Experiential Knowledge: How Literacy Practices Seek to Mediate Personal and Systemic Change

By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field’s conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping subjectivity. Because subjectivities (re)constitute larger systems, scholars should investigate how literacy interacts with experiential knowledge to learn whether and how it mediates personal and systemic change. To further such efforts, I show how some literacy practices use conceptual and procedural knowledge to revise experiential knowledge, and I outline an experiential approach to studying literacy.