Gender, Experience, and Knowledge in Adult Learning

Alisoun's Daughters

Elana Michelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317485506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this wide-ranging book, Elana Michelson invites us to revisit basic understandings of the `experiential learner'. How does experience come to be seen as the basis of knowledge? How do gender, class, and race enter into the ways in which knowledge is valued? What political and cultural belief systems underlie such practices as the assessment of prior learning and the writing of life narratives?

Drawing on a range of disciplines, from feminist theory and the politics of knowledge to literary criticism, Michelson argues that particular understandings of `experiential learning' have been central to modern Western cultures and the power relationships that underlie them. Presented in four parts, this challenging and lively book asks educators of adults to think in new ways about their assumptions, theories, and practices:

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• Part I provides readers with a short history of the notion of experiential learning.

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• Part II brings the insights and concerns of feminist theory to bear on mainstream theories of experiential learning.

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• Part III examines the assessment of prior experiential learning for academic credit and/or professional credentials.

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• Part IV addresses a second pedagogical practice that is ubiquitous in adult learning, namely, the assigning of life narratives.

Gender, Experience, and Knowledge in Adult Learning will be of value to scholars and graduate students exploring adult and experiential learning, as well as academics wishing to introduce students to a broad range of feminist, critical-race, materialist and postmodernist thinking in the field.

Part I
The politics of experience

1
Purging the Transgressive from Experiential Learning

The children of Mercurie and Venus

Been in hir wirkyng ful contrarius;

Mercurie loveth wysdam and science,

And Venus loveth ryot and dispence.

[The children of Mercury and Venus

Are in their workings opposed.

Mercury loves wisdom and learning,

And Venus loves riot and free expenditure.]

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, III 697–700

In her invective against the misogyny of the clergy, the Wife of Bath first questions why “no wommaan of no clerk is preysed [praised]” (III 706) and then proceeds to offer a simple explanation. An elderly churchman, she says, will lash out at women when, owing to dotage and impotence, he cannot “do of Venus werkes worth his olde sho [shoe]” (III 708). As the above epigraph attests, however, Alisoun also understands the tension between women and clerics to be the result of dissimilar astrological natures. Clerics are from Mercury; women are from Venus, as it were.

In associating the battle between churchmen and laywomen with the contrary natures of Mercury and Venus, Alisoun is appropriating – and using to her advantage – a gendered dualism that associates men with order and learning and women with disorder and lack of discipline. That dualism, deeply ingrained in Western culture, will be the subject of Chapter two, but for the moment, I want to explore Alisoun’s own side of the dualism, that is, the association of the female-normed experiential learner with the chaotic and the irreverent. In what follows, I trace the ways in which ‘experiential learning’ became constrained within the normalizing structures and ideologies of the emerging economic and political order. Many of the values most associated with the adult learner – self-direction, independence of mind, and critical self-reflection, for example – are a direct product of the gradual disassociation of experience from the “ryot and dispence” that Alisoun here associates with Venus.

Carnivals and the taming of experience

The story begins, not with a pilgrimage, but with a carnival, another customary feature of the medieval landscape. Both a symbol for and an enactment of the world beyond imposed ideologies, the carnival has come to represent the communal nature of medieval life and has been used by scholars to explore modes of being that were gradually erased from public view in the course of the Enlightenment.

In his classic study, Rabaleis and His World (1984), Mikhail Bakhtin explored the medieval and Renaissance carnival as a space within which the common people could breach the rigidities of a class- and Church-bound society. In opposition to, and in parodic relationship with, the ideological and social hierarchies of official culture, the periodic fairs of pre-capitalist Europe offered a transgressive realm in which sententiousness and ideological certitude were suspended in favor of sensuousness, mutability, and play. As described by Bakhtin, the carnival took its energy from “the material bodily principle, that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (p. 18). If the body is the site of worldliness and sin, it is also the site of energy, irreverence, and the transgression of boundaries. In the carnival, the body is celebrated for its capacity to express joy and audaciousness; it overflows its own limits, refuses confinement and order, and functions as a site of excess and extravagance.

