Coming to know oneself through experiential education

Abstract

This article draws on the work of Foucault to explore why students on a residential program talk about learning about themselves as if it were an epiphany and one of the most empowering aspects of the program. Foucault's schema of turning 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 powerful technologies of the self. Butler's work on giving an account of oneself is used to investigate the terms through which learning about the self occurs. She extends and inverts Foucault's schema, suggesting that one is only required to give an account of the self in the face of another. To become self-knowing requires recognition by another and recognition of others. While contemporary experiential education has been shaped by the maxim that nothing is more relevant to us than ourselves, I argue that perhaps this maxim should read; ‘Nothing is more relevant to us than those around us’.

Keywords:

• experiential education
• Foucault
• Butler
• technologies of the self

Acknowledgements

I currently hold a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta, funded by the Government of Canada. I am using this fellowship to undertake research on how we construct knowledge about ourselves and others in outdoor and experiential education. This research 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 9 residential program in Australia. Focus group interviews took place with students near the end of the nine-week program where they talked about their experiences and perceptions of the 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 more weight than it deserves. Brain theory sits in a broader context aimed at helping students to learn about themselves.

3. John Dewey's work is seen as one of the philosophical foundations of contemporary experiential education (Wurdinger, 1995).