Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of phenomena. It has its roots in the philosophical movement initiated by Husserl (Beyer, 2011) which suspended traditional philosophical approaches which try to understand the fundamental nature of reality in favour of focusing on analysis of phenomena as they are experienced. This approach allows for an objective appreciation of phenomena that are considered to be subjective.

Phenomenology has been applied extensively in a range of diverse disciplines (Friesen et al., 2012). In educational science, phenomenological descriptions are used to articulate the interests, aims, approaches, cultures, interactions, structures and reflections of educators and/or learners in a particular context.

Phenomenology: GO-GN Insights

Sarah Hutton conducted in-depth interviews with students and content analysis to connect shared internal goals supported by participation in an open publishing model where students are provided the opportunity to self-publish openly online or contribute to OER materials for the course.

“A phenomenological case study provides the opportunity for creating a rich narrative surrounding a shared experience. This method can help researchers establish a better understanding of individual meanings, and how subjects uniquely comprehend the world around them. Phenomenology and grounded theory pair well together for data collection and analysis, allowing for a more natural emergence of new ideas and thematic elements across a shared experience.

“A disadvantage to this type of approach is the sheer volume of data that must be collected and sorted through to create that narrative. While recommendations on numbers of study participants may vary slightly between researchers, the more data that is collected over a longitudinal period, the stronger a pattern can be indicated as interviews are analyzed. In depth interviews produce a large amount of data for analysis, and for a course case study, 3 interviews should be completed (beginning, middle, end) to complete a longitudinal thread of student experience and development throughout the course. Another disadvantage is that, similar to other qualitative data methods, phenomenology may be taken less seriously by policy makers than other larger-scale quantitative studies.”

Michael Paskevicius used a phenomenological approach with self-identifying open education practitioners. This explores how OEPs are being actualised in formal
higher education and impacting learning design, and describes the ways educators are bringing elements of openness into their everyday teaching and learning
practice through educational technologies.

“I employed an empirical phenomenological approach in my PhD study to investigate the personal social construction and ‘lifeworld’ human experience
of individuals engaging with OEP (Giorgi, 1997; Gray, 2013). At the core of phenomenological research is a pursuit of understanding mental directedness or consciousness by investigating individuals’ explanations grounded in their subjective experiences (Aspers, 2009). Empirical phenomenological research seeks to portray the essence of the conscious experience of others, essentially how they perceive the world, exploring what their experiences means to them, and provide a comprehensive description while recognizing the importance of social structure and context (Moustakas, 1994). Social structures are represented through the individual’s interpretation and construction of meaning in the world, and this social meaning construction can be studied empirically by the researcher (Aspers, 2009). The phenomenological approach aims to understand the general or typical essential structures of individual experience, based on the descriptions of those experiences. In doing so, I seek to understand not what ‘is’ in the world but to understand why conscious individuals say that something ‘is’ (Giorgi, 1997).

“Trialing research questions can strengthen a phenomenological study as it allows one to engage with and become familiar with the research space, learn about the context in which individuals of interest work, and gather feedback from potential participants or those operating in similar situations (Aspers, 2009). The interview questions, conducted using the Zoom synchronous meeting service, were trialed first with my supervisor, who uses open educational practices in her undergraduate and graduate teaching. My
supervisor was able to provide some feedback on the questions from her perspective as a faculty member. As a result of this process, we adjusted some of the language and sequencing of the questions.”

Jessica O’Reilly includes an interpretivist phenomenological analysis (IPA) methodology in her study of OER enabled pedagogy.

“The idiographic focus of the IPA approach fits very well with my research question, which is interpretivist, emergent, and very focused on
contextualized individual experience and sensemaking. One clear advantage that I see is the combination of psychological, interpretive, and idiographic “lenses” within the approach. IPA is well-suited, I think, to questions concerned with the experiences of a fairly concentrated and homogenous participant sample. A potential disadvantage to my IPA study will be the reliance upon interview data and the huge amount of work involved with transcription and analysis.”

Useful references for Phenomenology: Clandinin & Connelly (2004); Friesen, Henriksson & Saevi (2012); Giorgi (1997); Gray (2014); Manen (2018); Maxwell
2013); Smith, Flowers & Larkin (2009)