ABSTRACT
The complex and threatening issues of our times have been described as ‘wicked problems’, that is, problems that call for changes in the society that produced them. Tackling wicked problems requires access to all ways of thinking, from the knowledge silos established by our society, to the work of our independent individual minds. In the recent past, Western culture has formally recognised only one way of thinking, the objective and rational. In both formal and informal education, studies of collective learning have identified multiple ways of thinking, including access to the biophysical, social, ethical, creative and sympathetic dimensions of how we think. Experiential learning opens these ways of thinking, which, taken together, offer each individual a collective understanding of the world which can be extended to groups.
