Experiential Knowledge

    At risk of exploiting a cliche, I have to admit I found this article rather enlightening. In “Experiential Knowledge: How Literacy Practices Seek to Mediate Personal and Systemic Change,” Gwen Gorzelsky uses the teachings of a Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, to demonstrate how procedural knowledge and conceptual knowledge combine to create a framework for experiential knowledge, and then how that experiential knowledge, when appropriately applied within the provided framework, leads to individual and systemic changes. While Gorzelsky’s examples focus on how reading guided meditation and visualization leads to a spiritual and humanitarian change, she suggests substituting general literacy practices for meditation and visualization will offer students similar opportunities for personal growth and self-efficacy.
    The procedural knowledge Gorzelsky utilizes in her example is visualization during guided meditations. Nhat Hanh’s guided meditations

asks practitioners to undertake step-by-step visualizations designed to generate calm and  relaxation, and then encourages practitioners to focus on this state as the foundation of peace and joy in the present moment. The second emphasizes focusing mindful attention on negative emotions and mental states to generate insights that help transform these states into more positive ones. (407)

These two steps are procedures that, when combined with the third step, which introduces the conceptual knowledge Nhat Hanh’s teachings impart, build the necessary framework to allow the practitioner to effect personal change. Procedural knowledge, then, is the how needed to apply the what.
    Conceptual knowledge (the what) is reflected in the third step in which the practitioner applies the concepts of emptiness, the belief that no one has an inherent nature separate of external influences such as politics, culture, ecology, family and so on, and interdependence, in which there is a relationship between those external causes. When the practitioner applies the conceptual and procedural knowledges in the fourth step, they experience a connection between themselves that which they meditated upon.
    The resulting experiential knowledge drives a sense of compassion and a desire to take action. By maintaining sustain, mindful practice of these steps, the ultimate result is not a one-time experience but instead redirects the practitioner’s core understanding. To be most effective, the practice must address intense emotions, emphasize high stakes and offer successful examples of change. This new personal understanding causes systemic shifts because the newly-enlightened practitioners will feel an intense need to address and reconcile social injustices.
    In terms of literacy practices, the procedural knowledge students need to learn would be the writing process. The conceptual knowledge, then, would consist of core curriculum topics that allow students to explore subjects that are meaningful to them. When student combine their practice of composition skills with meaningful topics, their writings result in an acquisition of experiential knowledge. They can then take that knowledge and apply it to their personal influences on the world around them.