Sydney J Harris's 3rd and 4th lectures encouraged keeping opposites in a creative tension within a moral framework. So the bonds of marriage involve both bondage and freedom. He uses phenomenology to explore human experience. Again, what follows are my comments and not his.
This is to replace an 'either-or' frame of mind with 'both-and'. In his example, marriage binds and restricts on the one hand, yet liberates on the other. These two need to be held by both partners in balance, in creative tension, for the marriage to be healthy. In fact, readjustments will have to be made all the time, either emphasising the need for more responsibility or more freedom. Choices and decisions balance a number of points of view, sometimes contradictory. Democracy allows people to have a vote, and to be outvoted by a majority. The majority are not always right. Achieving a consensus aims at a solution that everyone can live with. Unfortunately it takes longer and assumes compromise. One intransigent individual can wreck consensus by refusing to compromise. In some cases he or she may be wrong to do this, but they may be right, especially if it is a moral matter of significant principle. Sometimes, someone has to stand up against the crowd.
Assuming that compromise does not mean 'being compromised' (i.e. feeling that we have to do something unethical), we need to define within the continuum of legitimate opposites a comfort zone within which we are prepared to trade. If others do the same, the ground is prepared for consensus. This assumes that ethics plays a central role in defining the limits of consensus and compromise. It is not that anything goes (relativism) - that gave us the ghettos and death camps. It means that there is room for manoeuvre within an ethically defensible range of choices.
The answer to many questions is yes and no. Understanding the parts we would say yes to (the pros) and those we say no to (the cons) are the ways we operate in this marginal zone of creative tension. Openness to others is easier for some than for others. People who are self-centred and disagreeable (poles of two personality traits) will find working with others difficult, and may find it hard to change. Openness comes in both dialogue (the willingness to allow another a valid point of view) and empathy (sharing in other people's emotional ups and downs0. Not wishing to hurt other people is the beginnings of morals and ethics. It is nothing to do with obeying petty rules.
Later lectures talked of polarised confrontational politics, misbalancing individual concerns with social responsibilities, and how in future we will have to live with ambiguity. Certainty is dead, although there are moral principles which are absolute. Globally, we have a lot of listening and compromising to do.
Humankind has evolved to be rational, though this is a discipline that escapes many. That should mean escape from aggressive responses and power to the strong, and to the possibility of working for the common good. The twentieth century was the most bloody in human history. What will the 21st be? What can we each do as individuals to achieve a fairer world both for humans and for other species?
So what is an authentic person? It is a dilemma. Authentic could mean true to me, and be totally self-centred. I do what I want, true to my beliefs and desires, and blow to anyone else. Or it could recognize that authentic recognizes the network of responsibilities and relationships that the self sits within. This is MacMurray's Self as Agent and Self in Relation, that as a human I have to be actively engaged, and supportive of the networks I exist within. My cats are not capable of that choice. For me, humans exist in a global network, so being authentic means promoting world progress and harmony.
Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label phenomenology. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Phenomenology.
There has been an active interest in phenomenology among my PhD students, so here are some thoughts. Especially they are how to do it thoughts rather than charging back to the big names. We will do that later.
Phenomenon is a Greek word meaning something which appears to be, as opposed to something which has substance. There are things we hold to be real, even though we cannot touch or measure them. Respect, love, success, wonder, motivation are all such things. The question is, how do we research them? One aspect lies in the question, What do we mean by real? How do we separate opinion from reality? Beneath opinions about respect, does the word 'respect' describe something real? or is it a concept, a classification of certain behaviours. The method traditionally used is to strip off ("bracket out"] statements identified as opinion, to see what's left. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology a hundred years ago, believed that something real existed beneath the opinion: these views are labelled "transcendental phenomenology". Seeing/glimpsing reality was called eidetic vision. This conclusion is however not essential to the method.
