (see, for example, Fejes & Nicoll, 2008;
Kelly, 2006; Usher & Edwards, 2007).
The students on this particular program appear to have taken up the manifesta-
tions of the entrepreneurial self maximising their opportunities. In a discussion about
how the community at the residential program worked these students described the
way their thinking had changed during their stay. These are themes that are touched
on in many of the interviews.
Andrea: You have to make something happen, otherwise you can’t just sit around andwait for something to happen. You have to make it happen.
Harry: Yeah, you’ve got to see opportunities and take those opportunities to dostuff.
The students described the process of coming to know who they are as a journey of
self-discovery, albeit with the aid of various personality tests, team and leadership
activities and a lot of reflection. And, consistent with the way Foucault theorises the
technology of the turning to the self, the students see this journey of discovery as an
individual journey. ‘I know who I am now’ has come about because they have focused
diligently on themselves and not become distracted by those around them. Sally, for
example, described her reason for coming on the program as an opportunity to ‘learn
about myself without the influence of parents and close friends’.
Turning to the self is a technology of the self that provides a way of
understanding why these young people talk about learning about themselves as if
it were an epiphany or a form of conversion. Turning to the self describes the
relationship to the self that is required if a subject is to seek the centre of oneself
(Foucault, 2005). Foucault was primarily concerned with the question of ‘who or
what can I become? His attention focused on the ways in which the subject
becomes an ‘object’ of knowledge and the technologies which permitted
individuals to transform themselves. Foucault described turning to the self as
requiring focus on the self that did not get distracted by those around us, but it
did also involve complex relationships with others (Foucault, 2000c). He insisted
that the relation to the self is a social and public relationship, ‘one that is
inevitably sustained in the context of norms that regulate reflexive relations: How
might and must one appear? And what relation to oneself ought one manifest?’
(Butler, 2005, p. 114)
This residential program establishes very specific norms of recognisability as
evidenced through the uniformity of the stories narrated by the students. As the
following comment from Gail demonstrates, there are norms which condition what is
appropriate reflection and therefore how one might and must appear.
Gail: When I get bored I don’t know what to write, but reflecting on something ishard. What did I learn? Like, I gave my reflective journal to [name of teacher]yesterday and she gave it back to me and it had all of these little orange slipssaying you should write more about this and rah, rah, and it was like, oh god, Ididn’t realise that.
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These norms deserve close scrutiny as they have specific effects on the ‘I’ that can
emerge. While this is beyond the scope of this article, this form of analysis would
undoubtedly provide some interesting insights into how social realities are
constructed through experiential education and both the subjectivities that
materialise in these contexts and how these subjectivities construct new materialities
(Blackman, Cromby, Hook, Papdopoulos, & Walkerdine, 2008). It is to the question
of the terms through which the self-discovery the young people on this program
experience can occur, that I now turn.
The terms through which self-discovery occurs
Butler (2005) extends Foucault’s argument by making the point that
an account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and thisother establishes the scene of address as a more primary ethical relationship than areflexive effort to give an account of oneself. (p. 21)
A relationship with another is required before a subject becomes a self-narrating
being. Without this relationship there is no impulse to give an account of oneself.
While the students talk as if the process of discovering who they are has been a
personal journey, the pedagogical approach of the program is one that requires
them to give an account of themselves to themselves, to other students and to the
staff. Reflection is a key part of the teaching process and students have to be able
to talk about what each experience means to them and how they might apply this
learning in the future. Over the nine weeks of the program each student produces
a book which documents what they learn and gain from the program. Periodically
they have specific activities where they write about their values and beliefs and
describe ‘who’ they think they are. One of the objectives of the book the students
produce is to be able to show others who they have become while on the
program.Just as norms shape the conditions of possibility for the emergence of ‘I’, they
govern the conditions of what will and will not be a recognisable account of the self
(Butler, 2005). Not ‘any’ story of the self will do, as Gail found when the teacher
reviewed her reflective journal. Students learn to narrate themselves in ways that
conform to the norms of recognition in this context and in the process they are able to
‘confer a certain kind of recognition on others’ (Butler, 2005, p. 41). An example of
this is the way the students use the ‘brain theory’ both as a means of understanding
themselves and of understanding others. For example, Mandy said, ‘It helps you
understand other people and where they are coming from. Like really creative people.
