Phenomenology in Educational Research

A qualitative methodology that investigates the meaning structures of lived experience — what an experience is like for those who undergo it, prior to theoretical interpretation. In educational research, phenomenology is used to study experiences such as becoming a teacher, learning a second language, or returning to study after a long absence.

Philosophical roots

Edmund Husserl (early twentieth century) founded phenomenology as a philosophy of consciousness directed toward "the things themselves." His descriptive programme called for epoché — the suspension of natural-attitude assumptions — to bring lived experience into focus. Martin Heidegger redirected the project hermeneutically: experience is always already interpreted within a historical, embodied, language-soaked world, so pure description is unattainable and the researcher's interpretive horizon is part of the inquiry.

Descriptive and interpretive variants

The descriptive (Husserlian) tradition, exemplified in education by Amedeo Giorgi's psychological phenomenological method, brackets the researcher's preconceptions and seeks the invariant essential structures of an experience. The interpretive (hermeneutic) tradition, anchored in education by Max van Manen, rejects strict bracketing and treats writing itself as the method of inquiry. Van Manen's Researching Lived Experience (1990) lays out a non-linear set of activities: turning to the nature of lived experience, investigating experience as lived, hermeneutic phenomenological reflection, and writing as the working out of meaning.

Methods

Data are gathered through in-depth interviews, written protocols, anecdotes, and the researcher's own observations. Analysis works toward thematic structures that hold across accounts — themes here are not topic summaries but distillations of essential meaning. Reports tend toward dense, evocative prose rather than coded extracts, on the grounds that the texture of experience is part of what is being communicated.

Use in applied linguistics

Phenomenology has been used to study language-learner anxiety, the lived experience of immersion, teacher transitions, and study-abroad. It is often confused with Narrative Inquiry in published work; the distinction is that phenomenology aims at the structure of an experience while narrative inquiry stays with the storied particularity of lives.

References

• van Manen, M. (1990). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. State University of New York Press.
• Husserl, E. (1931). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (W. R. Boyce Gibson, Trans.). George Allen & Unwin.