Phenomenology as a Method in Education Research
As a research methodology for investigating the lived experience of science teachers, phenomenology not only provides a means of accessing subjective knowing and pure perception but is sufficiently rigorous and systematic to represent the lifeworld experi
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Phenomenology as a Method in Education Research
D’Agnese (2015), in a thought-provoking article entitled ‘The inner [and unavoidable?] violence of reason: Re-reading Heidegger via education’, alludes to the powerful influence of Western thought on modern-day discourses on knowledge production. He draws from Heidegger when he writes, Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a procedure within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. This method erases its own traces, presents this reduction as unavoidable, and establishes that ‘human beings’ ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. (D’Agnese 2015, 435)
Today, this trend still persists, both nationally and internationally, in which science education researchers put too much emphasis on the mathematical nature of knowledge and consequently lose its roots in lived experience. In other words, knowledge is framed in some mathematical procedure that ignores the importance of human relationships and lived experience. Since these mathematical transformations of knowledge proved to be very successful for many centuries, researchers have become more and more obsessed with them (Dahlin et al. 2009). Consequently, this paradigm of ‘knowing’ dominates modern discourses, including human science research in which human behaviour is converted into mathematical formulas and lived experience loses its central epistemic position and described as mathematical models of truth. To this end, researchers reduce © The Author(s) 2017 O. Koopman, Science Education and Curriculum in South Africa, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40766-1_1
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their research participants to mere objects, and their findings are seen as more real than the concrete, lived experiences from which they have been abstracted. Husserl (1970, 59) calls this the ‘technisation’ of scientific knowledge. He avers that this technisation involves a gradual sedimentation of meaning in which lived experience is ignored (or forgotten) in favour of mathematical conceptualisations. He writes, … This problem of forgetfulness is exacerbated by the fact that with each new generation’s inheritance of the new techniques—an inheritance that presupposes the processes of transformation without explicitly recognising them—another increment in the Selbstverständlichkeit [matter of course] of natural scientific achievement occurs as well (Husserl 1970, 59).
According to Dahlin et al. (2009), the ‘sedimentation of meaning’ relegates mathematical formulas to a higher level than lived experiences, and by doing so mathematics takes on a form of its own. When this happens, science replaces the concrete lifeworlds of individuals with abstract mathematical models and formulas that people find strange and difficult to understand. Landau (1997) explains how mathematics and science were reinforced and popularised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West. He avers that in the course of these centuries, rationalism and the enlightenment’s critical and sceptical spirit spread among comparatively large
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