A minoritarian but spirited voice has existed in educational and curricular practice rooted in the insights of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred Schutz, and others. This diverse group has not capitulated to the modernist tunnel vision and positivistic outlook that sees education not as an act of collective liberation but as training for disciplined servitude to societal demands flavored by the discourse of freedom and progress. In different ways, these outlying voices have displayed their uneasiness with, and in some cases even outright rejection of, the modernist-technicist ideas of ‘learning’ and its measurement in education. These voices are not necessarily convergent in vision or explicitly ontological in outlook, but are collectively critical of the analytic-empiricist model of thinking that is predicated upon the observer/observed split. Besides, amid all, somewhere, there lurks the question, often unstated: What ‘goes through’ or experiences phenomena, what is this ‘reality’ that is experienced, and what is the relation between the experiencer and this ‘reality’ experience? These voices have refused to take the conventional answers to these questions for granted, and insisted that upon the truly critical and searching response to these basic questions must ultimately depend the nature and future of the educational enterprise.
Some of these thinkers mentioned above have not been chary of using the word ‘transcendence’—a word proscribed by modernists and technocrats—in relation to educational experience and manners of perception. For instance, in a discussion at the University of British Columbia in 2013, Dwayne Huebner, a foremost thinker in this constellation of differently concerned educationists, spoke thus: “transcendence is a matter of recognizing that our current ways of knowing, our current ways of acting, and our current ways of feeling are basically idolatrous … and when we recognize that our language is idolatrous, our social patterns are idolatrous, and our emotions are idolatrous then we can be open to something beyond that.”1 Idolatry literally means image or object worship by means of a psychological transference. Here Huebner is referring to the attachment and devotion to dead patterns, thoughts, totems, and sentiments in social and intellectual life that come in the way of discovering anew existential truths and ethical responsibility. This is negative (non-positive) ontotheology at its best, deducing a resolute openness from the deconstruction of prevailing wisdom. It announces its intentions with destruktion, and suggests the possibility of an intuition of a different reality beyond.
Besides Huebner, the other significant names that must find honorable mention in this list are the following: Ted Aoki, Max Van Manen, Maxine Greene, Madeleine Grumet, William Pinar, Janet Miller, David Smith, and some others. It may bear mention that this does not form any convergent group; some within the group might have closer links with one another, and thus there could be resonances, while the approach of others may be more divergent. Our attempt here will be to examine important strands of a few of these thinkers toward the larger task undertaken here which is to recover ontological thinking and find its relevance within education.
Huebner: Seeing from the Other Side
How, then, can we speak of education? Education is not something that we do to others, although it can only happen in community. Education happens to us. If we accept the Latin etymology as significant (from ducare—meaning “to lead”; and the prefix e—meaning “out”), then education is indeed a leading out. But the leading out is not as a horse is lead out of the stall by a would-be rider, it is a leading out by the Otherness that is the source of our transcendence. It is a component of being a human being. The reason, it seems to me, that Whitehead emphasizes the necessity or importance of reverence, is that if we forget the transcendent foundation of education and assume that it is a consequence of human agency, then we lose the possibility for continued education and assume a maturity that presumably completes education. Forgetting the Shema and substituting human agency for the absolute Otherness, means that we fall into idolatry and away from the source of our education.2
But education is not only a leading out from that which I am, it is also a leading toward that which I am not. Thus the significance of the second commandment which calls our attention to our neighbor, to the stranger in our midst, and even to our enemy. My recent thinking about this dimension of education has been greatly influenced by my colleague, Parker Palmer, who in his book The Company of Strangers clearly depicts the educational significance of the stranger in our midst. In a similar fashion, Hans Kung in his book The Church speaks of the educational significance of the heretic, the alien in our midst. The stranger, the alien, the enemy—anyone who is different than I am—poses an unspoken question to me, in fact to both of us … The difference and perhaps the tension between us is an opening into new possibilities for us. Differences are manifestations of Otherness. They are openings in the fabric of everydayness. They are invitations to be led out, to be educated. We fail to recognize the invitation when we forget the source of education. We cannot recognize the invitation if we look at the other as a mirror image or extension of our own self. We reject the invitation if we pass judgment on the other and ourself, and assume that we know either.3
As Levinas has pointed out, the leading is toward an absolute otherness that I cannot know ever. When I accept this unknowability and unassimilability, then the ‘I’ in relation is displaced beyond recognition, for the absolute other is not only out there but also in the midst of me, of us. A cursory glance tells me of the fact of the stranger, of the fluid and uncapturable otherness that is forever receding from me. This is particularly noticeable when I think about the possibility of thinking itself—who or what is it that thinks? Thinking is always incomplete and slipping beyond itself. But this is not necessarily a deficiency. So whether it is phenomena, or my neighbor, or even this thing I call myself, there is a leading out toward the other, which is an invitation to be educated. The invisible wall of separation that separates the you and the me, the me from the you, begins to dissolve when the alienness in me becomes aware of the alienness in you. And then the two sets of alienness can meet and extend each other, and fulfil the promise of the source. But we can never find this opening in the otherwise blandness of daily life if we continue the habit of assimilation, of measuring all in the range of visibility with the sameness to which I have reduced myself in the first place. The invitation to be educated that comes from the source or ground of being then remains unfulfilled. The educational situation is a beckoning for both teacher and student to become educated, to get out of each one’s paltry sameness, to be led into becoming an-other.
