Phenomenology in Education

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Phenomenology in Education

• Professor Peter Ashworth
• Sheffield Hallam University

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Outline (1)

• What phenomenology is
• How to clarify experience
• Some key notions
• The idea of the lifeworld
• Bracketing reality!
• Description (elucidation) not interpretation or
  explanation
• Some essential features of experience
• Personal or general?
• Essence

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Outline (2)

• Example of phenomenological work as critique of a
  strong tradition in HE research Approaches to
  Study.
• Generating and elucidating personal experience
  Describe a situation in which you felt yourself
  to be a teacher.

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What phenomenology is

• Absolute focus is on my experience of It is
  the detailed description of experience what
  appears in its appearing
• But all sorts of forms of empirical research
  would seem to be about experience
• Self-report questionnaires and inventories of all
  kinds
• Narrative work in social science and history
• Interview-based studies

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Phenomenological approach elucidating
taken-for-granteds

• Elucidating experience to describe what
  everyone knows may seem a pretty empty
  ambition! But
• People dont know. We act according to
  understandings which are for the most part
  pre-reflective. Elucidating them can be a
  revelation.
• Everyone may have taken-for-granteds which
  enable a roughly-shared communal life to take
  place but there is scope for a great deal of
  idiosyncrasy.

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Phenomenology How to clarify experience
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How to clarify experience Time

• Experience entails time. But what does this mean?
• The ribbon of time and the scientific view of the
  past as leading to the present by causation
• Consciousness of time is, rather, from now to the
  past as memory and from now to the future as
  anticipation both related to imagination.
• Past and future are always presentist

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Lived time, temporality

• If the past and future are to be understood
  through the present, it is also true that the
  present implicitly recollects and anticipates
• Each present reasserts the presence of the
  whole past which it supplants, and anticipates
  that of all that is to come, and by definition
  the present is not shut up within itself, but
  transcends itself towards a future and a past.
• (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p 420)

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How to clarify experience Space

• Just as time might be objectively represented
  by the ribbon and arrow of clock time, space has
  its various scientific representations. The three
  dimensionality of technical operation on space is
  an example.
• Subjectively, space extends from me. And it has
  social meanings of access and restriction, and
  psychological meanings of closeness and distance.

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Lived space spatiality

• Space can be hugely anomalous in the way it is
  lived. Maybe one does not know something which is
  perceived every day.
• In a pathological instance, Merleau-Ponty
  comments on spatiality in which the nose can be
  grasped but not pointed to we have to create
  the concepts necessary to convey the fact that
  bodily space may be given to me in an intention
  to take hold without being given as an intention
  to know. (1945 /1962, p. 104)

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Some questions that can be put to the experience
of temporality and spatiality

• When and where am I a teacher?
• When and where is she a student?
• When and where is the university?
• When and where is economic theory pertinent?

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How to clarify experience Self

• Self as the subject of experience experience is
  mine. Anonymous basic presence as self.
• My identity in relation to others who am I in
  this situation? Roles and positionings
• Selfhood as presence, voice, agency in a
  situation.

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How to clarify experience Embodiment

• How does the situation relate to feelings about
  ones own body, including gender, disabilities
  and emotions?
• Vulnerabilities and physical strength.
• Since it is through the body that we are able to
  pursue our projects, illness may well be most
  felt by the way it thwarts our projects.
• Variation in the sense of bodily presence in a
  situation.

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How to clarify experience Other people

• Who are the other people in a certain situation?
  (There may be levels of implication or
  experienced reality.)
• How does the situation affect relations with
  others? There is no doubt of the intrinsic
  relatedness of self and other, so who am I in
  relation to these others?

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Lived experience of others

• In describing experience of others, we must
  refrain from objective judgements. Terms such
  as paranoia are suspect.
• So an other whatever they are really like on
  some criterion or other must be described e.g.
  wonderful or devilish if this is their
  appearing to experience.

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How to clarify experience discourses

• What sort of terms educational, social,
  commercial, ethical etc are employed to
  describe and thence to live the situation? It
  has been considered by many that discourse
  supplants phenomenological description. But this
  is not so, even if speech is a powerful factor in
  the lifeworld.

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Discourse and experience

• Speech is that paradoxical operation through
  which, by using words of a given sense and
  already available meanings, we try to follow up
  an intention which necessarily outstrips,
  modifies and itself, in the last analysis,
  stabilizes the meanings of the words which
  translate it. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p 389)

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How to clarify experience Project(s)

• How does the situation relate to the persons
  ability to carry out the activities they are
  committed to and which they regard as central to
  their life? (The emotions of regret and pride,
  among others may relate to pursuing projects.)
  All the things and events of the lifeworld may be
  related to the notion of project.

