The Significance of Experience in SLE Research

Abstract

’Experience’ is at the root of individual, socio‐environmental existence. Inquiries into its more ‘significant’ moments and episodes have arrived at a potentially important body of knowledge in environmental education. However, in the absence of parallel research efforts that demonstrate how the findings of those inquiries translate into contextually sensitive and socially useful educational practices, this discussion returns conceptually to questions posed by Louise Chawla about ‘inner nature’ and how significance of experience is socially constructed. To that future research agenda, I add the further question of how those constructions of ‘significance’ must be seen in relation to dominant social constructions of the ‘environment/nature’, sensitivity and activism. This begs the further question, exacerbated somewhat by the above lack of a connection with existing educational practices, of how teachers’ and learners’ thoughts and actions might also need to be examined in relation to dominant conceptions of the environment/ nature and constructions of environmental education. Consequently, by focusing on the ‘continuity of experience’, this response to issues raised primarily by Chawla about inner nature and other assertions by Tanner about the ‘right subjects’ also addresses broader tensions in environmental education. Significant life experiences (SLE) researchers should continue to refine their understandings of the ontological significance of the central category of human ‘experience’.