- Meg:
In the name of the Father, art teacher, I do not have any art in me!
- Me:
I am just asking … requesting you to complete this collage piece Meg.
- Meg:
What’s the point? What does it mean anyway?
- Me:
I don’t know Meg, but we can try to understand why you did it.
- Meg:
Why did I do it? Because you keep pestering us. [Laughs]
- Me:
Yes, but it might have a significance … the colors, the choice of angles, the juxtaposition …
- Meg:
Why bother about it?
- Me:
The thought might help you to finish it.
- Meg:
You find out, you’re the artist!
- Me:
No … but all those reds, and there’s the sudden black line … then the white expanse followed again by an abrupt line.
- Meg:
[Takes a deep breath, looks steadily at me] Why do you want to know?
- Me:
I don’t want to know. … I just feel you were going somewhere with it, Meg.
- Meg:
I don’t know … Oh alright! Goodness! You!
I am confronted by a volatile other, who in turn is met by a quiet insistence. These two face each other. Neither has the measure of the other. I can never know Megan. In her unfinished expression she has thrown a challenge at me. The teacher is being educated, led out of himself; if the teacher allows the unknowability contained in the situation to operate, he will continue to be dragged out of himself to a new plane. There is open uncertainty at both ends. His complacency or sameness is broken by the force of recalcitrant Presence. On the other side, refractoriness is not suppressed but modified, and anarchy is directed toward a creative openness. The categories are thus forced to reckon with each other losing their settled ways somewhere along the way.
Alex, or rather, Alex-me is somewhat of a different story. I am both intimidated and fascinated by him. He hardly ever speaks, almost never looks at you, staring away in an orthogonal direction. But he produces the finest of lines—I always wonder wherefrom he gets those lines.
- Me:
Alex…
[No response. Alex is frowning at something].
- Me:
Hey Alex! These lines, tell me something about these, eh … eh? What is this?
[Alex shifts. I am in luck, it seems, today. He gets up and starts to walk out of the classroom. I follow. At length we reach what is popularly called the “Grove.” Alex is smiling to himself, still looking away].
- Me:
Come on Alex. What are we doing here?
[Alex shrugs, points at something. I take a few steps towards where he is pointing. Long, very long lines of ants. They had left fine tracks in the soil and shifted to new trails much like rivers shifting their course. The lines crisscrossed, going up and down interminably into the distance. I look toward Alex. He is looking upwards dreamily, takes no cognizance of me. We make a strange spectacle, like a set piece from some play, with the mottled light coming down through the canopies. So this is where he studies lines? God knows why he decided today to show me his secret place. Suddenly, Alex speaks, in a low baritone, startling me].
- Alex:
Why’d you want to see?
- Me:
Wanted to learn about the lines that you keep drawing. They’re interesting.
- Alex:
And so?
- Me:
You know there’s a famous story about an artist who produced a very fine line, and everyone said it was divine etc. Then another artist came along and drew a finer line lengthwise through the first line splitting it into two! Tell me why you draw lines, mostly, that is?
[Unimpressed by the story, Alex is frowning again. He does not like being quizzed].
- Alex:
I see lines. Everyone does.
- Me:
Sure! But you seem to see in terms of lines, which is interesting.
- Alex:
What’s interesting?
[In the past I have never been able to hold Alex in conversation for so long. Possibly something interests him here].
- Me:
Well, for me lines are mysterious. They don’t exist by themselves, and yet they are everywhere.
- Alex:
Don’t know anything about that. [Turns and shuffles out of the Grove].