Bakhtin’s work focuses on Rabaleis’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, written a century and a half after Chaucer, but it just as easily could have focused on The Canterbury Tales. The Tales are famously filled with images of bodily functions and pleasures – adulterous escapades, raised skirts and naked buttocks, flatulence – and while the pilgrims have a variety of responses to this imagery, it does not seem remarkable to any of Chaucer’s characters that they be spoken of in very mixed company. Christian virtue may claim the upper hand, but greed, lust, ridicule, and bawdy laughter all have a public face. The pilgrims’ outing itself is a kind of moving carnival; the longing “to goon [go] on pilgrimages” is stimulated less by a wish to honor “the hooly blisful martir” St. Thomas Becket than by the fact that “Aprill with his shoures soote” [fragrant showers] is a nice time to be out of doors (I 1–18).

Bakhtin makes the important point that the carnival body is a communal body. It is contained “not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego” (p. 19), but in the collective mass of the people, for whom the carnival represents a breathing space and an alternative sociality. Within that space, the body is valuable precisely because it “is not a closed, completed unity; it is unfinished, outgrows itself” (p. 26). It violates the boundaries between self and other, self and world. Bakhtin notes that Rabaleis’ imagery, which in this regard is quite close to that of Chaucer, accentuates those parts of the body that are open to the outside world. The emphasis is placed on the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body opens itself to or goes out to meet the world: the mouth, the genitals, the breasts, the anus, the potbelly, the nose.

This emphasis is of a piece with the role of the carnival as a site of experiences that we would now call border-crossings, that is, the “interchange” (p. 317) between entities whose separateness from each other is inherently unstable. Carnival experience, like the carnival body, is transgressive both in the literal and figurative sense. One aspect of this is a form of symbolic inversion, a parodic relationship to hierarchical authority and fixed social identities. The peasant is crowned king; the fool is promoted over the priest and the magistrate. Dualities are turned upon themselves in what is at once licensed release, a ritual of resistance, and a form of serious play (Stallybrass and White, 1986). In Alisoun’s terms, carnival is the site for privileging Venus over Mercury and, with it, the embodied over the cerebral. Stewart Justman (1994), who views Alisoun as a negative figure because of her association with the uncontrolled and disorderly, uses a word from Chaucer’s “Parson’s Tale” to identify this quality of reversal: “Like carnival or sin, she turns the world ‘up-sodoun’ [upside-down]” (p. 345).

The notion of interchange, however, does more than reverse the hierarchy of social and intellectual status; the “monstrueux assemblage” – monstrous jumble – of the carnival (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 109) also enacts the breakdown of any such dualities. That is, the fluidity of embodied experience in the carnival not only turns dualities on their heads, but undermines duality as such. The presiding spirit is neither Mercury nor Venus – in Greek, Hermes and Aphrodite – but rather the Hermaphrodite. Carnival represents a hybridization, a commingling of incompatible elements (Stallybrass and White, 1986). It makes possible impossible identities, unstable boundaries, unauthorized truths.

In such a world, experience is transgressive precisely because it cannot be made into a form of authority. It slips out from under the confines of official culture and insists on the human love of “ryot and dispense.” It is embodied, communal, and fruitfully incoherent; its very excess is what allows it to undermine hegemony. Experience, in other words, is liberatory precisely because it is unstable and provisional, because it is collective and not individual, because it always contains a chaotic element that resists categorization and management. In a world in which authority is a celibate male by definition, experience is the sexual woman who simply refuses – in all senses of the word – to mind.

