Matching Student Assessment to Problem-based Learning: Lessons from experience in a law faculty

This paper focuses on experiential learning in the paradoxical postmodern moment: a period offering unparalleled opportunities for diverse groups to experiment with identities. But this in a context of frightening uncertainties and insecurities at an environmental, socioeconomic and personal level. The struggle to experiment must also be located within a powerful consumerism which can offer illusions of choice, but substitutes appearance for substance, manic materialism for existential purpose. Using cultural theory and psychoanalysis, I argue that experiential learning, in the postmodern moment, requires a holistic cultural psychology of human agency transcending the narrow vocationalist, short‐term discourse of lifelong learning. In a culture where inherited templates have fractured, experiential learning has become a vital necessity, offering, potentially, some supportive space, emotional as well as critical literacy, for the peoples of the margins, and nearer the core, to recompose selves, stories and communities, on more of their own terms.