Phenomenological Inquiry in Education

Theories, Practices, Provocations and Directions

Edwin Creely, Jane Southcott, Kelly Carabott, Damien Lyons, Edwin Creely,Jane Southcott,Kelly Carabott,Damien Lyons, Edwin Creely, Jane Southcott, Kelly Carabott, Damien Lyons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000334005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Forschung im Bildungswesen

Phenomenological Inquiry in Education is an edited collection of 16 chapters that offers a fascinating and diverse range of approaches and views about phenomenological inquiry as applied in educational research.

Written by a group of international scholars concerned about understanding lived experience, the editors assemble theoretical ideas, methodological approaches and empirical research to create a distinctive transdisciplinary outlook. Embodying many unique and useful insights the book provokes thought about the possibilities for phenomenology in contemporary educational research. The international contributors highlight what an exploration of lived experience can offer qualitative research and extend on methodologies commonly used in educational research. By grounding phenomenological inquiry in the complexities of doing research across discipline areas in education, the writers of the book forge links between theory and empirical research, and give their unique perspectives about how phenomenological ideas are being and might be employed in educational research. The book is thus carefully crafted to address both phenomenology as a philosophical tradition and its possibilities for educational research.

This scholarly work will appeal to educational researchers, as well as those in broader social research. It taps into the growing international interest in phenomenological research in education which brings attention to lived experience and the highly important affective dimension of learning.

SECTION 1
Introduction to section 1:
Theoretical considerations

Edwin Creely

MONASH UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

The first section of this book is a tasty theoretical and philosophical beginning. It is not an entrée, but the first of three main courses. We hope the reader’s appetite is whetted with this opening section, and you come to the table with curiosity, as the authors of the five chapters engage vigorously and expansively with the field of phenomenology and position this terrain as the philosophical ground for educational researchers interested in a phenomenological approach in their research. The items on the menu are diverse but they share a common ingredient—phenomenology as a way of describing, interpreting and understanding human experience of the world.

Phenomenology is a complex and diverse philosophical field that emerged in the early 20th century as a strand of European philosophy. The beginning of phenomenology is widely attributed to German philosopher, Edmund Husserl, but the thinking that undergirds phenomenology has a long tradition whose roots arguably go back to the ancient Greek philosophers. The field is primarily about explanations in regard to human experiences of being in the world, and how these experiences shape both meaning and human action. The centre of phenomenology is thus about getting to the fundamental relations between the appearances (or phenomena) of the world given in the structures or essences of our experience (in the content of consciousness) and the constitution of the world through our embodiments within it. The nexus between essences and embodiments are intentionalities or the senses that emerge as humans encounter the world, take from the world and embody in the world. The phenomenology-oriented researcher investigates these fundamental relations in order to ‘get inside’ the nature of what is being experience of the world.

Since the time of Husserl, and his descriptive phenomenology, a variety of approaches to understanding the fundamental relations have emerged, including ones labelled as hermeneutical phenomenology that are concerned with interpretations of what it means to be in the world. There is often a distinction made between descriptive and interpretive approaches to phenomenology, with the understanding in the latter case that experience and meaning making are mediated through language and situated in culture. From this point of view experience can only be known through how it is communicated. Our common ingredient, phenomenology, is prepared in a variety of ways, which add to the complex flavours of this opening section.

Once the preserve of philosophers in the first half of the 20th century, more recently the field of phenomenology (and the foundational phenomenologists such as Scheler, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Ricoeur) has entered the menus of many human research fields and contexts, including psychology and education, and provides a rich source of flavours: new thinking and approaches that bring research back to the importance of understanding first-hand human experience. Those who employ phenomenological ideas in research often refer to what they do as phenomenological inquiry or phenomenological research. From these ideas, an assortment of methodological approaches has emerged as ways for conducting phenomenologically oriented research.

Our first main course opens with a quite delicious chapter by Stuart Grant, ‘Some possible ways into the question of how a phenomenology of education might be’. It is written from the stance of a philosopher of performance who makes no claim to be in the field of education yet speaks provocatively, addressing its very foundations. Stuart asks what a phenomenology of education might look like and daringly calls for thought about what should constitute an authentic ground for such a phenomenology. Stuart’s wide-ranging engagement with this ground, and his concerns with what is widely touted as constituting education, resolves on Heidegger’s idea of Ereignis—education as being primarily about the formation of a genuine thinking and experiencing being. Stuart asks us to consider what we are actually looking at as educational researchers.

Leon de Bruin adds his own distinct flavours to this opening section through his examination of the core attitude that constitutes phenomenological research in education. His chapter, ‘Epoché and objectivity in phenomenological meaning-making in educational research’, examines the notion of the epoché or bracketing—the suspension of judgments and preconceptions in order to understand a phenomenon in and of itself. Leon points not only to the philosophical meanings of this term but also discusses it as the primary orientation or attitude of the phenomenological researcher. In our experience, all researchers come to research with preconceptions, but it is in the attitude of letting go (of such preconceptions) and the movement to ‘pure seeing’ what is there that phenomena can fully unfold their meaning. Leon leaves an aftertaste for the reader of his chapter: what might be the approaches of educational researchers who want to engage the epoché?