Clearly, the form of experience I am calling carnival will never be serviceable as authority. It will first have to be tamed. Experiential learning as a legitimated social practice is a product of the time in which that taming happened, in which experience became situated within the modern relationships among reason, individualism, and self-mastery. First, the communal body of the carnival was privatized; new norms of social behavior privileged bodily autonomy and inviolability, and the ability to maintain distance from the bodies of others came to signify the management of society as a whole. Secondly, the emerging economic and political rights were predicated on individualized mental processes and a stable, self-regulating subjectivity. Thirdly, as I will explore in Chapter two, the terms of the mind/body duality shifted so that the body was to be controlled, not by virtue, but by reason. These three shifts – the privatization of the body, the fixing of internalized subjectivity, and the rule of reason – each rested on the rejection of the embodied, communal aspects of experience. In the process, ‘experiential learning’ became an algorithm for purging experience of its transgressive qualities, asserting a coherent, rights-bearing selfhood, and claiming its accompanying economic and political prerogatives. The ‘self’ thus circumscribed within carefully crafted, socially governable norms both defined the limits of acceptability through a series of outcast Others and restrained the transgressive and creative possibilities of experience.

The privatization of experience

In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986), Stallybrass and White use a Bakhtinian analysis to explore the growing attack on carnivals and public rituals that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They argue, first, that the decline of the carnival in Europe was part of a larger social transformation in which the life of the body was becoming ever more privatized as the autonomous, self-regulating economic ‘man’ of capitalism and the Enlightenment became the new social ideal. Rather than serving as a joyous point of exchange between the individual and the world, the newly isolated body came to represent what the poet and playwright Ben Jonson (1572–1637) called a “gathered” self, a self that is closed to the world, impenetrable, and “untouch’d” (as cited in Fish, 1984, p. 39). Henceforth, the body was to be valorized as “the border of a closed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and with the world” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 320).

There is no place in this new social formulation for the “mobile, split, multiple self” of the carnival, “a subject of pleasure in processes of exchange” (Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 22). Central to both the formulation of bourgeois public space and the construction of the gathered bourgeois self was a change in manners to refine those bodily behaviors – yawning, spitting, and passing wind, for example – that exist at the boundaries of self and world. Simultaneously, moral rectitude became associated with civil crowd behavior. One established a unitary, autonomous bourgeois identity through disciplined public behavior, while the rabble that Wordsworth called “this Parliament of Monsters” (as cited in Stallybrass and White, 1986, p. 120) demonstrated their inferiority through vulgar behavior in public spaces such as theaters and fairs.

Contagion¹ by others in the form of epidemic disease had long been associated in the Middle Ages with both socially marginalized populations and socially unsanctioned activities; leprosy, for example, was seen as evidence of sexual licentiousness, and bubonic plague was blamed on the Jews. In the centuries following the Enlightenment, a discourse concerning dirt and cleanliness, licentiousness and self-control was joined to the new distaste for bodily contact as official attention became more and more focused on the threats of invasion and permeability. As Catherine Gallagher (1987) describes it,

the body came to occupy the center of a social discourse obsessed with sanitation, with minimizing bodily contact and preventing the now alarmingly traversable boundaries of individual bodies from being penetrated by a host of foreign elements, above all the products of other bodies

(Gallagher, 1987, p. 90; see also Poovey, 1988)

The autonomy of the individual was thus represented in the first instance by an exactitude of bodily separateness that would have been impossible at a carnival or, for that matter, on a pilgrimage.

As an index of changing notions of selfhood, the privatization of the body as the sign of the gathered self has enormous implications for the emergence of the ‘experiential learner.’ The forms of identity both required for and enabled by the rise of bourgeois individualism rest on a symbolic order of borders, margins, and limits (Fuss, 1991, p. 1). Bodily surfaces demarcate social and personal boundaries, and what Stallybrass and White call the “logic of identity formation” (p. 25) develops within an experience of self that is unitary, closed, and self-possessed. The modern notion of identity itself originated when Locke applied the philosophical term for sameness to the fixed medium of the body, whose stability over time then forms the basis for political and economic personhood under the terms of the Enlightenment social contract. Resting on a concept of possessive individualism that grants rights to individuals as owners of themselves, this discourse sees the body as the delimiting grounds for human individuality (Cohen, 1991). In the process, the fruitful instability of experience, the transgressive meanings and unsanctioned subjectivity celebrated by Alisoun, are constrained within narrow rules for setting the newly privatized body within the socially recognizable parameters of economic and judicial personhood.