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Project

• The thing is inseparable from the person
  perceiving it, and can never be actually in
  itself because its articulations are those of our
  very existence, and because it stands at the
  other end of our gaze or at the terminus of a
  sensory exploration which invests it with
  humanity. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945, p 320)

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How to clarify experience The moodedness of the
situation

• Not having a mood. This and similar locutions
  involve presuppositions about interiority, or
  cause which must be set aside.
• Moodedness of the situation reminds us of
  feeling-tone as an essential element of any
  situation for us.

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The Lifeworld as central in the clarification of
experience

• It is possible to say that selfhood, others,
  embodiment, temporality, spatiality, discourse,
  project and mood are part of the essence of the
  lifeworld.
• Each situation displays a certain variation on
  each of the essential features.

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Other central notions of phenomenology

• Bracketing reality!
• Description not interpretation or explanation
• Some essential features of experience
• Personal or general?
• Essence
• An intrinsic relatedness of the researcher to
  the research participant (noema and noesis
  developed)

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Bracketing reality!

• Bracketing reality, the epoche, is enormously
  contentious.
• But really it is the core of phenomenology. The
  move to the focus on experience as such.
• Set aside whether a thought or perception is
  real, etc. The thing to be elucidated is the
  phenomenon in its appearing.

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Description not interpretation or explanation

• The thing to be elucidated is the experience.
• The experiencers experience not the
  researchers interpretation
• The experience, not its explanation in terms of
  some cause or other.

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Some essential features of experience
Intentionality

• All consciousness is of Intentionality
• There are two elements here (a) the mode of
  consciousness e.g. perceiving, judging and (b)
  the thing it is consciousness of the percept,
  the judgement
• Both of these are within awareness (remember,
  we have bracketed reality)

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Some essential features of experience Horizons

• A certain thing that one is conscious of, gets
  its meaning from a whole network of connections
  of understanding.
• This is part of the way in which discourse has
  its effect.

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Personal or general?

• It is right to assume as a part of research
  method that each individuals experience is quite
  unique.
• Then, when a general tendency or a set of common
  themes emerges from the data, the finding that
  there is a shared meaning carries enormous
  conviction.

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Essence

• It could be that a particular meaning of a
  situation really is specific to a particular
  person. Or there could be a set of meanings and
  groups of people relate to different members of
  that set.
• But it could be that a phenomenon has certain
  essential features. Might even be universal.
• The idea of essence is a different kind of
  generalisation to (e.g.) empirical
  generalisabilty from a sample to a population.

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Intrinsic relatedness of researcher to
participant

• Phenomenology is not interested in the detached
  objectivity of experimental research, nor in
  the reflexivity of some qualitative research.
• Since the researcher has the same kind of
  structure of awareness as everyone else, they
  have a certain noesis (they attend to X in a
  certain investigative way) and the object of
  investigation the noema has a large horizon
  of meaning-associations.
• In understanding and describing my or anothers
  experience it is right and inevitable that my
  subjectivity comes into play.
• Validation is agreement that the description is
  elucidatory.

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Example of phenomenological work as critique of a
strong tradition in HE research Approaches to
Study.
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Existing research methodologies

• Göteborg qualitative research phenomenography
  Marton, Säljö, Svensson
• Quantitative, psychometric research Entwistle,
  Ramsden, Biggs

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Phenomenographic research Student constructions
of learning

• Learning in the learner's perspective (Säljö,
  1979)
• Interviews with students "What do you actually
  mean by learning?"

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Approaches to Study

• The major division of the outcome space of the
  approaches to study phenomenography is between
• Deep Approaches, which stress meaning and
  understanding and tend to treat the material
  holistically, and
• Surface Approaches, which stress memorisation and
  reproduction, and tend to treat the material
  fragmentarily.

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A psychometric adaptation

• The 'deep and surface approaches to learning'
  tradition was further developed through
  Entwistle's Approaches to Study Inventory.
• The Entwistle questionnaire is a change in
  methodology.
• Rather than a qualitative discovery methodology,
  as in phenomenography, we have a questionnaire
  measure of deep and surface learning as
  established quantitative variables.

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Subscales of ASI (2000) Deep Approach

• Seeking Meaning
• Relating Ideas
• Use of Evidence
• Interest in Ideas

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Subscales of ASI (2000) Surface Approach

• Lack of Purpose
• Unrelated Memorising
• Syllabus-Boundedness
• Fear of Failure

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ASI structure phenomenographic outcome space

• Both Marton and Entwistle refer to the relation
  between the learner and the material to be
  learned. They both refer to intentionality
• But in fact, ASI and phenomenography are similar
  in treating approaches to learning as essentially
  mental orientations, and neglecting the
  importance of the thing (the learning situation)
  which the mental orientation is directed towards.
  

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The meaning of intentionality

• All consciousness is of something (the
  intentionality axiom of phenomenology).