The otherness that informs and accompanies education is the absolute Otherness, the transcendent Other, however we name, that which goes beyond all appearances and all conditions. Education is the lure of the transcendent—that which we seem is not what we are for we could always be other. Education is the openness to a future that is beyond all futures. Education is the protest against present forms that they may be reformed and transformed. Education is the consciousness that we live in time, pulled by the inexorable Otherness that brings judgment and hope to the forms of life which are but the vessels of present experience. To interpret the changingness of human life as “learning” and to reign in destiny by “objectives” is a paltry response to humankind’s participation in the Divine or the Eternal. The source of education is the presence of the transcendent in us and in our midst. We can transcend ourselves, go beyond ourselves, become what we are not, because we participate in the life which is transcendent and transcending. If we do not “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” then our education comes to an end for we cannot get beyond ourselves and we are no longer open to that which is new. We can be drawn out of our present self and present forms, we can be educated, only if we recognize the possibility of the transcendent in us.4
The divine or the transcendent in us is the endless potential to go beyond ourselves and participate directly in the life that is always reaching beyond itself. We can easily replace the scriptural language by a more suitable metaphor leaving the sense intact. The forms of life with which we are familiar through the encrustation of daily experience—the teacher, the student, the parent, the officer—are but closures applied to experience. Their social usefulness and pragmatic practicability are quickly exhausted within apparatuses that bind them, limiting their creative possibilities. These categories and forms need to be returned to the existential flow from which they were derived, to be pushed beyond themselves by the relentless otherness of life. That is transcendence. That is education. But to accept the description of isolated causal relations and the inherent flux of phenomena as the task of learning, and equate that to education is a pitifully shrunken conception.
To put the same thing differently, the prevailing language of “learning” is a bankrupt way of considering education, since this learning remains confined within the existing cultural root metaphors and patterns of thought that have long become bogged down in internal contradictions. There is no realization here that the human is obliged to live at two levels—the socio-cultural and the ontological. Only a proper dialectic between these two levels can free us from the dominance of single-track thinking which is idolatry. Besides, existence has its own inscrutable goals—we might call it destiny—and this goal is subverted by artificial aims projected on education by socio-political demands. The latter is a “paltry” response to the infinitude of life. From the very beginning education must be seen as a path-to-transcendence so that we are conscious of the fact that we have a duty to become other than what we are. This is what Nietzsche might have meant while positing the overman (ubermensch) in Zarathustra. The source of education is the transcendent potential in us, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow little selves, and “become what we are not.” This becoming is not an expansion of the existing self but a displacement of the usual ways of constructing the self.
But this displacement has the potential to create confusion within us, has it not? As we reach beyond ourselves, we are apt to lose parts of ourselves—the carefully enclosed ways of thinking and making sense of the world that have been built up over time. How do we ensure that we are not destroyed in the open encounter with the Other? Here we must invoke the ultimate munificence of life—Love. Love is the only thing that can guarantee survival in otherness. But Love is also a dicey notion, especially in education, and easily misunderstood.
What does love do in education? When faced with the new, the possibility of loss or destruction as we reach beyond ourselves, love provides the assurance that we will not be destroyed, that we can be whole again. The power of love can acknowledge weakness. Love heals the differences within us. It reconciles the new tensions and divergences in our life. There are three forms of healing that love assures. First, the presence and acknowledgement of the stranger in our life upsets the desired unity of thought, feeling, and action that we struggle to establish over time. Confronted by something new, forced to give up a part of our self, that unity is disrupted by new thoughts, new feelings, or new actions. Trust, patience and conversation provided by one who cares or loves provides the time, support, and language necessary to bring discordant feelings, thoughts and actions into new unity. A relationship of love and care is a relationship of assurance—assurance that you will not be overcome by the stranger, and that you will still be loved even though you are no longer what you were but have taken on new life and new memberships in the world.5
Love is the voluntary weakening of the inner ligatures that keep out the other. It is a form of sacrifice that anticipates the stranger. Thus we find in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the meek….” The meek in this context are those who do not shore up their inner psychological defenses that protect the current forms, but remain vulnerable instead. This sensibility is seen again in the epistles of the Apostle Paul who insists that in my weakness is my strength. The ‘weaker’ or more vulnerable one is, the more open the psyche, and the less attachment to the ego principle. Love is the causeless inclusive joy that comes out of innocent participation in the world; it is a secretion of the being that heals all sense of loss. The Love spoken of here is not something personal or sentimental; it is simply an ontological movement of freedom—freedom from the known. One can even go so far as to say that education, ultimately, is the creative possibility of Love.