Judith Butler (1999) has noted that categories of personal identity are themselves a part of internalized regulatory regimes. That is, they are how we come to understand who we are, what – and whom – we desire, how we should feel, and how we must behave. The privatization of experience behind the closed, proprietary boundaries of the self is thus not only an aspect of the privatization of society, but also an aspect of a growing emphasis on self-regulation. As the body came to represent the unitary identity of the (male) bourgeois individual, one asserted one’s entitlement to economic and political rights by controlling one’s own bodily behavior and by projecting lack of self-control onto a series of despised Others who were portrayed as ‘low’ and disorderly. With the emergence of what we would now call medical and sociological discourse, the association of disease and vice became focused on the notion of self-control: disease was seen as caused by those whose own bodily imprudence, now redefined as pathological, threatened to invade the social body as a whole.

Thus, the association of Venus with “ryot and dispense” takes on new meanings with the emergence of the bourgeois individual charged with developing personal, internalized mechanisms for self-control. Closely related to the understanding of the body as demarking a personal boundary is a new understanding of inner consciousness as an interiorized, bounded realm and, in what we might now call critical self-reflection, as a ‘space’ to be explored (Bordo, 1986). Montaigne’s Essays, first published in 1580, describe this newly privatized, self-conscious inner realm: “I turn my gaze inward. … I look inside myself; I continually observe myself. I take stock of myself, I taste myself …” (as cited in Bordo, 1986, p. 443). Thus, the privatization of the body on the part of the experiencing self is matched by inwardness of self-monitoring mind.

The writings of René Descartes represent both the most developed exploration of the privatized mind and the most explicit rejection of any form of communally held ideas. Like Alisoun, Descartes begins by rejecting the received truths of others, but, unlike Alisoun, Descartes sees this as a deeply individual affair. Descartes (1637[1960]) begins his first Meditations on this very point:

Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, … and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew. …

(Descartes, 1637[1960], p. 112)

His chosen task, to limit his inquiry “not to what others have thought…, but to what we can clearly and perspicuously behold and certainly deduce” (Descartes, 1985, p. 13), constructs a knower who is distrustful of others to the point of paranoia. The foundations of certain knowledge lie in doubt and suspicion: less ‘I think, therefore I am’ than ‘I exist, since I am deceived.’

The Cartesian knower is characterized by two forms of detachment: a separation from and suspicion of others as the basis for arriving at reliable truths and a suspicion of the senses, the very instruments of exchange between the self and the world. Descartes embraces thinking as a retreat from the world of dialogue, action, and feeling. The unitary, anti-social, doubting human mind is the only thing he can trust. At the same time, the autonomous mind constructed by Descartes is trustworthy only to the degree that rules of rationality govern its thinking. Descartes is one of many who, by focusing epistemological questions on how one knows rather than what can be known, make the split between mind and body and the management of mental processes into a question of personal identity.

As Foucault (1979) famously argued, the development of internalized Norms – and the categorizations and measurements with which to enforce them – was the underside of the formally egalitarian political and judicial framework within which the bourgeoisie arose. While every society has had ways of controlling the body – enslavement, torture, and imprisonment come to mind – and while something that might be called subjectivity no doubt exists in myriad human settings, the management of inner experience became crucial at a point at which the threat of violent coercion was being replaced in some contexts with internalized standards of discipline and self-control. Thus, the privatization of experience behind the closed, proprietary boundaries of the self is not only an aspect of the privatization of society, but also of a growing emphasis on self-regulation. As I explore mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Credits list
• Introduction
• PART I The politics of experience
• PART II Gender, experience, and the body
• PART III Power and the assessment of experiential learning
• PART IV Narrating the self
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index