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Noema and Noesis elements of intentionality

• Noesis is the mental orientation to the
  phenomenon (e.g. superficial approach to
  learning)
• Noema is the object of awareness (e.g. a text to
  be learned in limited time under various
  pressures)
• Both are aspects of intentionality
• The noema is bound up with the lifeworld

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Revisiting the qualitative description of
approaches to learning

• We set aside the assumptions built into the
  Gothenburg group's work that an approach to
  learning will emerge as a mental orientation
  and start again with in-depth interviews of
  students concerning their conceptions of study.

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Methodology

• Qualitative research interviewing about the
  experience of the learning situation, what is to
  be learned, the student (as a learner), and the
  context. Not just mental orientation to the task
  of studying.
• Set aside (bracket) the question of the
  objective reality of what is said, the focus is
  on subjectivity.

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• The self
• Identity (is being a student central?)
• agency, presence and voice (and the felt lack of
  these in a situation e.g. a learning
  situation).
• Embodiment - the lived body, including
  motivations and emotions associated with
  embodiment.

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• Other people
• The meaning of others relates to self or
  identity, and to project.
• Consider the impact of fellow students
• Significant others
• Role models
• Lecturers

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• Subjective Time (temporality) including
  biography the sense of the time-sequence of
  events the emotions of impatience, longing, etc.
• Subjective Space (spatiality) including the
  spatial arrangement of social life regions where
  one can or cant politely access distances and
  the associated metaphors.

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• Project (Sartre) or Care (Heidegger)
• A person has certain priorities and lines of
  interest which (though no doubt open to free
  change) remain almost definitive of them. What is
  the relevance of being a student in general to
  this? What is the meaning of learning this
  material to the learners project?

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• Discourse
• The events, people and objects of the
  lifeworld are already subject to discourse we
  live in an interpreted world. There are things
  that one says about being a student and about
  the learning situation
• (The difference between phenomenology and
  discourse analysis is that in the former
  discourses refer to experience.)

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The area of investigation The lifeworld

• Moodedness of the situation
• What is the feeling-tone of learning situations?

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Student A Gary

• The learning situation is one which holds out the
  possibility of affirmation for Gary.
• Collaborative learning situations may provide
  affirmation he notices ploys which might lead to
  favourable comparison with others. (As
  interpersonal tactics, he teaches others and / or
  gains higher grades.)
• A hazard in learning is the necessity of the
  text. Dyslexia renders text an enemy, and a
  consumer of valuable time.

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Student B Clive

• Learning is a competition. He can win esteem by
  winning he knows men do take this line.
• The meaning of learning is bound up with parental
  expectations he knows he must succeed in their
  eyes. (Their disapproval has led to his
  abandonment of his own preferences in the past.)
• To be a successful competitor Clive knows he must
  look for cues from his teachers about what is
  expected. Then he will be able to achieve high
  grades and therefore beat his peers in the
  academic game.

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Student C Diane

• Learning is about achieving personal meaning.
• There is a movement of seizing material and
  internalising it (almost physically), followed by
  a process of doing with it.
• Others are (privately) engaged in the same thing.
• She happily accepts that the course restricts the
  scope of this meaning-making.

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Student D Karen

• Learning is reaching a shared understanding with
  others.
• Her place (literally) in the academic environment
  is assured in the exchange of bodily signs of
  shared understanding.
• She must always be aware of others needs and
  wants.
• Learning collaboratively is exciting.
• At times the demands of others leads Karen to
  find alternative places to learn on her own.

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Is an approach to studying noetic or is it
noematic ?

• It is plain from the descriptions of studying
  within the lifeworld that much more of the
  meaning of studying for the student comes from
  the place of the activity within the flow of
  their life rather than the mental orientation
  which (maybe as a response to the contingencies
  of the lifeworld) has been adopted.

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Conclusion

• Approaches to studying are much richer than can
  be encapsulated by noetic descriptions of depth
  or superficiality, even when elaborated as in
  later versions of the ASI. The conception of
  learning as deep or surface (etc.) has no
  helpful meaning in understanding the activity of
  university students.

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.

• We need to recover awareness of the individuality
  of the student. Both in research and in pedagogy.
  
• This individuality is best viewed in terms of
  their subjective lifeworld rather than mental
  orientation.
• Classifying students using an instrument that is
  confined to the noetic is of limited usefulness
  at best.

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Generating and elucidating personal experience
Describe a situation in which you felt yourself
to be a teacher.
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Generating and elucidating personal experience
different formulations of the topic

• Describe a situation in which you felt yourself
  to be a teacher.
• Describe a situation in which you were
  disappointed as a teacher (in a teaching relevant
  context).
• Describe a situation in which you felt learning
  had occurred.

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Producing the protocol

• Individually write a one-side of A4 account of a
  situation which you feel relates to the topic.
• Your partner may inquire further, having read the
  account, bearing in mind the phenomenology of the
  lifeworld.

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The reflective production of meaning-units

• Exchange protocols and consider
  sentence-by-sentence the meaning of what has been
  written.
• Always in the light of the question of the
  meaning of teaching.

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The construction of an account of the experience

• Themes?
• Essences?
• Features of the lifeworld?