In education, we cannot phenomenologically study a school, or a class, or anything measurable with substance within it. But we can study learning, behaviour, ethos, relationships, morals or any other significant intangible. Psychology is fond of psychometric measures, so we have seen historic attempts to measure 'intelligence', and more recently emotional intelligence using intelligence tests. Personally I have no confidence that they measure anything other than the superficial. Robert Steinberg even claims that wisdom can be measured, but only by reducing the concept of wisdom to something measurable, around the notion of balance. I agree that we can put together a crude check-list to determine whether something is balanced or not, whether other points of view have been sought, and a win-win situation sought. But I would not identify this with wisdom.
Intangible realities could apply to many aspects of everyday life. What is my everyday experience of work? of leisure, of pleasure, of value, of well-being? Much phenomenology used in research today comes from this emphasis by Alfred Schutz. But how can we do this rigorously and well?
Data collection needs to be completed in the qualitative paradigm. Much can be learnt from ethnography, with its emphasis on observation and interviewing, especially in its auto-ethnographic aspect (that is, being part of what is being observed). Normally it is important to know how a range of people react to the phenomenon, so a sample of respondants will be put together. For example, researching respect, you might first determine what a sample of people mean by respect by asking that straightforward questionnaire question. This is called phenomenography. The more the data collection focuses on the researcher herself or himself, the more care has to be taken to establish reliability. This is a triangulation question; interviewing others, keeping a long-term fieldnote diary, being interviewed by another research are all responses to the need for triangulation.
Finally, the analysis needs to keep firmly to the phenomenon, looking at it from many perspectives - psychological, philosophical, sociological, and critical. Bracketing out opinions on the phenomenon produces a body of data which can be analysed interpretively and hermeneutically, so a broad picture of the phenomenon and its various interpretations can emerge.
Phenomenology is a way of looking at everyday intangible things. The research methods and analysis I have described are mainstream qualitative, and the same concern for rigour and reliability needs to be built in.
Phenomenon is a Greek word meaning something which appears to be, as opposed to something which has substance. There are things we hold to be real, even though we cannot touch or measure them. Respect, love, success, wonder, motivation are all such things. The question is, how do we research them? One aspect lies in the question, What do we mean by real? How do we separate opinion from reality? Beneath opinions about respect, does the word 'respect' describe something real? or is it a concept, a classification of certain behaviours. The method traditionally used is to strip off ("bracket out"] statements identified as opinion, to see what's left. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology a hundred years ago, believed that something real existed beneath the opinion: these views are labelled "transcendental phenomenology". Seeing/glimpsing reality was called eidetic vision. This conclusion is however not essential to the method.
In education, we cannot phenomenologically study a school, or a class, or anything measurable with substance within it. But we can study learning, behaviour, ethos, relationships, morals or any other significant intangible. Psychology is fond of psychometric measures, so we have seen historic attempts to measure 'intelligence', and more recently emotional intelligence using intelligence tests. Personally I have no confidence that they measure anything other than the superficial. Robert Steinberg even claims that wisdom can be measured, but only by reducing the concept of wisdom to something measurable, around the notion of balance. I agree that we can put together a crude check-list to determine whether something is balanced or not, whether other points of view have been sought, and a win-win situation sought. But I would not identify this with wisdom.
Intangible realities could apply to many aspects of everyday life. What is my everyday experience of work? of leisure, of pleasure, of value, of well-being? Much phenomenology used in research today comes from this emphasis by Alfred Schutz. But how can we do this rigorously and well?
Data collection needs to be completed in the qualitative paradigm. Much can be learnt from ethnography, with its emphasis on observation and interviewing, especially in its auto-ethnographic aspect (that is, being part of what is being observed). Normally it is important to know how a range of people react to the phenomenon, so a sample of respondants will be put together. For example, researching respect, you might first determine what a sample of people mean by respect by asking that straightforward questionnaire question. This is called phenomenography. The more the data collection focuses on the researcher herself or himself, the more care has to be taken to establish reliability. This is a triangulation question; interviewing others, keeping a long-term fieldnote diary, being interviewed by another research are all responses to the need for triangulation.
