Experiential Learning by Colin Beard

Author:Colin Beard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749467661
Publisher: Kogan Page

The quotation above, from The Spell of the Sensuous by the philosopher David Abram, describes the effect of an experience that triggered a sensory re-awakening in a local population. Following the impact of this hurricane on their town people experienced the world around them very differently. Sensory awareness returned to them. Ordinarily for many people everyday experiences incorporate an avalanche of stimuli, arising from the sounds and sights of cars, from televisions and street lights, and added to by other consumptive data, all appealing to our senses through advertising media. This sensory world continually attempts to sell us goods, images, services and formulated experiences. This can easily create a human world that becomes sensorially dulled, a world that has blocked out many pleasurable naturally occurring sensory phenomena. Technology in this story clearly added to the estrangement.

However, technology can also work in conjunction with the bodily experience: the continuing development of gesture-based technologies (GBT) for example, where fingers, hands and arms are now used to manipulate information – eg in the iPod, iPad and iWall – heralds a potential return to the use of the bodily movement to aid mental processing (Beard and Price, 2012). When we present statistics or graphs these forms can often seem unintelligible to non scientists, yet new and very creative research (Gwilt et al, 2012; Gwilt, 2013) aims to translate such traditional complex scientific data into sensual physical objects, where contours, texture and colour of the physical form allow the data to be sensorially read or interrogated. This is a very different way of experiencing scientific data! Ironically the distancing of the human from the more sensorial world was even more profound as a result of the evolution of the human written and spoken language.

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