There are may ways of describing experiential learning but this work from Professor Thomas Fuchs works for me, describing cognition as embodied and active and the brain as a relational organ, the title of his 2016 book.

I am working my way through his 2018 book “Ecology of the Brain – The Phenomenology and Biology of the Embodied Mind”.

In the preface the book refers to the idea of ‘..the Umwelt for understanding the human brain, namely as an organ of relation, interaction, and resonance: with the body itself, with the immediate environment of the organism, and with the social and cultural environment of the lifeworld.’

The Umwelt or environment, is a way of thinking about how our perception is a product of our circumstances. A bacteria, a bee, a bat, a bird and a badger all live in a wood near my home. All sense and respond to the same woods but each will percieve it in a very different way. A bacteria responds to heat and chemicals in it’s immediate milieu, a bees can sense the sun, with compound eye and navigate by it, a bat flies by sound, a bird by sight, a badger lives in darkness and hunts by with its nose. To each it is categorically a different place. Each organisms umwelt, their environement, thus their experience, is different.

My take is that the outdoors and art making offer us ways of modifying our umwelt or having our umwelt modified. We can, through art-making, think through paint or dance. The outdoors provides us with an experience very different from our normal domestic indoor setting. Art making and the outdoors extend and modify our umwelt. Thus they extend and modify us. This is a key idea in what I am proposing.

The video below has Professor Fuchs explaining ideas from this book. The language is dense but non-technical. It may be a useful way of thinking about experiential learning, our learning in an environment, an umwelt, for artists, art therapists, experiential and outdoor educators.

He talks of learning being circular, realtional, thus performative and phenomenological, about how mind and body are a unity, and both the subject and object of experience, and about how an ecological understanding best applies. For me it brings together a lot of ideas, maybe attached to different words, in a variety of other academic discourses I have read, so it is post-curricular and trans-disciplinary. To me a good sign. It suggests it has the scope to be understood by people from many modes of discourse.