ABSTRACT
Experience has important elements of content and knowledge, i.e. we acquire or understand something that we perceive to be important for ourselves. Experience also has a considerable incentive element, i.e. we are committed motivationally and emotionally to the learning taking place. While the majority of John Dewey’s development of pedagogical practice and theory took place in the first decades of the twentieth century, he dealt with the concept of experience later in a short work entitled Experience and Education based on a series of summarised lectures. Dewey has a broad definition of the concept of experience in accordance with its everyday meaning. The concept comprises all aspects of learning in principle, including internal psychological acquisition processes and social interactive processes, content-related aspects and incentive aspects, and all forms of learning and forms of interaction. But for learning to be described as experiential in the way this concept has been set up, various specific qualitative criteria must be fulfilled.