Knowledge is often understood as a pre-existent structure. Because it has been produced elsewhere, we see our task merely to reproduce it. We forget that knowledge came into being through someone, that it was created by other people. We forget the origins of knowledge, and thus forget our own involvements in history. Hence knowledge is seen as fixed, as reified. Knowledge appears removed from the interactions that link person to environment or person to person. We fail to recognize it as an invitation to join hands with someone else in their involvements with the earth. We fail to recognize it as an invitation to establish a relationship of care and being cared for—a relationship of duty, love, and reverence. In forgetting this history and these invitations, knowledge becomes a vehicle of power and oppression. It is important to remember that knowledge is, first of all, a relationship with something that was, at one time, strange. Thus knowledge is a consequence of our being called forth by the otherness of the world.6
As has often been pointed out by critics, the reified view of knowledge has become its most widespread conception; we are even encouraged to hold this view of objectified knowledge that has gone through several layers of distillation and sanitization. This distillate is far removed from the context of its production or discovery. It is cold and impersonal; and the colder and more impersonal it is, the better it seems. This cold and dead knowledge is pressed upon the pupil, notwithstanding the fact that this is not how knowledge is actually come upon by those that did the actual work. The context of discovery usually is so outstandingly organic, intersubjective, and mysterious that an equally outstanding effort is made to absolve it of complexity, making it neat and consumable. This sterilization effort results in a wholly uninspiring and utterly misleading view of what truly consists of knowing—which is the invitation of the otherness. The world as the Unknown Other, invites, and so we progressively “know.” Equally, in this process of reductionism a vital aspect is lost—that of responsibility; without love and care for the root matrix, we grow up treating knowledge as external, non-intimate, material information. We have forgotten the history and origin of knowledge. Any move toward the other demands the recognition of duty, ethical obligation and responsibility. In many traditions one must demonstrate this worthiness to receive in order to obtain knowledge. In the absence of ethical responsibility, knowledge becomes a mere tool for power and oppression, even when it appears benign and benevolent, perhaps especially so. Knowledge cut loose from ethical grounding becomes satanic in the hands of a partial psyche that gives importance to phenomena and pursues it to control and dominate. Only Love can prevent this turn toward the authoritarian.
- Iris:
You say you have no authority as a teacher … Why then must I listen to you? Why can’t I walk out of here?
- Teacher:
The teacher must have no authority over the student. You ought not to listen because of authority. That is the wrong kind of listening.
- Iris:
But still that does not answer my question.
- Teacher:
Yes, I was coming to it. One must first understand the wrong kind of listening. Then one listens out of Love, if at all.
- Iris:
But I have no love for you.
- Teacher:
God forbid! Of course not. I did not mean love for the teacher. But the love of listening.
- Iris:
Listening to what though?
- Teacher:
Listening may have no content. It does not matter. All listening returns you to yourself. Listening is a state of attention. You are not listening to me. You simply listen, maybe to your heartbeat.
- Iris:
Why? It all sounds so … so odd.
- Teacher:
Perhaps. But it is quite simple really. You asked: Why should I listen to you? The reply was that you don’t listen to me. You develop a state of listening. It is a singular capacity. One can do that with the help of a reasonable being, that is, one who understands … respects mutuality, is herself listening.
- Abby:
According to what you said just now, there is no difference between someone teaching wrong stuff over someone teaching right. Both can be the subject of listening!
- Teacher:
Yes. But that is also why I used the word ‘mutuality.’ It is my deep responsibility to speak correctly, accurately, so that I do not create confusion. Knowledge, Love, and responsibility go together.
- Abby:
I still don’t understand how knowledge enters the picture.
- Teacher:
The world invites you through phenomena. It invites you to participate in it and thus go beyond your current state. This stretching beyond yourself is helped by engagement, knowledge.
- Abby:
What if I don’t want to stretch?
- Teacher:
That is a choice each one has. But the price is contradiction.
- Abby:
What do you mean, contradiction?
- Teacher:
The ‘you,’ the ‘me’ is always out of date. Each moment the world enters a new state, and you cannot deal with it accurately with the old ‘you.’ Hence the invitation … to stretch.
- Iris:
You used the word love. And then you went off into other things without clarifying.
- Teacher:
That is because I don’t really know what to say. Love, like ‘energy’ is a basic building block of the world, and cannot ultimately be reformulated in terms of other words. At best I can say…
- Iris:
Building block!! Sorry.
- Teacher:
You know scientists talk of fundamental particles. They also talk of waves. When you ask: these are waves of what, in what, they simply point to the mathematics. In other words, there is no image available. When there is no imaging, that is, no image-making, there could be Love.
- Abby:
But how can we live without images?
- Teacher:
I am not suggesting that we do, ordinarily, that is. But in moments of pure listening, there could be no image. You must find out for yourself. Then you might see the connection between knowledge and love.
