Epistemologies of the Hand: The Role of Personal Experience in Knowing and Learning

• In Event: Death, Xylophones, Rights, and Hands: On the Locations and Dislocations of Knowing

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

Personal experience seems fundamental to human existence and to learning, and in a U.S. context, it has been explicitly tied to education since at least the work of John Dewey (1938). However, this notion of personal experience is a relatively recent construction (Pomata, 2011). This paper looks to a time when personal experience was a new and unstable construct in order to investigate novel ways of knowing that relied upon it and the ways of learning that these epistemologies made possible.

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) that investigates the development of ‘personal experience’ as a valid epistemic, and subsequently pedagogical, category. In doing so, I view learning as a situated practice (cf. Daston and Galison, 2007; Mol, 2002), not a biological or psychological universal, and follow the particular arrangements participating in the construction of knowers and learners.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

I present a series of cases (Forrester, 2017), with each case highlighting a set of knowledge-making and learning practices made possible through the centrality of ‘personal experience.’ While earlier cases inform later ones, they are not presented as a causal progression, but rather as a set of resonances in which preceding ideas and practices both inform and are changed by later ones.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

I concentrate my analysis on late-16th and early-17th century books of secrets (e.g., Plat, 1594) as well as texts deemed central to the rise of the empirical and experimental sciences (e.g., Bacon, 1605). I put these texts in conversation with contemporary takes on the role of personal experience in education, looking specifically to experiential learning theory (Fenwick, 2001; Kolb, 1984; Seaman et al., 2017).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

I demonstrate how the category of ‘personal experience’ helped make possible what I call epistemologies of the hand – epistemologies that locate the foundations of knowing and learning in activity itself – and a popular pedagogy manifested in widespread vernacular publications for lay audiences. I also show how ‘personal experience’ was involved in a related but slightly counter epistemology that came to be seen as the beginnings of the empirical and experimental sciences. This latter way of knowing dislocated experiences from the people experiencing them and made possible a conception of learning based on aggregation and abstraction.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

This paper contributes to curriculum studies and the history of curriculum by connecting contemporary theories of learning to the early empirical sciences and by historicizing the epistemic category of ‘personal experience’ on which many rely. Moreover, it offers a comparison to current DIY communities, informal learning spaces, and even anti-intellectual movements that push against what has come to be seen as a dominant mode of knowing and learning.

Author

• Jais Brohinsky, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author