Striking Encounters: Problematics With Experience, Reflexivity, and Learning

This article seeks to explore a series of encounters where we engage with research with a view to learning differently. We argue that every encounter is a form of research if we can marshall the connecting threads and consider the individual as both singularity and collective. We use reflexivity to go beyond reflection and strive to construct knowledge as individual and collective purpose. We draw upon striking examples to explore how issues of learning, reflexivity, and pedagogy develop thinking in education, especially in Higher Education (HE). We seek to move beyond accounts of experience that merely describe and report and which borrow from humanistic accounts of a subject (one which both experiences and who thinks) an approach which we dub “De(s)-carting.” We then move toward explorations, which seek more engaged, concrete, ethical approaches that open up possibilities and offer alternative conceptions of working with experience in education, in all its variety.