Knowledge, Experience and Language Teaching

Pergamon $mwz, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 449.460, 1996

Copyright 0 1996 Elwier Science Ltd PII: SO346-251X(96)00041-3 Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved

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KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

BRIAN KENNY

Center for Language and Educational Technology, Asian Institute of Technology, GPO Box 2754, Bangkok, Thailand

A key question for communicative language teachers is how we get our students to say what they want. This question is inextricably mixed up with the sort of syllabus approach we use, for, in a sense, the organization of a syllabus dictates what we do and how we do it. It may even dictate our students’ responses to the educational endeavour and their use of their autonomy. There are two syllabus types. The knowledge transmission syllabus is essentially an organization of ready-made knowledge. The experiential syllabus is an organization of people. As such it is better suited to language teaching and learning being wholly communicative. On the basis of the author’s own experience of its use, a simple strategy for the implementation of an experiential syllabus is put forward in the final section of this paper. Some discussion is made of a language teacher’s role here. Before that, the relationship between knowledge and experience is considered, and the difference between reified knowledge and knowledge-for-use is clarified. The effects of reified knowledge on students and teachers, as well as on the school timetable, is considered. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

TWO SYLLABUS TYPES

White et al. (1991: pp. 169-171) write: “Any curriculum model is an expression of a particular ideology,” and then go on to present three educational stances. “One view of education is that it is concerned with the transmission, intact, of an esteemed cultural heritage, while another view is one which stresses the growth and self-realization of the individual. Yet another view sees education as an instrument of social change.” White et al. (1991: p. 171) associate the transmission mode with “conformity”, “prescribed canons of correctness”, and “grammatical rules”. This is in line with what philosophers of education like Ford and Pugno (1964), Phenix (1964), Hirst and Peters (1970) and Hirst (1974) among others have indicated about this syllabus, which embodies the school subjects. I will refer to it as the knowledge transmission syllabus. This syllabus is not loved by everyone. Sociologists of education such as Young (1971). Gorbutt et al. (1972) and Flude and Ahier (1974) attacked it for its reification of knowledge and the alienating effect of this on classroom life.

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White ef al. (1991: p. 17 1) describe their second syllabus as one which stresses growth and self- realization and they say it will “tend to err towards an approach which encourages individual achievement, possibly at the expense of conformity.” A manifestation of such a syllabus in practice would be if a teacher made a remark such as: “it doesn’t matter how you say it, so long as you express yourself/get your message across” (p. 171) This is a significant statement and points up a major difference between this and the knowledge transmission syllabus. For here the educational expectation is that those being educated actually do have “messages”, and should use them. In other words the syllabus content can be provided by them, on the basis of their own experiences, thoughts, expectations and discussions with others. The syllabus here then is an organization of people, rather than an organization of knowledge to be transmitted, and the emphasis is on the experiences these people have had and are having now. This I call the experiential syllabus.

The third of the educational viewpoints given by White er al. (1991: p. 171) is characterized as having a strong political orientation “because education - and specifically language - will be seen as having an empowering function.” But this applies equally to views one and two and thus leaves us with only two syllabus types. For all education is political and empowers somebody. The knowledge transmission syllabus is no less empowering than one which seeks to empower an exploited group (such as Freire’s educational work) through the self-realization by that group of the nature of its exploitation.

But we would be making a mistake if we thought that only an overtly political syllabus dealt with power. Benesch (1993: pp. 706-707) has cited a number of authors who see not only language teaching but all education as being both ideological and political. In this capacity the knowledge transmission syllabus helps perpetuate the status quo and sees to it that other educational approaches are constrained or vitiated. Criticos (1993: p. 158) observes that the knowledge transmission syllabus “does not tolerate experiential learning, action research, holistic medicine and other alternative ways of knowing and working.” While Ellis (1993: p. 91) has noted that the structural/knowledge transmission syllabus “is probably still the most common in language teaching today.” So dominant is the ideology of transmitted knowledge, that to escape its offerings may seem a penaliza- tion. For example, in a discussion of standard English, which he describes as an institu- tional language and thus a language of power in a way that other varieties of English are not, Widdowson (1993: p. 325) argues that “you empower pupils by teaching it, thereby denying special privilege to those who happen to have acquired it by upbringing.”

