Without experience – How would you know?

I told my son (12) that he should not bite his nails, and he replayed: “But if I did not bite them, how would I know that the thumb nail is the thickest, hardiest and tears differently than the other nails?”

He was right: How would he know without experience?
We tend to understand thought as something opposite to what is directly perceived (Dewey, 2009). Michael Parsons suggests that thought itself is embodied (Parsons, 2007). I do not doubt that experience is essential for our understanding of the world and ourselves … it is just so seldom that we use words to mediate, explain, share, reflect about our embodied experiences.

Marte Gulliksen connects her experiences, thoughts and feelings in poetic descriptions of her embodied interactions with a three-dimensional material. In her master thesis – conducted as “research by design”- she wrote about her experience acquired through interactions with piece of wood she was carving. She observes her hands, tools and materials both from the inside of her body, and form the outside: with her eyes, nose, ears. And she tells us (and herself) about her intimate meeting with the material being shaped:
”The wood needs a long period of intense persuasion to accept my ideas, but when the shapes are found at last, the knife follows the fibres as if they had a secret agreement as to where they were heading. The knife follows the directions of the fibres. When they meet, the fibres and the knife, they unite like rivers connect, meet gliding down through shallow valleys” (Gulliksen, 2001)
Can writing about our experience help us to understand better? And what can we achieve by reflecting about the connections between thought, feelings and an experience? I believe more that we can imagine! But as far as our “tacit knowledge” and embodied experience remain unspoken, I fear they will remain a non-issue in discussions about learning.

I don’t have an image of Marte’s wood-work. The images presented here show two small sculptures that have been through hands of two male artists: “The Heart” has been cut on the lathe, re-constructed and polished by Tollef Thorsnes. Another piece of wood has many times been turned around in Mikael Nilsson’s palms; The shape of a horse that was hidden inside, slowly made itself recognizable through the artist’s touch (more than through his sight) and motivated his further actions with the knife. (I can tell this because I observed Mikael while he was making other small sculptures at the Slöjd conference in Linköping, in August 2010.)

Dewey, J. (2009). How We Think. Available from Digireads.com

Gulliksen, M. (2001). The Creative Meeting - A discussion over the Aesthetic Elements in the Creative Process. In C. Nygren-Landgärds & J. Peltonen (Eds.), Visioner om slöjd och slöjdpedagogik: visions on sloyd and sloyd education (pp. 55-64). Vasa: NordFo.

Parsons, M. (2007). Art and Metaphor, Body and Mind. In L. Bresler (Ed.), International Handbook of Research in Arts education (pp. 533-542). Dordrecht Springer.