In their chapter, ‘Walking into the posts’, Jennifer J. Clifden and Mark D. Vagle discuss a well-formed approach to doing phenomenological inquiry called post-intentional phenomenological research. This approach to research is now on the menus of many researchers internationally. The writers discuss this research approach by noting its origins in both phenomenology and poststructuralist thought, thus pointing to its hybridity and the complexity of its flavours, like an aging fine wine. According to the writers, phenomenological inquiry needs to account for the reality of coming in to research at multiple points, and into fluid meaning making that is constituted in situated communication. They believe that this condition characterizes all research. There are multiple and shifting intentionalities, and all research is a process of negotiation that depends on language, context and the disposition of human relationships. The chapter offers insights into how this approach to phenomenological research might be applied.

That there are myriad flavours to phenomenology as applied in educational research is also explored in the chapter ‘Phenomenological human science via phenomenological philosophy: a phenomenomethodological approach to education research’ by John Quay, Irena Martinkova and Jim Parry. They argue, taking the line of Heidegger, for conceiving phenomenology as a methodological term, not in the sense of a recipe or formula (certainly not) but as a coherent approach to conceiving human research and meaning making. The writers set up a distinction between what philosophers do with phenomenology and how those in human research (including education) use phenomenology, though they are at pains to point out that such a distinction is not absolute in the work that researchers do—there is significant crossover. Their notion of phenomenomethodology traverses a substantial range of analytical tools and thinking valuable to the educational researcher. Our menu is certainly building to a grand feast of ideas, with multiple courses and diverse influences.

We come now to the last morsel on the multi-textured plate of this theoretical feast, no less tasty than the chapters that proceeded it. Erika Goble’s ‘The challenges of researching lived experience in education’ draws on a substantial range of theoretical and practical ideas and offers a critical examination of the difficult but rewarding space of doing phenomenological research in education and examining lived experience. Despite recognising that phenomenological research has conceptual and practical complications, there is a profound passion for this approach that emerges in the chapter—for phenomenology offer up rich potential that is worth exploring in the tasting.

We recognise that the varied opening course of our banquet may contain items that are not to everyone’s taste or might prompt diverse reactions from delight to dismissal. The role of this section is not to offer neat definitive answers (there are none) but to provoke thought about the nature of the ground of phenomenological research in education. This section thus acts as a prolegomenon for the next two courses.

1
SOME POSSIBLE WAYS
INTO THE QUESTION OF
HOW A PHENOMENOLOGY
OF EDUCATION MIGHT BE

Stuart Grant

MONASH UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

What this essay tries to do?

When I was asked to contribute to this volume on phenomenology of education, I was excited. I am not a philosopher of education by trade, but I am an educator and a phenomenologist. My field of expertise is phenomenology of performance, so the overlaps are many. As an educator, I am aware of my own and the students’ performances, and of the performer-audience dimension of my relations with students. I am also aware of the idea of corporate performance that tacitly determines my actions in the classroom. I am further aware of the increasing dissonance and incompatibility between these performances. The implicit definitions that underlie my vocation as a scholar and educator are increasingly inappropriate to perform the tasks required of me by the institutional world in which I practice. As a phenomenologist, it is clear that this dissonance emanates from different and incompatible definitions of education itself. There is no firmly grounded understanding of what education is. I saw this essay as an opportunity to examine the extent to which the fundamental questions of education have been asked, and to bring my more than 20 years of experience as a phenomenologist and educator to this critical situation in my own life.

First, it is necessary to lay out a few definitions. It is a tired truism to say that the term phenomenology refers to many things: many practices, many processes, many concepts, and many approaches. It is indisputable to say that the term education also refers to many practices, processes, concepts, and approaches. There are no universally accepted definitions or clear guidelines for how to understand or do either. And when these two sets of many practices, processes, concepts, and approaches are brought together, the difficulties of finding any consistencies, practical or definitional, are compounded. Education is a widely “understood” and universally experienced fundamental pillar of advanced Western capitalist democracies. Phenomenology is an opaque philosophical obscurity, little known beyond the world of its exponents, and more renowned for the difficulty of its pronunciation than its relevance to anything that might be of use in the everyday life of society.

So this essay, as the first in a book on phenomenology of education, begins by laying out a complex of problems associated with the need to understand the two primary terms and the conceptual fields to which they refer. This immediately reveals a mire of, in one case, a history of taken-for-grantedness, ill-definition, misunderstanding, political manipulation, and in the current climate, a duplicitous attempt to impose a regime of a utilitarian instrumentalism, dressed up as innovation and standardization; and on the other hand, a genealogy of deliberate slippages and reinterpretations of interpretations aiming at an impossible but ever-sought refinement of a nonetheless ultimately unachievable clarity.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem, purpose, and necessity of this essay and this book. How might a book on phenomenology of education seek to ground its matter to a sufficient degree to be of any worth at all, and what might this essay contribute to that? I would venture that the only realistic aim is to lay out the problematic fields and ask...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Section 1: Introduction to section 1: Theoretical considerations
• Section 2: Introduction to section 2: Issues and contexts
• Section 3: Introduction to section 3: Research applications
• Conclusion
• Index