46 Ethics and Systems Thinking
focus on ‘changing frames’ or – ‘meaning perspectives’ as Mezirow (1991) calls
them – is directly analogous to the concept of ‘epistemic development’.
It is perhaps most useful to conclude this piece with a brief reference to the
meta-cognitive competencies – the learning how to learn and knowing how to
know – that remain to be addressed here. In patent contrast to those who see learn-
ing as the acquisition of knowledge, Kolb (1984) presents it as ‘the process by
which knowledge is created through the transformation of experience’. From this
experiential perspective, knowledge is continuously being created, recreated and
‘used’ by individuals as they seek to make conceptual sense of what they are sensing
through their own experiences of the ever-changing ‘concrete’ world about them,
as the essential prelude to taking sensible actions to adapt, or to adapt to, that
perceived reality.
As Kolb sees it, it this adaptation that is the essential motivation for coming to
know and learning: indeed, as he argues, ‘learning is the major process of human
adaptation’ (Kolb, 1984, p32). Echoing one of the central themes of this chapter,
Kolb insists that experiential learning is a ‘holistic process’ that involves constant
transactions ‘between the person and the environment’ in a manner that engages
‘the integrated function of the total organism – thinking, feeling, perceiving and
behaving’.
But with that insistence, of course, Kolb reveals an epistemic position as well
as a systemic orientation and logic, that is far removed from the dualism and
reductionism that continues to prevail, ironically enough, within our formal insti-
tutions of learning and in our conventional knowing institutions which ‘extract’
the perceptual/sensual from the conceptual, and action from reflection, the subjec-
tive from the objective and so on. This Kolbian view of learning is as a quintes-
sentially participative and transformative process in which the transformative
power lies with both ‘the whole’ knowing system and ‘its parts’.
Knowers develop a deep sense of the world that they are experiencing from the
perspective of being ‘embedded’ within it and participating as part of it, even as
they are trying to make sense out of it. Thus participation is an ‘implicit aspect of
wholeness’, as Skowlimowski (1985) claims, which, in this learning/knowing sense
includes, as Bohm (1987) emphasized, ‘thoughts, “felts” and feelings’ as well the
‘state of the body’. Importantly, as Bohm also argued, it is a social process with
‘thought passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought has
evolved from ancient times’. This continuous ‘unfolding’ and ‘enfolding’ of mean-
ings, thoughts, ‘felts’ and even intentions and ‘urges to do things’, cannot be any-
thing other than a dynamic, systemic process of individuals and social groupings
alike – and indeed of the mind itself. And all of this is very reminiscent of Goethe’s
participatory approach to a science through which he strove ‘to enliven and deepen
our understanding of nature’ (Barnes, 2000). The Goethean scientist, claimed Bor-
toft (1996), ‘does not lose himself or herself in nature, but finds nature within him-
self/herself in fully conscious experience’. Such conscious participation, is seen as a
synergistic condition in which humanity and nature work together in such a way
that ‘each becomes more fully itself through the other’; a mutual enhancement.