Some concepts and definitions

In his much-quoted book Experiential Learning (1984), David Kolb describes how a diverse body of learned scholars developed very similar models of learning in the first half of the twentieth century. He shows that the American pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, the German originator of ‘T-group’ training and organisation development Kurt Lewin, and the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget — working relatively independently of each other used the same two polarities with regard to learning, each of them leading to a cyclical learning model with four (virtually identical) phases. These phases are often referred to as ‘Kolb’s learning styles’. This book also adopts this term and follows Kolb in that the learning styles are not necessarily assumed to follow each other cyclically.