Learning Through Experience
We all want work—and life—to be better. So how do we make it happen? 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’ work explores. As we navigate the everyday, 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.
Almost all adults work and experience organizational life. Work is the common connector; it dominates where we engage with the world and where the world engages with us. And for Dr. Brooks, it’s a canvas for the great re-imagining of our humanity. So, what can we do every day to help create an experience of work that people want to be part of? This everyday leadership invitation goes beyond deliverables and tasks into thinking of work as a space that we co-create.
Season Three of the Learning Through Experience podcast echos Dr. Brooks’ course structure, centered on interpersonal and group dynamics. Even at Yale, there is a place for learning through experience—not just books. The answer you seek is not on page 4. Watch and listen as Dr. Brooks meets with colleagues and authorities in their fields about transformative experiences that shape and shift how we learn and listen, feel and connect, reinforcing that experience precedes thinking that challenges our paradigms and assumptions.
In order to challenge the status quo, we need to have experiences that open us up to learning. Are you ready? Join us for Season Three of Learning Through Experience.
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Episodes
- 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.
- 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. - 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.