Finally, the analysis needs to keep firmly to the phenomenon, looking at it from many perspectives - psychological, philosophical, sociological, and critical. Bracketing out opinions on the phenomenon produces a body of data which can be analysed interpretively and hermeneutically, so a broad picture of the phenomenon and its various interpretations can emerge.
Phenomenology is a way of looking at everyday intangible things. The research methods and analysis I have described are mainstream qualitative, and the same concern for rigour and reliability needs to be built in.
Friday, 13 November 2009
Lived Experience 3. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
This comes from MvM, chapter 5. It purports to be a study of Obsessive and Compulsive Disorder, and is by Mary Haase.
This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.
The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.
So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.
This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.
This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.
The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.
So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.
This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Research and past experience
D Clandinin and F Connelly, in Personal Experience Methods in the 1994 Denzin and Lincoln Handbook of qualitative research (413-427) note: 'Experience... is the stories people live. People live stories, and in the telling of them reaffirm them, and create new ones' (415). Life history has thus become a widespread method of research of various professions. Some base generalisations on a substantial number of life history interviews (for example Goodson and Sikes, Life history research in educational settings, 2001). Researchers also look back into their own life histories in a variety of ways, reflecting perhaps on their careers, or on a particular piece of research they have completed, such as for Masters or a doctorate. There are issues of accuracy and authenticity in this: humans are capable of lying both to others and to themselves, and on other occasions do not reflect with full understanding. So the quality of looking back (retrospection), or reflecting on past experience has to be taken seriously. From a methodological point of view, reflection on a period of research, such as to a doctorate, can be helped by having a written record of one's thoughts from beginning to end. The research diary is the traditional means of achieving this, modelled on the fieldnotes used in anthropology, but being sure to note down feelings, attitudes, beliefs and suchlike as well as 'facts'. The strictures of John van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, are helpful here, that fieldnotes are not definitive but have been affected by processes of selection, interpretations and partial observation, and maybe by the unrepresentative use of informants (interviewees). Research diaries therefore consist of material to be critiqued, and should not be supercialially accepted. Two of my students were helped by arranging to be interviewed at the beginning of research by an experienced practitioner briefed to be probing. Critiquing that transcript reveals the journey travelled, which might otherwise have become blurred. Other students write their fieldnotes using blog technology, which has the advantage that supervisers can offer guidance frequently. If this becomes a daily habit, a researcher focusing on their own professionality reflects constantly on whatever happens, or whatever thoughts and issues they are wrestling with. I deal with this more fully in Bigger, S (2009) The Potential of Blogs in Higher Degree Supervision, in Worcester Journal of Learning and Teaching issue 1 (online, full text here).
The substantive issue is how to interrogate our own past histories. In talking about reflection on action, Donald Schon (The Reflective Practioner, 1983; Educating the reflective practitioner, 1988) encourages reflection on comparatively recent history - a job that has just been completed for example. Why were certain decisions made, what conclusions have been drawn of success or failure. This encourages habits of evaluation in groups: self evaluation has some sort of control as it is tested by the views of colleagues. Once we attempt to be self-evaluative over a longer period, such dialogue with other participants becomes more difficult. Even straight-forward timelines become difficult as the years blur into each other.
We might even question the purpose of a timeline. To establish an actual factual record does not tell us much about quality. If I can be certain for example that I taught Cambridge Classical Background in 1978, it doesn't tell me whether I taught it well. Or what I might mean by 'well'. Max Van Manen distinguishes between technical rational information (stage 1), contextual reflection (stage 2) including attitudes, values and ethos, and dialectical reflectivity where quality and ethics are critiqued (Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical, Curriculum Inquiry 6(3), 1977, 205-228).