- Iris:
Are you saying that one gets to know something because one loves it deeply? Here we learn things we don’t love!
- Teacher:
Something like that. I think love must come first, knowledge later.
Bridgeman and a variety of philosophers of science have pointed out that knowledge does not describe merely an object. It describes our operations on, our interactions with, or perhaps more appropriately our dancing with, the object. As that knowledge, that set of interactions and intersubjective relations, is moved from the scientific community to the technical community—as it becomes technical knowledge rather than scientific knowledge—we shift our relationship with the phenomena to which the knowledge points. As technical people with technical interests, we make the objects of the world care for us. We harness these objects, their qualities and characteristic, to our needs and wants, frequently destroying them, and gradually the earth, so they can serve us. The mutuality of love and reverence is broken in technical communities, for we no longer care for that which cares for us. The lore of the American Indian and the concerns of the emerging ecologically conscious communities remind us of the significance of love and reverence in the structure of knowledge. The scientist lives, in her own special field of inquiry, with reverence, whereas the technician forgets the reverence and duty which is the source of his power.7
Knowledge is not mere description; it is the creative formation of a knower-known amalgam. The scientist loves the field of her knowing and in turn receives love-knowledge from it. I think this is what the poet-philosopher Goethe meant when he spoke of “delicate empiricism.”8 Things reveal themselves when we are in right relationship with them. But when we turn knowledge over to the utilitarian, such a mind, shorn of love and care, thinks only of how to put knowledge to use. We learn how to coerce the world—the things and beings of the world—care for us, serve us, in the process destroying them. We cease to care for the things that care for us, and gradually build an exploitative world in which the entire earth is turned into a “resource” as Heidegger had noted.9 Nothing is sacred; nothing is deserving of reverence, other than the idols of man. Education, coming out of such a worldview, cannot but serve mammon and the needs of power. Education coming out of such a predisposition is a denatured form in which love and compassion have been eliminated from the act of knowing. We thus receive not emancipatory knowledge but power-inlaid reproduction. Only by eliminating the opposition between knowledge and Love can we redeem the educational act. The ontological dimension, in the final analysis, hosts an invitation to pay deep and quiet attention to that which we call the world. In that, there might appear an upsurge of the world, which is Love.
Ted Aoki: The Situational Interpretive
Let us turn next to another important and radical thinker in education, the figure of Ted Aoki. For Aoki education was the collective search for a sufficient maturity. Immediately we can see the shift from the standardized bureaucratic form (of educational imagination) to the ontological form: maturity involves the whole being and its relations with other beings, not just external objectives, various degrees of knowledge, and their measurement. What is striking about Aoki’s work is that he takes everyday concerns of educational practice such as curriculum evaluation, assessment etc., and delves deep into it coming up with a new way of looking at the old and the familiar. Aoki distances himself from the existing model of thinking about education, teaching and curriculum in the following words:
To date in the field of curriculum the dominant social theory has been guided by idioms of behaviorism, structural functionalism, systems theory and the like, which support the instrumental notion of reason. By adopting technocratic strategies and allied decision-making social theories, we are asked to admit the rational necessity of extending centralized management theories to more and more areas of the life of teachers, students, and administrators in the classroom and the school, including implementation. This assumption has been reinforced by positivistic thought, by an “intoxication” with the technical power of science and technology, and by the development of business management techniques. To question this position requires a radical reexamination of the foundations of social theory and an exploration of alternative modes of inquiry and sociocultural organization.10
What is so erroneous about “intoxication” with the rational and technical power of the technological model? The technical management model works well when there is a clear division between the controller and the controlled, that is, when we are talking about things and objects that are isolated from the observer. But these perspectives fail miserably when there is no clear line between the observer and the observed, or between the controller and the controlled. Consider the following. We have sensory impressions that gradually materialize into stable objects of experience, which in turn condition our sensibilities in an endless dialectical process. At length a being emerges that separates itself from the environment and adopts a certain autonomy. This “autonomy” works to some extent when it manipulates “things” or alienated objects, but fails when it tries to act on itself, as in education, because it is a product of circular self-referentiality. The problem of self-referentiality is well known in philosophy. When a part of the knowledge about something is derived from reference to itself, then that knowledge becomes unreliable because the unknown enters the picture through the backdoor of self-inclusion. This is why Aoki demands a “radical reexamination” of social theory where it pertains to education. This reexamination leads us inevitably to an ontological turn for the problem of self-referentiality can only be understood within an ontological frame.
