Experiential-Inductive Learning

Experiential-Inductive Learning explores a central challenge in professional education: how can experience become a genuine source of knowledge rather than remain simply something that happens to the learner?
Drawing on experiential learning, inductive teaching, reflective practice, and metacognition, the volume develops a pedagogical framework in which experience, reflection, problematization, and formalized knowledge are deliberately interconnected. Its distinctive contribution lies not in proposing a new general theory of learning, but in configuring these dimensions within a recursive educational architecture that enables learners to examine how knowledge reshapes their interpretation of experience.
The book moves from the theoretical contributions of Kolb, Schön, and Mezirow to the formulation of Experiential-Inductive Learning, examining its relationship with professional reflexivity, educational action, and the modifiability of interpretive repertoires. A critical dialogue with neuroscience further explores the conditions that make such repertoires open to revision while avoiding biological reductionism. The framework is then examined through educational experiences in which learners engage with formal, non-formal, and informal learning, empathy, sound dramatization, music and emotion, writing, and metacognitive reflection.
Rather than opposing experience to theory, or inductive learning to explicit instruction, this volume asks how their relationship can be intentionally designed. It offers researchers, teacher educators, and professionals in education a framework for understanding how experience can become an object of inquiry and how formalized knowledge can return to experience to transform the ways in which it is interpreted.

Maria Rosaria Strollo is Full Professor of General and Special Didactics at the University of Naples Federico II and Scientific Director of its Experimental Didactics Laboratory. Her research focuses on experiential and reflective learning, metacognition, teacher education, neurophenomenology, and the relationships among emotion, memory, and educational processes. She has published extensively on teacher education, musical autobiography, metacognition, and
transformative learning. In 2014, she received the Jack Mezirow Living Theory of Transformative Learning Award at Columbia University.