In an extended investigation of syllabus design, Candlin (1984: p. 30) points out that “syllabuses typically come in two ideological forms.” In one, learners “bank received knowledge as a collection of ‘communiques’ or states of knowing,” and in the other learners are encouraged “to explore ways of knowing, to interpret knowledge and to engage in dialogue with it and with themselves.” The first syllabus type is “static and imposed” while the second is “dynamic and negotiated” (p. 33). Here we recognize the features of the knowledge transmission and experiential syllabuses, as presented earlier by White et al. (1991). Candlin (1984) goes on to describe the dynamic syllabus in a variety of ways, and writes that it could be “a series of guided experiences, focusing both on what is to be learned and on how and why it is to be learned” (p. 34). But here we should pause for thought. For if learners’ experiences are to be guided and focused by a teacher, then

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doesn’t this mean that as far as the learners are concerned the experiences will be somehow debased and secondhand? In addition, if a teacher is to try and focus the learners’ experience on “what is to be learned”, then this does suggest that what is to be learned is known and even decreed in advance, and is thus knowledge which could actually be transmitted. Why then are we trying to present it as the learners’ own experience? Is this not duplicitous? We pull the wool over learners’ eyes by appearing to give them an autonomy they can’t use.

Newmark (1983: p. 163) has suggested that a key principle of the communicative teaching movement and “an important test of our success as language teachers...is the ability of our students to choose to say what they want.” Now if this is the case, and 1 think it is, then in allowing our students the autonomy to say what they want, we will not as teachers be selecting knowledge for our students but will be encouraging them to pursue their own experiences in the educational context. In discussions and reflections on these experiences the students may well come to say what they want, and will gain both language and knowledge. But this knowledge will be a knowledge-for-use, born directly from the learners’ experience. It will not be a pre-selected and reified knowledge. In the remainder of this paper I will discuss briefly some ideas arising from this. These include the relationship between experience and knowledge; and then reified knowledge, the school subjects and their effects on students and teachers. In a final section I put forward a simple strategy, based on my own experience as a teacher, for the implementation of an experiential approach to both language and other learnings.

Knowledge und experience Kerfoot (1993) describes a participatory ESL curriculum in South Africa. In what is a radical educational context, Kerfoot admits a tension between the intentions of the syllabus and its content. This tension springs mainly from two assumptions. One is that a participatory program requires printed materials even though these may come to consti- tute “a new regime of truth” (p. 442). The second is that it may need taught bodies of knowledge (p. 438) though Kerfoot is perturbed by this. She wonders who will define the needed knowledge and on what grounds. In highlighting this dilemma, Kerfoot has put her finger on a sore spot. For what exactly is the relationship between knowledge and experience’?

Everything we do is an experience of a kind, and Auerbach (1993: p. 545) has warned teachers of the dangers of letting learners treat their experience uncritically, as this can only lead to a confirmation of what they already know. We may note then that experience needs interpreting if it is to lead to understanding and knowledge, and Usher ( 1993: p. 179) sees “re-enactment” as a way of doing this. An experiential syllabus allows both for re-enactments and interpretations as its participants report back to each other about what they have been doing and the experiences they have had. For an experiential syllabus is essentially an organization of people. Its participants learn from experience and reflections on this as they investigate issues they have identified as of pressing concern and interest to them. A reportback provides a forum which allows for both a public and a self-monitoring of the work-in-progress, and for a sharing of the educational gains being made. These gains include both technical and socio-political knowledge. And as the participants, working in groups, use a great deal of language while doing their work.

