Many people, especially students, think that we learn from experiences. It’s so easy to say “We’ve learned a lot from what we experienced during our internship in this class…”, but when asked to say what this really was that they’ve learned, they often have great difficulties…
I’ve recently found this quote here and I really like it, because it related to so many thoughts I’ve had the last weeks about learning, teaching, reflecting, making a portfolio and even the conscious mind and implicit learning…
“We do not learn from experience; we learn by thinking about our experience… The process of remembering, retelling, reliving and reflecting is the process of learning from experience.” – Shulman, L.S. (1996).
I think this can be applied to so many situations of everyday live… and I would like to add that learning in this sense is inevitably a social process in the sense that we always remember, retell, relive and reflect our experiences with reference to other humans. Even if I reflect on a particular experience without anybody else being physically present I’m somehow always telling a story about this experience as if I was trying to tell it to someone else… It’s a bit like consciousness, which I currently see as the nice story we’re all telling ourselves about who we are and why we think we do this or that… a bit like we are all one of the characters of our own inner theatrical plays, while there actually is nobody to see this play…