Sometimes I think it’s strange because I’m not very creative and now I understand, oh
they must be yellow’. This appears to mark a shift in the way they think about
difference. Students talk about how in the past they might have labelled someone in a
negative way, they now understand their behaviour as a result of the different way
they learn and it is a matter of utilising the strengths they bring to a group. Alicia
explained thus:
Because if you’re in a group and you have all red brain, that’s more social, everyone’sjust going to keep talking. And see no one back at home knows what they are. So youcould be in a group full of them, but you don’t know. And see here, you can prepare forit and grab a group of red, green, yellow, and blue.
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‘Who are you?’
One way of understanding why students find coming to ‘know themselves’ through
this residential program as such a powerful pedagogic process is that it does offer
them a way to situate themselves within norms that condition the possibilities for
young people today. They can now take control of their lives, as they understand who
they are and now know their strengths and limitations in line with discourses of the
entrepreneurial and responsibilising citizen. It gives them a possibility to act with a
sense of coherence and agency that many of them felt they did not have previously.
Another way to understand why the young people find coming to know
themselves so powerful is that they narrate accounts of themselves that are
recognisable to others, while at the same time, they recognise the accounts given
to them by others at the residential school. Butler (2005) inverts the claim of self
knowledge being a prerequisite for recognition by another. She argues that to narrate
oneself presupposes an Other. In narrating oneself, one is not only giving an account
of oneself, ‘I also give an account to someone, and the addressee functions to
interrupt the sense that this account of myself is my own’ (Butler, 2005, p. 36,
emphasis in original). To give an account of oneself is not an individual act; it
requires the presence of another and the account is given in relation to them.
Following this argument suggests the students find this residential program such
a powerful learning experience, not because they turn away from everything external
to themselves and focus on themselves. Rather the scenes of address they encounter
here require them to recognise others’ accounts of themselves and they find their
accounts of themselves are recognised by others. The residential program establishes
clear norms on how to describe and narrate oneself so these stories are recognisable
to the other students and to the staff. Observations such as Mandy’s, that creative
people no longer seem strange to her, are made repeatedly through the interviews.
The ‘brain theory’, in particular, appears to provide possibilities that enable students
to understand others’ behaviour, and indeed their own behaviour, in a more open-
ended way than they could previously.
Butler (2005) makes the point that ‘one way we become responsible and self-
knowing is facilitated by a kind of reflection that takes place when judgments are
suspended’ (p. 46). She goes on to argue that to judge and condemn another renders
the other as non-recognisable and denies commonality with the other. I am not
suggesting students on this program suspend judgement, as they use ‘brain colour’ as
a way of explaining and understanding others. But, the ‘brain theory’, along with all
of the other elements of the residential program, seem to allow these students to
make judgments that are more generous in scope than many would have made
previously, which in turn, confers greater recognition of others than would have
previously been possible. One of the effects of the residential program appears to be
increasing the bounds of commonality between students, at least for the duration of
the program.
Whereas much of the experiential education theory posits that greater knowledge
of the self leads to greater understanding of others, Butler argues the opposite point
here. Greater understanding and recognition of others leads to greater ‘self-
knowledge’. Fred said others can know you once you know who you are. Perhaps
he has come to know ‘who he is’ because he has come to know others as the
boundaries of recognisability have expanded. As the boundaries of recognisability
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expand for these students they may experience a greater sense of common ground
with another than they have in other educational contexts.Butler (2005) argues that ‘in a real sense, we do not survive without being
addressed, which means that the scene of address can and should provide a
sustaining condition for ethical deliberations, judgement and conduct’ (p. 49).
Perhaps this program offers such a scene of address for these young people in that
they are not as quick to judge others as they were previously. As such, this gives them
greater scope to recognise others and therefore to recognise the self. While the
possibilities in this scene of address are shaped by the norms that govern the scene,
the greater openness with which these young people recognise others may be a
sustaining condition which allows self-acceptance or generosity of a sort to flourish
(Butler, 2005).