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the gains also include an Ll, an L2 or even an L3. For the languages used are the vehi- cles of the participants’ work and are needed as an integral part of this. In the case of a deliberate learning of some language point, say a letter to a high-ranking official asking for a meeting, then this is for a particular vital function related to the work in hand. It is not for some function which may or may not turn up in the future. So the participants proceed, and as they do their transactions generate interpretations, meanings and under- standings. And this constitutes knowledge. It is knowledge-in-action. Participants may deliberately seek specific knowledge from an expert or other source of information. But this knowledge, which results from the participants’ own work and self-organization, and is reclaimed by them for their own purposes, is also a radical because active and political knowledge, personal and useful. It is knowledge-for-use. It is not some sort of pickled knowledge immortalized in print, or delivered by a lecturer as part of a timetabled syllabus, where neither the lecture nor the timetable has been identified by the participants as relevant to their work.

A knowledge transmission syllabus presents a quite different view of knowledge than does the experiential syllabus. Here the syllabus is an organization of ready-made knowledge, not an organization of people. Where an L2 is to be acquired, this syllabus may range from a choice of grammatical structures, or notions and functions and topics and genres, through study skills to special lexis, taking in communicative acts and tasks, or even be a selection of guided experiences focusing on what is to be learned, which will doubtless be a selection from a list like that just made above. Nor is this state of affairs to be altered or somehow rendered experiential where it is the learners themselves who make the selection of items. This is cosmetic only. Of course, everything we do is an experience. Attending a lesson on the ablative absolute or the Geiger Muller counter are both experiences. But this does not render them examples of experiential learning. In the case where a group of participants need to know about the Geiger Muller counter to do their work, then a consultation with an expert would be a different matter. For a key difference in all of this is whether a syllabus and its participants are engaged with real work, or whether the syllabus and its transmitters are presenting knowledge for learners to memorize.

I have pointed out before (Kenny, 1993a, 1993b) that investigative research can change passive pupils into active investigative researchers, and that this is empowering because it engages people’s autonomy with regard to the educational process. Pupils do the exer- cises a teacher gives them. Investigative researchers carry out pieces of relevant work defined by them. I can refocus this distinction now and refer to learners, to whom knowledge is transmitted, and who study knowledge in its reified forms, and participants, who through self-organization and autonomy find what it is they want to say and also the knowledge and language necessary for the saying. For, in defining what needs to be done, participants in an experiential syllabus also define the knowledge they need to do it. And it is not reified knowledge.

The reified knowledge syndrome For some students, knowledge, as they have come to understand it, presents a formid- able, almost bodily, obstacle. They feel impotent before it, and unable to initiate any endeav- ors of their own until the fetishism has been exorcised. A group of three post-graduate

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Asian students, on a pre-masters bridging program that I teach on in Bangkok, having agreed to work together on an investigation of the effectiveness of different kinds of computer networks, announce that they will be unable to begin “until we have knowledge,” which is rather like saying we can’t begin until we know what the end is. But which knowledge are they talking about? They don’t know. We came here for knowledge, they say, referring to the postgraduate institution, because we lack it and can’t do anything until we get it. Some students dramatically reinforce this point and bury their heads in dictionaries as if to show that the dictionary constitutes what they would regard as real knowledge, and that if you want to learn English as a foreign language then the way to proceed is by swallowing the dictionary in a systematic way, and surely this is generally accepted? One student, noting that the timetable for the next few weeks has time available for investigative research wonders if at last a slot might be found for a teacher to give some lectures on English. “I’ve never had a proper English teacher”, he muses, “nor proper English lessons.” I sympathize as best I can and point out that for the last eight weeks, via a series of tasks which were teacher-provided although student- controlled (that is to say the students got to fill the tasks with content of their own), he had been making great use of English for his own purposes and shown a noticeable improvement. He agrees, but points out again that this isn’t the same as proper lessons.

