Histories of Experiential Education: Wild Children, Individualized Curricula, and the Problem of Experience

• In Event: Constructing the (Ab)Normal: Development, Affect, and Sensory Experience in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

Objectives or purposes:
This paper explores how the category of ‘experience’ developed during the 18th century into a construct that explained differences between normal and abnormal behavior, and which was used to design individualized curricula aimed at normalizing the abnormal. Alongside the other papers in this symposium, this study contributes to an understanding of the ways in which 18th and 19th century conceptions of development influence understandings and practices of education centuries later.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework:
My analysis draws on science studies and the sociology of knowledge to engage questions of education. On the one hand, it is in part an “historical epistemology” (Daston, 1995, p. 24) as it investigates the development of ‘experience’ as a valid epistemic, and subsequently pedagogical, category. In doing so, I explore the problematization of ‘experience’ (Verstraete, 2009, p. 272), that is, the ways in which ‘experience’ is constituted as a problem and how its framing as a problem simultaneously suggests responses (i.e., curricular interventions) that are defined by the same logic that structures its constitution in the first place.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry:
My analysis focuses on the well-documented case of Victor, the ‘wild boy of Aveyron.’ I will historicize this case to show how the epistemological category of ‘experience’ was used to understand Victor as a subject of experimental psychology vis-à-vis experiential pedagogy.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials:
In analyzing the case, I draw on primary materials documenting Victor’s education (e.g., Itard, 1802) as well as secondary considerations of these materials (e.g., Rose, 1985). In addition, I engage texts referenced by the historical actors (e.g., Condillac, 1971/1756) and subsequent historical work that contextualizes these connections (e.g., Riskin, 2002).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view:
I demonstrate how ‘experience’ constituted both a problem of abnormality and a pedagogical solution aimed at correcting such difference. Through Victor’s case, I show how experiences were classified as normal and abnormal, which made possible an idealized developmental trajectory that could be measured and evaluated based on the experiences one had. Understood as such, experiences could make up constituent elements of an individualized experiential pedagogy designed to create, or correct, a particular kind of person: normal experiences beget normal people, and abnormal experiences beget abnormal people.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work:
This paper contributes to curriculum studies and the history of curriculum by historicizing ways in which experience becomes a method to evaluate the development of normal/abnormal selves and a site of intervention for correcting them. Placed alongside the other pieces in this symposium, this study offers an historical comparison that shows how early psychological constructs influence contemporary curricula and participate in what gets framed as educational in the first place.

Author

• Jais Brohinsky, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author