ABSTRACT
Myles Horton, the lay preacher who established the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in the 1930s, once remarked ‘An unanalysed experience is a kind of a happening’ (Horton, 1986). When he made this remark he was leading a seminar on his work at Highlander and he was being questioned about his approach to teaching and learning. He observed that the people with whom he worked – the poor, blacks, labour groups – had never been encouraged to analyse their experiences. His approach was to build programmes based on real problems, help groups analyse their collective experiences of those problems and encourage some form of collective action to bring about social change (see Adams, 1975). The idea of analysing one’s experiences to achieve liberation from psychological repression (e.g. psychoanalysis) or social and political oppression is a recurring theme in adult education. It is most commonly identified with the work of Freire (1972, 1974), but it is also a feature of some contemporary conceptions of self-directed learning/ critical pedagogy (Brookfield, 1985a, 2005), andragogy/transformative learning (Mezirow, 1983, 2000, 2003), action research (Carr and Kemmis, 1983; Kemmis, 1985), models of the learning process (Jarvis, 1987a, 1992) and techniques of facilitation (Boud et al., 1985; Boud, 1987).