Within the ontological frame, the instrumental thinking that leads to theory/practice divide evaporates. What is most significant in Aoki’s colossal work is the consummate ease with which he overcomes the theory/practice opposition—Aoki practices theory, as well as theorizes practice in the same breath. The theory/practice divide itself is meaningless to him. Thus he says,
[W]e believe education to be a moral enterprise concerned about what it means to educate and to be educated. In this connection, some of us feel that the inherent logic of “application” often found in education talk—the notion of “applying thought to practice”—should be made problematic, at least when reference is made to the world of people. We feel that for too long “thought” and “practice” have been set apart, an act that has tended to invite reified “thought” on the one hand, and a-theoretical utilitarian “practice” on the other. For too long, we have not been aware that second-order thoughts were being “applied” to the first-order social world of practice. A phenomenological study of the phenomenon of “application” is called for. Such an explanation might provide us insight into possibilities of contextualizing “thought” and “practice” within a new framework wherein the relatedness of the situational interpretive and the critically reflective orientations may lead us further along the way.11
Aoki offers a vital insight into the theory/practice divide—the reason why theory gets reified on one side and practice turns to reductionist and mechanical goals on the other. “Second-order thoughts” or abstracted formulations are applied to “first-order” world of experience in order to guide these. The result is failure because of level difference as well as misunderstanding of the notion of “application.” In the technical world, application as guided manipulation is possible for there is no attitude of liberation or emancipation—the technician is not attempting the releasement of objects or classes of objects. Hence the very term “application” needs to be rethought in the context of education and the practice of teaching.
In order to do that, we have first got to examine the rationalist-functionalist assumption that the world can be framed solely in terms of instrumental action. Citing Egon Guba, who argued that the “unassailable rational base” that curriculum developers often assume, and in turn teachers are goaded to assume, in fact does not exist, Aoki writes,
I wish to propose an alternative view of implementation, one that is grounded in human experiences within the classroom situation. This is the experiential world of the teacher with his students, who co-dwell within the insistent presence of “a curriculum X to-be-implemented.” I propose an alternative view, which sees “implementation as situational praxis” of teachers. To say “praxis” today is to restore that which prevailed among the ancient Greeks. Recalling Aristotle reveals for us a tradition that has become concealed, disappearing from the recesses of our memory. In his days, Aristotle saw different forms within which a reflective subject can relate with the objective world as ways of knowing. I wish to refer to two of these ways: 1. Theoria—a way of knowing in which the subject comes to know through a contemplative, nonengaged process, as a spectator as it were, guided by the telos of theoretical knowledge itself. 2. Praxis—a way of knowing in which the subject within a pedagogic situation (like a classroom) reflectively engages the objective world guided by the telos of ordering human action. Here, theory and practice are seen to be in dialectical unity. For Aristotle, praxis was a holistic activity of the total person—head, heart, and lifestyle, all as one—given to an ethical life within a political context. It is this sense of practice as praxis that I feel we need to restore.12
In classic Aoki manner, he decides to take on an everyday term in curriculum practice—implementation—and turn it on its head. We often hear of plan and implementation. This comes out of a technical or business model. One lays out a blueprint and follows it through to achieve the necessary objectives having factored in a number of variables. The assumption here is that at each level, the actors and actions retain or conserve the original intent and/or display minimum distortion. But the teaching act is not car salesmanship nor consumer behavior anticipation. The teaching act is supremely a situational praxis dependent on interpretation and meaning making.
Witness this conversation in Grade 5 science class. Its strangeness is due to the admission of a different expectation and the corresponding construction of a different set of meanings to the knowledge act. Often the pressure is to suppress these alternate meanings and capitulate to the consensus meaning.
- Shubhra:
Sir, why do you wear spectacles?
- Teacher:
Shubhra, there is a condition called myopia that requires a correction to the natural lens of the eye that we were talking about earlier. The lens here provides that correction.
- Shubhra:
No Sir, but why do you have to wear spectacles?
- Teacher:
I really don’t understand … I wear because my eyes ….
- Shubhra:
But you know so much science!
- Teacher:
Are you saying that because teacher knows a little science so he should be able to correct his vision and manage without spectacles?
- Shubhra:
Yes Sir! At least you should know how to take care of your eyes.
- Teacher:
That is a very good point. What is the use of knowing if my body cannot benefit from the knowledge? A good point. You’re really asking why I can’t heal myself. There are traditions of healing in which knowledge directly works on the body. Unfortunately, knowing a little bit of optics does not help me heal myself. This is the descriptive side. For knowledge to work on the body, I must go to the prescriptive side. But I am not sure even there I can do much about my existing condition. I might be able to prevent further damage.
