Genuine Contact Way of Learning: Learning from Experience

Our teaching model is rooted in experience. The platform design for the model is Whole Person Process Facilitation. The reality of learning from experience is embedded in ancestral worldviews from which our model evolves.

Weil and McGill define "experiential education" as the process whereby people, individually and in association with others, engage in direct encounter and then purposefully reflect upon, validate, transform, give personal meaning to and seek to integrate their different ways of knowing" (1989:248). This definition underscores the idea of direct encounter as a necessary base for experiential learning. Our model allows for integration of different ways of knowing. It allows the learner to use more of his or her senses to learn, which reinforces the understanding that learning comes many sources - including oneself - not only from the formal theory promoted by experts.

An experiential and embodied approach to teaching and learning can help learners re-awaken the knowledge that their bodies are continuously giving them feedback. An experiential and embodied approach to facilitating, leading or managing can have the same impact.

Griffin reaffirms: "Our bodies reflect our emotions: anxiety becomes tense shoulder muscles or knots in the stomach; embarrassment turns into blush on the cheeks. Sometimes we feel the bodily reaction without having noticed the emotion. Sometimes we ignore the emotion, sometimes we deny it or repress it. The body knows it is there, however, and expresses it in some way". (1988:115)

Source: Fyre Jean Graveline
Photo: www.sxc.hu/photo/1019278

The Cicrle, a teaching space

One of the things I really loved about teaching in the interior is that I had an outside teaching space. So we used to do Circle on the ground, outside, underneath this big tree. I would really like to be able to teach Circle that way again. There's something missing in Circle when we have to sit in a box to do it! When we can't be sitting out on the ground, with the beautiful sky over our heads and the grass on our bums, the birds singing, and feel the sense of interconnectedness to all of creation, as we are there, because that's what brings the power to Circle.

Source: Fyre Jean Graveline