ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the possibility of institutions where learning from experience is valued and engaged. She details, through an extended case example, the individual, interpersonal, group, and institutional dilemmas of introducing experiential learning into a traditional educational organization. The author then presents five points about what might be called "characteristics of experience". They are: experience is subjective in the popular sense of the word, experience may be basic and direct, or transformed and complex, experience may or may not be symbolized, experience is linked to behavior, and experience is reflexive. The distinction of subject/other is central to the existence of humans as social animals, where the social is built upon communal imagination and symbolization. The group relations training method developed temporary learning institutions as a focus for learning from experience. These conferences apply established knowledge to the creation of "containers"—that is, conference tasks, territories, and times—within which learning might occur.