- Shubhra:
Then what is the use?
- Teacher:
What is the use of what … of learning about optics etc.?
- Shubhra:
Yeah!
- Teacher:
Well, there are limits to how we can put this form of knowledge to use in any specific circumstance. We can for example construct a camera or a simple telescope like we discussed by understanding behavior of light rays. But mere optical knowledge will not be able to change or reverse a biological condition from outside, although it might help in understanding the situation.
[Shubhra remains skeptical, falls silent].
The young child is trying to make sense of the purpose of science learning. He is instinctively questioning the presumptions of positivistic knowing (out-there-knowledge), and demanding that knowledge be able to address an immediate condition—epistemic corpus and the body corpus must interact directly. There is a powerful phenomenological element present since the child is not fully socialized into the mind/body split. The cold logic of “implementation” cannot respond to such a demand for the direct experience of knowledge. Only the co-actors—student and teacher—together can direct the process of inquiring into experience with the help of an existing state of knowledge. Thus there are two frames of reference within which “implementation” can be constituted: the logic of instrumentalism and a hermeneutics of phenomenology. The latter responds to the becoming and transformation of beings, whereas the former responds to the bureaucratic form of society and its practical demands.
The crucible of classroom culture is made up of possibly outrageous but authentic experiences and demands that need to be carefully examined in an intersubjective space: “what is equally important for teachers and students as they engage in interpretative acts is to be critically reflective not only of the transformed reality that is theirs to create, but also of their own selves. It is within this critical turn, a precious moment in praxis, that there exist possibilities for empowerment that can nourish transformation of the self and the curriculum reality. It is this critical turn that provides the power to affirm what is good in the reality experienced, to negate what is distorting therein, and to allow engagement in acts or reconstruction guided by an emancipatory interest.”13 The situational praxis is a continually changing landscape within a supreme guiding principle which is the discovery of an ethical life, a just life, a non-mechanical life, and a responsible life. The functionalist-instrumentalist paradigm teaches adjustment to existing forms made up of the perceptions of the alienated self, whereas the situational praxis attends to the possibility of the emergence of a self in which “head, heart, and lifestyle” are in unity. The primary mode of concern here is ontological: the construction of reflective, meaningful experience and its communication. In other words, the self-world relation, and, in turn, its relation with other self-worlds is at stake here.
The activity of concern for those in the situational interpretive framework is communication between man and man. Because guiding interests of the situational interpretive researcher are insights into human experiences as they are lived, he needs to direct his efforts toward clarifying, authenticating and bringing to full human awareness the meaning structures of the constructive forces of the social cultural process. The form of knowledge sought is not nomological law-like statements but deep structures of meaning, the way in which man meaningfully experiences and cognitively appropriates the social world. Hence, when he comes to know situationally, he knows his world in a different form and in a different way compared with those of the empirical analytic view. The view of man/world in lived situations is one of man-in-his-world of fellow men. Although in the empirical analytic stance, as we have seen, man and world are given second-order constructions through the medium of conceptual constructs, in the situational world man and social world are seen as united.14
There is, within exchanges between lived situations, both density and intensity. The deep structures of meaning that lie at the root of communication do not present themselves in a self-evident manner. Situational praxis requires steady attentiveness and progressive clarification of the attendant meaning configurations within a context. Experiencing is given first-order importance and is not made subservient to concepts. Rather conceptual constructions are made to serve the purpose of unearthing parts of experience. For example, if we treat the oedipal construct as primary, we try to fit all experience within this conceptual construct. But if experience is primary then it cannot be contained within the oedipal alone; it overwhelms the concept. Primacy given to experience does not mean however that there is no coherence and that there is chaotic procession of elements. While sense making is not achieved through law-like apparatuses such as, say, external assessment protocols, sense giving unity is achieved by means of mythopoeisis, corporeal expressions, theatre, thick descriptions, and other creative symbolisms. If the root metaphors and suppositions about human-world relations are different (than the existing instrumental ones), then efforts settle along new lines. The deepening of meaning giving activities toward richer self-other and communicative relations is a very different enterprise than the seeking of greater explanatory powers or improving control and efficiency. Accordingly, curriculum or the teacher cannot stand aloof, but is organically inserted in an intersubjective space which clarifies, contextualizes, constructs, and communicates. But this can only come about in a profound and integral manner if the “teacher” realizes the limits within which her/his consciousness has been thrust from the beginning. Writing of the Polish scholar Karol Wojtyla, Aoki comments:
