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The questions that arose at the beginning of the investigation were as follows: what does experience mean in this investigation, and what is the constitution of the transitioning experience? Experience has been a central and fundamental term in the research. When I engaged in responding to these two questions, I realised that a variety of perspectives relate to the experience concept so that it remains without consistency and particularisation. The term has appeared as a ‘floating signifier’ (Midgley, 2010; Smith & Turner, 1995). According to Holmes (1971), experience as a term is problematic when it is used as an object for research because it is epistemologically complex. The complexity can be seen from two sides: first, a problem arises with the significance of experience as knowledge; in other words, how significant is knowledge that is based on subjective experience? The other aspect to the problem is whether experience can be understood as a source of knowledge, as well as a final court of appeal for all empirical knowledge. Therefore, at the heart of this investigation is the need to identify the concept of experiential knowledge as a source of knowledge in order to conceptualise the transitioning experience.

The concepts of experience and of the transitioning experience are developed, as mentioned, around symbolic interactionism (in addition to the sociocultural perspective and the

formation of Arab reason). These three perspectives have offered a broad set of interrelated assumptions about the two-way relationship between man and the context (Musolf, 2003).

Although each perspective is a large umbrella covering a range of diverse theories, there are some shared assumptions relevant to the concept of experience. Two major assumptions are described below:

1. Human experience can exist only as a result of the interaction between a person and his or her world.

Both symbolic interactionists and socioculturalists believe that humans are not merely passively influenced by the environment; rather, they consciously interact with it. This process creates development and transformations in the course of our lives. On the basis of this assumption, the relationship between individuals and the world is a reciprocal

relationship that results in reciprocal influences (Blumer, 1980, 1986; Daniels et al., 2007;

Denzin, 1992; Mead, 1967). From a symbolic interactionist perspective, interactions are based on the meanings that we assign to them. These meanings are ‘derived from, or arise out of, the social interaction that one has with others and the society’ and are ‘handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters’ (Blumer, 1986, p. 1).

Interaction is a constituent of our experiences, and humans experience things in the process of interaction with the world, which is a combination of two worlds: the physical world (i.e.

space, time and events, languages as voice), and the nonphysical world (i.e. beliefs, culture, society, politics, languages as signified meanings). We interact with these two worlds in a dynamic way, and this activity is what forms our experience.

According to Daniels (2005), experience, from a Vygotskian perspective, is considered a unity of self and environment. Thus, when we examine someone’s experience, we actually examine the interaction between a person’s self with all its components (e.g. values, beliefs, personal characteristics, and skills) and its surrounding world (Daniels, 2005).

2. Experience is the consequence of a person’s interaction with the surrounding recognisable world.

This assumption is interrelated with and dependent on the previous assumption. It is the foundation that underlies the concepts of the transitioning experience and cultural identity. It is assumed that experience can be created only by interaction with the recognisable world or with what Holland (2001) calls the ‘figured world’ (p. 41). Our figured world is the context that is produced socially, constituted culturally, and developed historically (Clammer et al., 2004; Holland, 2001; Urrieta, 2007). This figured world is the space we are actually

interacting within and is the context within which our activity is placed.

To know this world, we use our mind as a tool to mediate understandings and figuration (Urrieta, 2007). The mediating mind (Vygotsky, 1962), or ‘reason’ (لقعلا) as Al-Jabri (2011b) calls it, is a combination of two minds, as explained earlier: the constituent mind and the constituted mind. The constituted mind is the means by which we understand the world and make meaning of it; it is constituted, first, by our cultural and social discourse, and by language and cultural artefacts as interpreted by the constituent mind. Experience is a result of interactions between persons and their recognisable world, and is influenced by the social and cultural context of the figured world.

Experience develops historically. According to Dewey (1998), ‘experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those

which come after’ (p. 27). Dewey suggests that experience is a consequence of a person’s subjective action combined with the judgment of the consequences of that action within an object (environment). To understand experience, we must consider both subject and object together (Glassman, 2001).

Three ideas arise from this discussion: one, the figured world; two, the active self; and three, context. These concepts have each been developed in a different and specific theoretical frame. However, they share two assumptions that provide an important connection. First, we interact with our surrounding world; and second, the interaction occurs within a contextual environment that mediates the production of meaning within and between exchanges. Thus experience, in a basic sense, is considered an emergent and dynamic phenomenon that results from the interaction between individuals and their context. This phenomenon, a unit of meaning created within an interaction, includes feelings, knowledge, images, impressions, and even the developmental and transformational status of the meanings that emerge (e.g.

Engeström, 1999; Glassman, 2001; Heinemann, 1941; Urrieta, 2007). The experience of Saudi students in a mixed-gender environment can be viewed as the interaction of ‘the Saudi self’ within a mixed-gender context.