Kurt Lewin's Experiential Learning Theory

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Learning from experience According to some researcher’s experiential learning theory (ELT) has been widely used in management learning research and practice for over thirty-five years. Building on the foundational works of Kurt Lewin, John Dewey and others, experiential learning theory offers a dynamic theory based on a learning series driven by the resolution of the dual tensions of action/reflection and experience/abstraction. These two dimensions state a holistic learning space wherein learning transactions take place between individuals and the environment. The learning space is multi-level and can describe learning and development in appropriate ways at the level of the individual, the group, and the organization. This approach…show more content…
To improve learning in higher education, the primary focus should be on engaging students in a process that best enhances their learning – a process that contains feedback on the effectiveness of their learning efforts. Education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience, the process and goal of education are one and the same thing. Dewey (1897) all learning is re-learning. Learning is best facilitated by a process that draws out the students’ beliefs and ideas about a topic so that they can be examined, tested and integrated with new, more refined ideas. Learning needs the resolution of conflicts between dialectically opposed modes of adaptation to the world. Conflict, differences, and disagreement are what drive the learning process. In the process of learning one is called upon to move back and forth between opposing modes of reflection and action and feeling and…show more content…
The interest in knowledge flows stems from primarily two observations. The early literature on information transfer has suggested that the cost of transmitting a given body of information is often very low (1962). However, von Hippel (1994) observed that the above statement is only true as long as knowledge is not sticky, that is only when information is costly to acquire, transfer and use does the issue of knowledge transfer become interesting. An alternative observation suggests that because the character of knowledge is fundamentally different from physical goods, the transfer of knowledge becomes more complicated than physically moving something from A to B (1969). Knowledge can either be generated within firms, or accessed externally that is knowledge flows may viewed as intra-firm or inter-firm. As it turns out, these two ways of building knowledge have been used as foundation for at least two sets of
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