This article challenges the assumption that learning is a process of conscious mastery. In its place, I offer the notion that learning is something we live within. Implicit in this are questions about how learning happens and how experience is conceived as learning. Accordingly, I will offer a series of provocations to ‘find the learning in the experience.’ In doing so, I will test the senses alongside the intellect and the resonance of the experience alongside its cultural definition. To facilitate this, I will reflect upon the ‘body in learning’ and the means whereby this is received and expressed. Central to the discussion will be the stimulus contained in emotional experience with particular reference to ‘love’ and ‘loss.’ Here, reflection upon the ‘ecology’ of embodied experience will be addressed. Influences upon this work range far and wide: Augusto Boal, Humberto Maturana, Constantin Stanislavski, Aaron Williamson, and others. Because it is configured in terms of learning rather than healing, the orientation of the text will be towards a working understanding rather than resolution.

 

 

 

 

 

About the Author

 

David Wright is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Western Sydney. He teaches Drama Method, Transformative Learning and Social Ecology. His research interests lie in the fields of ecological consciousness, arts practice as research and applied theatre.