Phenomenology & Practice (Journal)
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Attunement as a Pedagogical Starting Point
No full textFor many teachers, the value of pedagogical reflection is missing from practice. Rational educational approaches that prioritize judging and measuring students overshadow the relational dimension of teaching. Our study investigated this relational gap to explore more fully teachers’ attunement to the child as a unique person. We examined lived experiences of six teachers pedagogically engaged with children (K–12) participating in an active outdoor living program. The program aimed to develop a youth network of friends, nurturing positive self-esteem and youth leadership. Using a phenomenological method, we facilitated open-ended interviews to show teachers’ pedagogical awareness through hermeneutic conversations. We present the data as three anecdotes representing a synthesis of teacher reflection, writing, and on-going conversation. Our findings reveal the importance of being-in-time with children as teachers relate pedagogical moments with children learning outdoors. Through attunement as the flexibility to adapt educational challenges and approaches to suit the moment and uniqueness of the child, teachers became careful observers, allowing students to be children without the competing tensions of institutional expectations
Painting Deep Time: Encountering Landforms’ Alterity and Phusis Through Phenomenology and Oil Painting
No full textThe practice of oil painting landforms, rocks and sea water in Jervis Inlet, British Columbia (BC) puts me in dialogue with land’s resistant alterity. By closely attuning to landforms, and by stepping back and blurring my focus at regular intervals while practicing oil painting of landforms, I experience phusis of land and of my painting. Through self-concealment and emergence, land alternates between revealing and enfolding its character, resisting my human comprehension but speaking to more-than-human elements in myself. The slow accretive process of oil painting lends itself to phenomenological research, taking days and weeks for paint to dry before new layers can be applied. This slowness produces phusis within me as an artist, as I am forced to withdraw from the painting while its layers dry and we reassume an unfamiliarity with one another as dual subjects. Through oil painting, landforms’ alterity shifts towards familiarity. Earth’s elements originate in deep time, pre-dating human experience. Cycling within me is a repository of minerals, water, and salinity originating in deep time. This draws attention to alterity within my own body. By practicing phenomenological research through painting landforms, I encounter the phenomenological paradox of deep time and come face-to-face with the originary elemental origin I share with landforms
Phenomenology of the Parent-Child Goodbye on the First Day of School
No full textAs a milestone in a child’s life, the first day of school is a much-anticipated event. Preparations usually begin well in advance as families shop for school supplies, visit the school, and talk about what school will be like. Regardless of the many preparations, the moment of saying goodbye on the first day of school is sometimes a lot more difficult than either the child or the parent was prepared for; it can also slip unnoticed in the busyness of arriving and leaving; it could provoke a memory of a child’s birth; it may precipitate a parent’s sudden realization that their arms are empty. This paper explores the often-overlooked phenomenon of the parent-child goodbye on the first day of school. It reflects on singular parental experiences of preparation, expectation, and relationality. Lippitz’s (2007) inquiry into foreignness of school invites wonder about the child’s transformation to student and what that might mean for a parent. Drawing from van Manen’s (2015) phenomenology of pedagogical tactfulness, it offers insights into the relationality between a parent-child goodbye and the teacher-student hello. Exploring what makes the parent-child goodbye on the first day of school, as a unique experience, opens new possibilities for understanding the meaning of a child’s transition to school for the parent
Being and Becoming Woke in Teacher Education
No full textThe role education plays in society has been contested in the United States since the inception of public education. Historically this contention has produced a delicate balance between promoting the social justice concerns of educating democratic citizens and the disciplinary concerns of individual intellectual development. Teacher preparation programs in American normal schools, colleges, and universities have traditionally struck a similar balance between theory and practice. In the past several decades, however, the rise of neoliberalism in American politics has shifted the balance away from equity, diversity, and inclusivity. The purpose of this study is to provide an account of the lived experiences of teacher candidates with the phenomena of being and becoming “woke” within a teacher education program that reflects neoliberal values but maintains a stated commitment to social justice. This study includes narrative vignettes that explore the phenomenality of “wokeness” as it manifests in the public-school environment and the teacher education program. It also addresses the effects of neoliberalism on teacher candidates’ willingness and ability to take up social justice for themselves, their students, and society
Professional Ethics as Experienced by Student Teachers: A Neoliberal View
No full textStudent teachers’ experiences of professional ethics, as lived practice, need to be visualized and verbalized to support their ability to develop an ethical practice. The aim of this article is to discuss the lived experiences of professional ethics from beginning teachers’ internship, based on a phenomenological study. Some of the essential meanings are interpreted in relation to the tension between responsibility and accountability that is emerging from neoliberal influences in teacher education. Inspired by Reflective Life World Research (RLR), interviews were conducted with student teachers specializing in preschool and elementary school. The empirical data was analyzed in order to determine the meanings that constitute the lived experience of professional ethics for early career teachers. By identifying the implications of professional ethics in neoliberal times, teacher educators can more easily observe and communicate the manifestations this has for teaching. Discussions and observations of professional ethics can stimulate student teachers’ learning as part of teacher education discourse
Does Gert Biesta’s book, The Rediscovery of Teaching, matter to education?