Some cautionary words
I do not give this residential program as a utopian example of creating conditions
which sustain recognisability. Following Foucault and Butler, I am not suggesting
students are coming to know a ‘truer’ self through this program, even though the
students might construe it in this way. The students see the ‘brain theory’ as a useful
resource for understanding themselves and others. Given that so much of
experiential education has become highly individualised where the learner is
conceived of as a bundle of cognitive needs, it is not surprising these students feel
they been on a successful quest of understanding themselves.
Paradoxically, the way the students engage with the residential program is, first to
find that they may not be who they thought they really were. The next step is then to
engage in the a range of reflective activities to discover who they ‘really’ are, which
the students most often reduce down to a brain colour, to both explain and fix their
understanding of themselves. Foucault argues that the sorts of elaborations of the
self that occur when seeking one’s truth are very different from the elaborations
possible when creating oneself (Paras, 2006). The former could never capture the
richness of the relationships one has with the self as it is a process of ‘discovery’
based on the presumption that there is an ‘authentic’ self we can come to know. He
saw the latter as an open-ended and creative process concerned with ethical conduct
and freedom (Foucault, 2000b).
Even though the students might be on a quest to find a ‘real’ self, Butler (2005)
reminds us that this is an impossible quest. The conditions of the emergence of ‘I’
both precede and exceed ‘I’, therefore the subject remains ‘opaque to itself, not fully
translucent and knowable to itself ’ (p. 19). ‘I’ is further interrupted in the process of
narrating itself to another, as the students found on this residential program, as the
account given has to be in a form recognisable to that ‘someone’. Butler asks if in
this opacity, brought about by the inability to ‘know’ oneself fully and the
dispossession of the self that occurs in giving an account to another, there exists a
‘possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language
and to you than I previously knew?’ (Butler, 2005, p. 40). And is it this opacity and
relationality that requires us to ask ‘who are you?’, if we desire to give an account of
ourselves?
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Conclusion
The epiphany of discovering themselves which the students experience on this
program can be explained through the schema of the ‘turning to the self ’ which
Foucault suggests is the most powerful technology of the self in the West. The self
they seem to discover is consistent with contemporary educational discourses of the
self as an enterprising subject who has a life-long responsibility to maximise their
opportunities. The students tell stories of how they have come to learn about
themselves, who that self is, and how that is going to make all the difference. But
Butler (2005) theorises that one can only become self-narrating in the face of anotherand this requires recognition of the Other. Whereas the stories the students tell
presume that others can only know you if you know yourself, Butler argues, it is only
through knowing the Other that it is possible to come to know the self.
Much of the focus on experiential education has been on learning about the self
as the maxim offered by Luckner and Nadler (1997) states: nothing is more relevant
to us than ourselves. The role of the other that is a fundamental part of reflection
and reflexivity has had less attention within the experiential education literature. If
theorists and educators are interested in creating learning environments that providesustaining conditions for students, and indeed for themselves, maybe the focus of
effort needs to shift from the endless pursuit of more effective ways to facilitate the
discovery of ‘I’, to creating conditions that increase the bounds of commonality and
recognisability. Perhaps the maxim for experiential education should read: ‘Nothing
is more relevant to us than those around us’.
Acknowledgements
I currently hold a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta, funded bythe Government of Canada. I am using this fellowship to undertake research on how weconstruct knowledge about ourselves and others in outdoor and experiential education. Thisresearch project was conducted with Dr Michael Dyson from the Faculty of Education,Monash University, Australia.
Notes
1. This quote is drawn from data gathered during a two-year research project at a Year 9residential program in Australia. Focus group interviews took place with students near theend of the nine-week program where they talked about their experiences and perceptions ofthe program. Names have been changed to maintain anonymity.
2. ‘Brain theory’ is only one of a number of tools students are introduced to on the program.They tend to talk about it as the most significant tool that helps them to learn who they are.The residential site is a complex learning site where many things occur. To suggest that only‘brain theory’ is responsible for teaching these young people who they are may give it moreweight than it deserves. Brain theory sits in a broader context aimed at helping students tolearn about themselves.
3. John Dewey’s work is seen as one of the philosophical foundations of contemporaryexperiential education (Wurdinger, 1995).
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