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 (Brookfield 1985a), andragogy (Mezirow 1983), 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).
