Experience and Space

The idea of experience has been fueling my research interests for the last couple months or so without me necessarily recognizing that “experience” was the term I should be using. I think that the articles examining Vygotsky’s and Makiguchi’s concepts of space lie wholly within this realm of the importance of experience in education also. The concepts of space and how people are constantly creating new meanings through physical and social landscapes are also formed by students’ experiences within these contexts, and we could even refer to the process of creation of meaning as experience itself. Goulah says directly that “’Space’… is the sociocultural space(s) wherein meaning in constructed.” (86) To put it in Giroux’s term and to approach it slightly from the lens of cultural studies, cultural artifacts are shaping and being shaped by interactions between humans and their surroundings. There is a sort of “public pedagogy” that is constantly being enacted in these social spaces while meanings constantly shift for the participants acting within these spaces. This is really valuable because it shows how meaning is created together, through collective experiences. An experience does not occur through the actions and responses of one individual, but rather through the interconnected web of social understanding of symbols. Meaning and experiences are shaped together in the local community. This connection between meaning and experiences is also discussed in the “Fundamental Values” as the concept of value. Value is relational and is created only through placing the self in relation to an object. It is a deeply humanistic argument. However, I think the ideas of experience and sociocultural constructions of meanings are also inseparable. If we view all of these processes an constructions of value and social space as experiences, then we can create an even greater value on experience within the classroom.