Max van Manen is a key proponent of the use of phenomenology in pedagogy and the curriculum. A phenomenon is something which is considered real but has no substance for observation. For example, Max van Manen completed early work on tact and tone in pedagogy, and more recent work on pupil privacy. There has to be a great deal of data collection and discussion about the meaning of such words, and the claim made that they are somehow real as opposed to constructed and conceptual. Quality is another such word. What people mean by quality is one level; what is real quality is a higher level. What we assume about the phenomenon (tact, tone, quality) is an interference which we have to put to one side (or bracket out). Many of these phenomena are things in everyday life we take for granted, which means we have not thought deeply about them, our assumptions and stereotypes satisfy us.
The beginnings of analysis of our past experience might be phenomena applicable to us. Whilst tone and tact (to pupils as well as to colleagues) might get us started on pedagogy, and quality might provide roots for views of good practice and self-evaluation, we probably need to construct a matrix of phenomena relevant to us. Respect, justice, community and so on. The case for an item being a phenomenon rather than a concept may have to be debated. What is wisdom? I think it is a concept, not a reality, a judgement that something is sensible rather than foolish. And what of God? I think also a concept, a picture of the highest good, and not an entity which is real. I am sure some readers disagree, but do be sure of your grounds.
I conclude this section by inviting you to look back at your life and career using such markers as tone, tact, respect, fairness, justice, equity, community. There will be aspects in which we feel we have been treated badly, others where we feel we have treated others badly, and still more where others are acting or being acted upon. From this step, observations and recommendations will come.
# post still under construction
The substantive issue is how to interrogate our own past histories. In talking about reflection on action, Donald Schon (The Reflective Practioner, 1983; Educating the reflective practitioner, 1988) encourages reflection on comparatively recent history - a job that has just been completed for example. Why were certain decisions made, what conclusions have been drawn of success or failure. This encourages habits of evaluation in groups: self evaluation has some sort of control as it is tested by the views of colleagues. Once we attempt to be self-evaluative over a longer period, such dialogue with other participants becomes more difficult. Even straight-forward timelines become difficult as the years blur into each other.
We might even question the purpose of a timeline. To establish an actual factual record does not tell us much about quality. If I can be certain for example that I taught Cambridge Classical Background in 1978, it doesn't tell me whether I taught it well. Or what I might mean by 'well'. Max Van Manen distinguishes between technical rational information (stage 1), contextual reflection (stage 2) including attitudes, values and ethos, and dialectical reflectivity where quality and ethics are critiqued (Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical, Curriculum Inquiry 6(3), 1977, 205-228).
Max van Manen is a key proponent of the use of phenomenology in pedagogy and the curriculum. A phenomenon is something which is considered real but has no substance for observation. For example, Max van Manen completed early work on tact and tone in pedagogy, and more recent work on pupil privacy. There has to be a great deal of data collection and discussion about the meaning of such words, and the claim made that they are somehow real as opposed to constructed and conceptual. Quality is another such word. What people mean by quality is one level; what is real quality is a higher level. What we assume about the phenomenon (tact, tone, quality) is an interference which we have to put to one side (or bracket out). Many of these phenomena are things in everyday life we take for granted, which means we have not thought deeply about them, our assumptions and stereotypes satisfy us.
The beginnings of analysis of our past experience might be phenomena applicable to us. Whilst tone and tact (to pupils as well as to colleagues) might get us started on pedagogy, and quality might provide roots for views of good practice and self-evaluation, we probably need to construct a matrix of phenomena relevant to us. Respect, justice, community and so on. The case for an item being a phenomenon rather than a concept may have to be debated. What is wisdom? I think it is a concept, not a reality, a judgement that something is sensible rather than foolish. And what of God? I think also a concept, a picture of the highest good, and not an entity which is real. I am sure some readers disagree, but do be sure of your grounds.
I conclude this section by inviting you to look back at your life and career using such markers as tone, tact, respect, fairness, justice, equity, community. There will be aspects in which we feel we have been treated badly, others where we feel we have treated others badly, and still more where others are acting or being acted upon. From this step, observations and recommendations will come.
# post still under construction
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