This sort of thing is tiresome for a teacher. For the student is neither resiting nor rejecting. All we have here is interference from a different but dominant educational approach. For one of the effects of the knowledge transmission mode of educational delivery is that for many learners all round the globe it constitutes the only way in which education may officially be carried on. Anything else may be fun and useful, but a teacher teaching a lesson is “the real thing”. However, one of the lesser functions of an experiential approach is to challenge the dominance of knowledge transmission on the grounds that education is something larger than it suggests. So a teacher remains unperturbed.

Meeting the group once more the teacher asks how they intend to start their work. The students say they don’t know. “We will have to read some books,” is put forward as a solution. But which books? The students don’t know. A doctoral student who is present as a resource person says that if the group is ever to clarify what it is that is problematic for them about computer networks, then they will first have to go out and do something or talk to someone, and that only after that will it be clear what books will be relevant to their investigations. But the students are not impressed, as the notion of doing something, as opposed to being told something by a teacher, has not been a part of their previous educational experience.

But what is happening here, and what is being raised is a very fundamental educational issue, which is often exposed bluntly as students engage with experiential work. For these students are suffering from the reified knowledge syndrome, a direct product I suggest of too much submission to transmitted knowledge in their earlier education. The students lack focus, do not see the relevance of knowledge to life, have no grasp of knowledge as a resource, or of knowledge-for-use, and are trapped in the knowledge they have while prostrate before that they feel they lack. Over the next few days, “negotiating progressive teacher perspectives with learner expectations of traditional school- ing” (Wrigley, 1993: p. 459), the group is persuaded to leave the building and go visit

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various technicians and engineers who maintain and run computer networks both on and off campus. As real network problems are identified and analysed, and ideas trans- lated into acts, so the group abandons its pre-conceived abstractions in favour of a prag- matic approach to the collecting of data, with realistic cross-referencing of this with information gleaned from experts and books. The group is now generating its own knowledge and enjoying itself. That this knowledge may not be new to the world is not the point. It is new to these learners, belongs to them, and is the product of their experiential learning.

Tyranny of the school subjects According to Stenhouse (1975: p. 6) “Prophets may teach private wisdom: teachers must deal in public knowledge.” What Stenhouse means by “public knowledge” is embodied in the school subjects. Our private wisdom is at best un-nurtured and at worst repressed; or, at least, only considered as an extra-curricular activity. The prophets thus have all the fun. But given that there is so little overt criticism of the school subjects it can only be supposed that the tenets supporting their existence are generally felt to be beyond reproach. Let us then consider what a few of these might be.

(a) That all knowledge is expressible in the terms of a school subject. In other words, any knowledge that isn’t identified with a school subject is no knowledge at all. Private wisdom is thus a non-starter, likewise interpersonal knowledge.

(b) That knowledge is always compartmentalized, being of necessity identified with some or other school subject.

(c) That what teachers teach are the school subjects. (d) That what students learn are the school subjects.

Without going into the philosophical complications of (a) and (b) here I suggest that the manifest absurdity of (d) as a fact in the real world puts all four of these assumptions in doubt. Yet school subjects exercise an appalling domination over the education system, and are a disaster for learning of an experiential kind. For the day is chopped into pieces for their accommodation, and what is reinforced is that other ways of conceiving of a school day, timetable, syllabus, or educational way of life, are out of the question.

BRINGING EXPERIENCE INTO THE CLASSROOM

Given the popularity and rapid world-wide spread of task-based approaches to language teaching and learning (Kenny and Savage, 1997), it seems like that experiential learning - a development of the task-based approach - will also be on the increase. Yet it was recently said that: “Teachers do not deny the value of experiential activities...they do not know exactly how to implement an experiential strategy” (Stern, 1992: p. 322).

Any attempt to implement an experiential syllabus requires a change in classroom perspectives. From a teacher’s point of view the focus now is on getting pupils and learners to become participants and to start saying what they want to say. While, from a participants point of view, the focus shifts from memorization and “banking” to a need to speak out, and ultimately to define, plan, carry-out and reportback on pieces of work.

