Learning through Experience
How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’s work explores. As we navigate through life, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.
In season one of the Learning through Experience Podcast, Dr. Heidi Brooks focused on one of the most impactful ways to learn through experience: learning with mentors. She spoke with some of her mentors and they reflected on what brought them to where they are today in their own work, life, and play.
But in a podcast that proposes that learning can not only happen through conventional exposure to concepts and theories but also through what we experience in life, this second season is all about the HOW.
How do we learn through our own experience?
Dr. Heidi Brooks talks to artists, authors, professors, and even yoga instructors about four practices you can lean on to learn through experience. These four practices are: How to challenge your perspective, how to stretch yourself and build range, how to direct your own learning, and finally, the importance of reflection.
I hope you follow along and join us for season two of Learning Through Experience.
Subscribe to Learning through Experience in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or your favorite podcast player.
Episodes
- PodcastSeason 1Episode 4Duration 39:33
Orienting Towards Courageous Community
When I was coming out of my PhD studies, I was wandering in my own wilderness, trying to find my way. Wondering what else I could do besides clean my house to avoid my dissertation, I enrolled in the Coach Training Institute. And that’s how I met Karen Kimsey-House, who eventually became my personal coach, teacher, and dear friend. Karen helped me see how I could amplify the power of learning through the experience of my academic world filled with books, papers, and expertise. In this conversation, we discuss the power of reinvention, how to hear and heed your own truth, and the importance of creating spaces to craft understanding.
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- PodcastSeason 1Episode 3Duration 40:03
The Scariest Book I Had Ever Read
In this episode, I spoke with Parker Palmer about the connection between teaching and learning, healing the heart of democracy, and following the path of integrity.
I’ve been reading Parker J Palmer’s books for years. He's the author of 10 books about education, community leadership, spirituality, and social change. Three of these particularly resonated with my own experience: Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. and one of them stood out as the scariest book I had ever read.
Parker J. Palmer is also the founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal.
Key Topics:
03:33 The interplay of aging and vocation: How to keep learning through experience with the limitations that come with age;
09:38 The connection between teaching and learning: Teaching as an expert with relatively static knowledge versus teaching as a more dynamic process;
13:34 The community of truth: How we know what we know and the validity of our knowledge;
19:53 The scariest book I had ever read: Why this book resonated so deeply and prompted a perspective shift around leadership, epistemology, faithfulness, and effectiveness;
29:12 Putting wheels on ideas: Creating a vehicle that will allow other people to ride an idea and reshape it as they go toward destinations of their own choosing;
35:43 Following the path of integrity: Despite our greatest ambitions and clear intentions to live a life of virtue aligned with our values, it can be hard in practice.
Additional Resources from Parker
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- PodcastSeason 1Episode 2Duration 36:47
Learning Outside of the Classroom
Not everything we learn in college comes from the classroom. When you think about learning and insights that have mattered most to you, you may find that the most powerful associations include people, events, feelings and places.
Barbara Tannenbaum and her living room came easily to mind for me when thinking about when and where I learned through experience. Barbara taught one of the most popular courses on campus. So why the living room image? Barbara would invite some students into her home for gathering circles in her living room — and I feel lucky to have been one of them. Her living room — outside the walls of my college classrooms — is an important marker in my ongoing learning journey.I love how we all have the chance to learn outside the classroom (because that’s most of life). In this episode, we discuss power talk, removing linguistic anchors, and why when we have more voice, we welcome more beauty.
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- PodcastSeason 1Episode 1Duration 09:10
Introducing Dr. Heidi Brooks and ‘Learning through Experience’
We are overloaded with so much information that we become full of ideas but too often lack the time to reflect, practice, and enact wisely. Ideas are not enough—we cannot run life by syllabus and read our way through—we have to learn our way through much of the experience of life, and integrate information as sensemaking to help us get better as we go.
I’m Dr. Heidi Brooks, host of Learning Through Experience. I believe that we could upgrade life and face an unknown future with more confidence if we had the capacity to learn our way through experience. So I want this podcast to offer some ways to learn our way forward.
Given the podcast format, it might be challenging - I can't simply tell you what learning through experience is, I want to show you, to offer you an experience. I am certainly doing that myself as I learn through experience how to podcast on this topic. I am hopeful that we will experience it together.
In this first season, we looked at the experience of mentorship, an experience based on relationship. This was a set of conversations with the people who mentored me (oh so long ago!) with an eye to this question: How do we apply what we learn through experience with mentors?
Key Topics:
00:00 The WHY behind the podcast: Why do we need to learn from experience? Why experience in itself isn’t enough?
05:51 Learning through the experience of teaching: Discovering what people are hungry for through one of my first experiences as a teacher at Yale.
07:42 The paradox of Learning Through Experience: These episodes aren’t about teaching, they’re about experiencing something together, reflecting, noticing what resonates, and learning from within.
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