David A. Kolb, Patricia J. Jensen, and Ann C. Baker have published an excellent abstract about their recent book Conversational Learning. (Editor of the abstract: Yoshi Takeda.) The book is important. When you think about it, any dialogical exchange brings together the kinds of difference and interaction between personal fields which can evoke learning through the experience of an assimilation and accomodation of those differences. Conversation, dialogue, is an important feature of squareONE’s dyadic and small group work.
John Dicus offers The Fourth Piece of the Puzzle @Cornerstone Associates. If it provides a gloss to some extent, Dicus does get into some intriguing details; for example, ‘ Whole-System Experiential Learning gives meaning to unused ideas, making it possible to reject some outright and to implement others.’ The conception of unused might also include hidden or heretofore unconscious ideas, so this comment gets at a crucial concept.
Scott Forbes offers Krishnamurti’s Insights into Education: Education as a Religious Activity. He makes explicit in this fine article a different view on ‘unused’ knowing,
Throughout the ages sages have warned us that we can’t see what is true even when it is presented to us because that which is true isn’t what we expect or want to hear.
Obviously this describes the problem of: not wanting to use knowing.
Krishnamurti:
The function of education, then, is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but to be yourself all the time. So freedom lies…in understanding what you are from moment to moment. You see, you are not [normally] educated for this; your education encourages you to become something or other.
In short, who a person really is, is not what many persons wish to learn about or see or is knowledge the person wants to use.