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Habits acquired from a possibly long previous submission to the knowledge syllabus mean that from time to time neither of the parties to this different way of doing things will find it easy going or immediately rewarding, and there are difficulties that can arise in the beginning. These will include pupils who want to be told exactly what to do, and teachers who find doing this irresistible.

Figure 1 shows a simple strategy. In the opening stages of engaging with experiential work, with people who have not done this before, our objectives as teachers are to establish what it is and how it works, and to orientate everyone to the manner of proceeding. The exact nature of Task A is subordinate to setting up this procedure. In any case, Task A is not something to be learned but something to be done. Neither do we have the sort of complication that Long and Crookes (1992: p. 43) get into, for our tasks are not intended to provide “a vehicle for the presentation of appropriate target language sam- ples to learners”. We have no wish to put any restrictions at all on the language the participants may acquire. Paradoxically then it doesn’t matter critically what Task A is, for educational value here lies in the reportback and evaluation sessions as well as in the doing of the task. Our aim is to bring the participants to a point where they are sufficiently confident and autonomous to initiate work of their own. But to get the ball rolling a teacher is going to provide Task A.

I will describe now a technique which we have been using for many years at the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, with postgraduate engineering students from all over Asia, in pre-masters intensive English and also on bridging programs. The technique is designed to start participants off on an experiential syllabus. After a day of orientation and assessment, we give out papers which tell the participants, working in pairs, to go and find out about a “word” circled in a list of say fifteen words. These words include, for example, such concepts as “alternative technology”, “gender” and “sustainable development”, which we have chosen deliberately for their relevance to students at our Institute and to modern life, but also for their ambiguous and disputable nature. But you choose your words to suit your participants, and give different words to different pairs. The rubric at the head of the paper says: Come back at 1.00 pm and say what you did, who you talked to and what you found. Receiving the paper, participants are often puzzled and start asking the teacher questions. The teacher confirms that the paper liter- ally means what it says, and leaves the classroom. Participants eventually do likewise.

r Fig. I A strategy for introducing experiential learning.

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In the first reportback session, sitting round in a group, a number of things become apparent: (a) that nearly all the participants headed for dictionaries and encyclopedias; (b) that nobody spoke to anyone; and (c) that definitions of the words were copied down and are now read out, usually with incomprehension, for there is nothing more numbing than dictionary definitions out of context. The teacher asks repeatedly “who did you talk to?’ Participants reply: “No one.” “Not even your partner?‘, asks the teacher. “Not even my partner”, replies the student. In the case of “alternative technology”, it often happens that participants treat this idea as two separate words and come up with the proposition that alternative technology means having a choice between different technologies. “Oh you mean like a choice between a pencil and a ball point pen?” asks the teacher. “Yes”, says someone: “no”, says someone else. “Well then what?” says the teacher. It is possible at this point that some other participants will come up with their own ideas of what alternative technology might be, and that some of these suggestions may be near the mark or even hit it. But a teacher does not confirm any explanations, only ruminates about them. For a teacher’s job here is to lubricate the proceedings. In fact the teacher now starts pushing the discussion in the direction of wondering what participants will do next and notices that on the timetable further investigation is scheduled for tomorrow morning, with another reportback in the afternoon. A participant may ask “why are we doing this?’ The teacher looks round at everyone else, for the teacher is reluctant to dominate the proceedings by being the person who always has a ready answer. Suggestions can be made by other participants. In the absence of any explanation from a teacher, the originator of the question will often concoct a fairly traditional understanding of the task as an exercise designed to extend learners’ vocabulary. The teacher con- curs. For a teacher’s task is to keep all options open, and to get as many people as possible joining in, saying what they think. Criticism at this point is not required, though participants can be encouraged to take a critical stand and this is productive.

