Against Naive Romanticism: from celebration to the critical analysis of experience

The importance of building on adult learners’ rich experiences is celebrated as a defining characteristic of adult education. This paper argues that we must move from celebration to a critical reflection on experience. Critical reflection is defined as the illumination of power dynamics and the uncovering of hegemonic assumptions about practice. The author explores how adult educators can be engaged in a modelling of critical reflection on experiential practice by viewing what they do through four complementary lenses — their autobiographies as adult learners, their students’ eyes, their colleagues’ perceptions, and the lens of theory. Experiential educators’ use of the circle is discussed as an example of how critical reflection challenges orthodoxies of experiential learning.