No full textGert J.J. Biesta 2017
New York and London: Routledge
111 pages / 5 chapters + prologue / epilogue / index
Owning an Older, No-Longer-New, Used Car
No full textIn his highly insightful and wide-ranging rebuttal article “Doing Phenomenology on the Things,” van Manen makes the important claim that “the mission of modern phenomenology transcends foundational and exegetical philosophical theorizing” (2019, p. 3). I take this claim seriously and put forward this article as an exercise in practical lifeworld phenomenological reflection. By lifeworld I refer to the environing world in which we are enmeshed and in which we live and breathe and have our being; it penetrates our awareness of things while at the same time offering the possibility of reprieve from complete enmeshment (submergence) in the form of existential reflection on the things, events, doings, goings-on, etc., that collectively constitute the phenomenological concept of world. By phenomenological reflection I refer to written analyses (texts) that approach mundane lifeworld phenomena in a manner or style that seeks to show or reveal aspects of the lifeworld that in the ordinary course of everyday life remain hidden from view…aspects of the lifeworld that while they may be glimpsed fleetingly from time to time, remain largely hidden, i.e. in a state of unrealized concealment. The article thus takes seriously the Husserlian call for a return “to the things themselves.” And while the ostensible topic is an old (or older) used car, the defacto topic is “us,” or perhaps better stated, the actual topic arises at the meeting place where the “us” (as subject) and “an older car” (as object) arrive and conjoin. It is at the place of this meeting between self and world that the phenomenological analysis can begin. The article emphasizes the practical import of this meeting, this engagement—it is not regarded as a matter of purely abstract philosophical theorizing nor as a purely descriptive (empirical) matter, although it is also that in part too
Pedagogic Being in a Neoliberal School Market: Developing Pedagogical Tact Through Lived Experience
No full textExploring teaching as an upper secondary school teacher through lived experience offers pedagogical insights that have been challenged over a period of 25 years, when neoliberal educational policies gradually transformed the conditions for teaching in Swedish schools. The article is grounded in the assumption that the teaching profession is complex and there are multiple tacit dimensions inherent in being and becoming a teacher. Several of these dimensions are captured by the notion of pedagogical tact and have to be learned through practice. However, over the past few decades, the implementation of neoliberal policies in the Swedish education sector have changed the conditions for teaching, and created an area of tension between the teacher’s pedagogical alignment and the educational practices influenced by neoliberal values. The aim of the study is to describe how the author experienced these tensions, and what they meant for her becoming and being a teacher in three different pedagogical sites: a higher education preparatory program, a vocational preparatory program, and in adult education. The description is grounded in the lifeworld phenomenological approach and carried out through personal narrative
The Phenomenology of the Pipe Organ
No full textAn extended illustration from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception describes the interplay of habit, sedimentation, and intersubjectivity in the practice and performance of a skilled organist. This paper takes up Merleau-Ponty’s example in order to describe some of the phenomenological characteristics of embodied musical performance. These characteristics point toward an intersubjective event of “consecration,” as Merleau-Ponty describes it, in which the musician adopts the role of rhetor, inviting the audience into a shared dwelling place