In a second and third reportback the atmosphere changes as those participants who have actually talked about their word with other people on campus or elsewhere, drop definitions in favor of contextualised explanations including examples. This draws other people into the discussion as they give examples too, or get involved in the politico-economic aspects of the words in question, which start to be apparent in any discussion that relates the words to the lived-in world. People also begin to see connections between words, for example “alternative technology” and “sustainable development”; while others point out that words in isolation do not signify anything, but mean different things to different people. It is possible that someone will say how boring it is just talking about one word all the time. And this is true. By now, however, most people in the room are no longer just talking about one word, but are enjoying the larger discourse that grew out of the task. But having someone say it’s boring can be interpreted as a challenge to a teacher’s authority. Interpretations and meanings are what we are all about. What will a teacher do? Some participants may indicate displeasure at the person uttering the challenge. It is very comforting if someone says no it isn’t boring and explains why, or even if someone else agrees that the challenger’s word was perhaps not one of the best to deal with. But, in the end, a participant, in this different educational mode, is entitled to think something boring if that’s the case for them, and to say so. Different teachers will respond in different ways. The question of what exactly a teacher’s authority is in a situation like this is difficult to answer. The sort of authority bestowed on a teacher by the knowledge


transmission mode will not be in place here; neither will the sort of authority bestowed by obedient pupils. In fact a teacher doesn’t really want any authority except that of being good at the job. But what is the job in a syllabus like this? Hoping it doesn’t seem far-fetched, I would suggest “impresario”, “entrepreneur”, or even “producer” as suit- able labels for it, as these do carry connotations of trying to get other people to give of their best, and of making appropriate and original arrangements for this.

Readers may think I have given a very academic example of a task, but you could use other “words” and other activities. It is the procedure, and how a teacher behaves in an early reportback, which I wanted to convey. Other words might include “the harbor”, “city hall”, or “race relations”. In a situation where the target language is initially in extremely short supply, as in Kenny and Laszewski (1997) various realia can be intro- duced into a reportback to provide discussion. These can include photographs (Savage and Storer, 1992: p. 191) drawings and video, or sounds and simple interviews on audio tape. These are produced by the participants.

Do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity of the transactions portrayed in these reportback sessions, for knowledge is being gained. This includes “hard” knowledge, such as how a solar cell works (arising from an investigation of “alternative technology”) or how “the harbor” is managed and its traffic controlled. In a reportback session many of us may be interested in and benefit from an explanation by other participant colleagues about these matters. But other kinds of knowledge are being generated and sharpened too. These include things like how to interact and work cooperatively; how to report events and activities; how to distinguish the valuable from the trivial; how to carry out an informative interview; how to use language better: and the usefulness of applied critique and evaluation. None of this is taught, but is knowledge, including the target language, gained on the job.

Negotiuting a piece of work How do we get from tasks suggested by a teacher to work negotiated by participants? There is no clear answer to this, because there is as yet little data about how experiential syllabuses work, and how topics are negotiated (Legutke and Thomas: 1991: p. 239). I can, however, describe what I have experienced. A sufficient number of teacher-initiated tasks provides participants with practice in reporting back so that they reach a point where they are familiar with each other’s interests and manner of self-expression. A degree of familiarity, mutual understanding and trust, and preparedness to cooperate, are essential preliminaries to negotiating a piece of work. even where the degree of mutual understanding and synergy remains limited. A teacher may have to judge when the situation is ripe for the suggestion that participants should now negotiate work of their own. Following this a number of things may happen: (1) Participants choose who they want to work with and then start wondering what they may do. (2) A strong topic emerges around which people begin to orientate themselves. (3) People ask a teacher to suggest something. (4) An eminently ludicrous topic turns up in an attempt to satisfy perceived teacher requirements and to attain a swift closure; and (5) a subject is identified about which some participants want to explain to others who are not thought to know about it. Of these, (1) and (2) are good; and (3) and (4). which do not turn up frequently. need talking into something sensible. It is important to try and grasp the

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motivation behind a topic and a teacher can make a major contribution here by spotting and criticizing suspect topics, especially those whose potential to become pieces of work is doubtful. Number (5) above is a case in point, though happily rare. The participants here have not actually got anything to investigate, apart from assembling information for a lecture. For they want to initiate others into an area of knowledge the others are thought to lack. In short, they want to act as traditional teachers, and have identified their colleagues’ lack of knowledge as constituting an area that needs something done about it. The wheel has come full circle here, and reified knowledge wreaks revenge. For what tends to happen is that these participants repeat lectures and lessons they themselves have earlier witnessed, and gradually become frustrated by the lack of response in the rest of the group, as a mini knowledge syllabus is let loose in the experiential classroom. Even this situation can provide material for interaction, experience and learning, but it should never really have gone so far. The time for ironing out suspect topics is at their period of initiation and preliminary definition, and it is done by means of group discussion and analysis. Topic negotiation, which is one of the benefits allowed by experiential learning, is a serious matter and a teacher’s involvement is crucial. An unsettled situation can prevail for a number of days for what is happening is an unpredictable but necessary process. Rogers (1967: p. 298) has pointed out that with groups, as opposed to individuals, for “vital self-initiated, self-directed learning” to emerge is an issue about which we know little. But, whatever the case, eventually pieces of work do appear of sufficient definition for groups to begin their investigations, and these, plus reportback sessions, bring about further clarification of the work itself.

An experience A group of six students including Mongolians, Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese, wanted to work together and agreed on a topic which had been in the air for some time: telecommunications in poor rural areas. The members of this group were convinced that telecommunications, far from being an advanced technology for use in rich countries, were in fact essential to an economic development and thus no luxury. The interest of the group was split between straight telecommunications enthusiasts and those more ori- ented towards engineering management. But “poor rural areas” brought them together. Their investigation over a period of six weeks included discussions with a variety of officials, planners and bankers, as well as with telecommunication specialists, both academic and in the field. They also went for a week to a poor area in North East Thailand to see the problems of a shortage of telecommunications first hand. Here they talked with farmers, telephone managers, and engineers. They looked at the government’s plans for future development and made more urgent plans of their own, They got in touch with a Bangkok-based United Nations agency, who explained that they took a holistic view of communication systems. This was a new idea for the group, but time ran out before they could follow it up. And in fact, the investigation had to stop just at a moment when doors were opening on new vistas. These included macro questions of economics, politics and developmental priorities. It also became apparent in reportback sessions that there was a developing awareness among participants of a possible gap between what people say and what they do. This included the difference between official statements and official action, and even extended to a critique of the academic institution itself for sus- taining a gap between theory and practice, by failing to disseminate its discoveries and inventions to the lived-in world, in a way that would make them acceptable.


In the end, and paradoxically, I am not able to say how much of value the participants in this experience gained, or even whether it is a proper example of experiential learning. But I can point to certain dimensions about it that would not have been present had the group followed a prescribed syllabus in the knowledge transmission mode. First: the investigation, which was initiated and managed by the participants, was carried out in the target language English, which was indeed the only language the group had in common. Second: the investigation generated its own knowledge of various kinds, but also made use of knowledge and procedures already accumulated in different places under a number of headings, for example, economics, rural life, statistics and communications theory. The investigation thus integrated amounts of knowledge-for-use, and was not inhibited by either the school subjects or a timetable. Third: the investigation brought together a group of people who wanted to work together for some common good, which they had agreed upon. This required them for long periods to abandon their Lls for a foreign tongue, and also to control idiosyncrasies and individualisms where these could have dis- rupted team work and cooperation. In short, these people had to put themselves at risk. make sacrifices and learn to work together. That they did all these things, did not let the work fall apart, attended reportback sessions where they verbally reconstructed and eval- uated their progress, and were pleased with the outcomes of their investigation. leads me to suppose that this was a generous learning experience of an experiential kind.

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Knowledge, Experience and Language Teaching

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