[Wojtyla] had recognized that since Descartes, knowledge of man and his world has been identified with cognition, the ensuing post-Cartesian attitude extending it as reflections in behaviourism, utilitarianism, and determinism. His efforts to transcend objectivism appear in his book The Acting Person dealing with the communal venturing of man as experienced through acting and reflecting throughout one’s life. Unraveling the network of man’s constitutive tendencies and strivings, Wojtyla, in his book, attempted to reveal man’s status in the world, the meaning of emancipation, and of human fulfillment. He probed by means of ontological hermeneutics the constitutive dynamism integrated by the acting person. Believing that man is no mere creature of circumstances conditioned and encapsulated by his social milieu, he proposed man’s worthy life venture as self-disclosure and self-governance as he fashions a personal and social life worth living. By emphasizing both the communal condition of man and the irreducible transcendence of the human person with respect to the current of social life, he counteracts the deviant, reductionist tendencies so prevalent in contemporary philosophy and culture.15
The teacher must break out of the limits imposed by Cartesianism and the subsequent post-Cartesian cultural attitude that sequestered world-knowing within behavioristic and utilitarian terms, normalizing these positions within a host of taken-for-granted rationalist homilies. Cognition became the center-piece of this worldview; wisdom, religiosity, intuition, love, and care, for instance, were gradually driven out of the public discourse as ways of being in the world. This, in turn, surfaced in curriculum as individualistic acquisition of knowledge and its peculiar form of proof of knowing via assessment protocols. This narrow view of education was the direct result of the truncated view of the human and the potential of the species. A cursory review of the “constitutive tendencies and strivings” of humans in widely spaced settings shows a very different picture. The centerpiece of Greek culture was not cognition but striving for a space between the human and the divine, something that Aristotle referred to as the daimon . The centerpiece of Egyptian culture was not cognition but the discovery of the ethical life. The centerpiece of Hindu culture was not cognition but the intuiting of dharma or calling. The centerpiece of Christendom was not cognition but the possibility of agape or Love. And so on. The source events and great cultural efforts sprang not from the will-to-knowledge of the cerebral kind but an expansive being in the world or world-being and becoming whose well-springs were diverse.
Causal knowledge of the world is useful, but it does not address the question of emancipation and the possibility of going beyond a particular configuration within the indefiniteness of human potentiality. The “constitutive dynamism” of the human actor has many things to draw from of which epistemic knowledge is only one. To focus only on the latter to the exclusion of all other ways of being and relating in the world makes for a dangerously one-sided and distorted world. To such a view the human appears as a contingent being, an accident of proteins and chromosomes. There is no necessity that governs the species or the surrounding world. Thus the human is condemned to the particular social and cultural milieu in which it finds itself with no scope of transcendence. Contrary to this, in the mythos of almost every culture, we find the narrative of transcendence, of revelation as the means to truth and self-disclosure. In source events of each culture, we find a profound negation of reductionist tendencies and the warning not to forget the obligations and the being of the human. We are warned that we are unfinished beings, and an ontological hermeneutics toward fulfillment is placed before us as the chief existential challenge. It is the pedagogy of anamnesis that across cultures tells humans not to forget the true inner core of being or a central purpose to existence beyond plans and intentions.
What of the teacher or of the teaching situation that is not aware or does not heed the call of anamnesis? The pedagogy of anamnesis requires us to mobilize the deepest instincts toward the irreducible transcendence that is part of the being of the human. Not to heed the call of anamnesis is to betray our purpose as well as to fall prey to the contingent social circumstances in which we find ourselves, as also to take it too seriously. Political culture is a partial derivative of culture that is already in forgetfulness and hence cannot truly offer emancipation. Politics is the battle to take charge of history, of time. But time is the enemy of man; emancipation does not come through chronos . Empirically this is obvious when we look into the facts. As division, regulation, and exercise of power, at no time in history, nor at any place geographically, has politics resulted in communal deliverance. Theoretically too it is obvious why this would be the case. Division never produces real peace or justice; it produces truce, at best. It is the product of a fallen-ness. Curriculum reflects politics, this we know. In the usual run of things, there is a kind of truce between the teacher and the taught or between the system and the student. But truce is not becoming or fulfillment of potential. It is a stale-mate. Thus the educational situation is a stale-mate, without emancipatory hermeneutics.
How can we go beyond the stale-mate? Indeed, in terms of a constitutive pedagogy, what must be included on the horizon of reflective thought and educative action? How do we judge “competency,” whether of the student or of the teacher, within this new approach?
Reflection, however, is not only oriented toward making conscious the unconscious by discovering underlying assumptions and intentions, but it is also oriented toward the implications for action guided by the newly gained consciousness and critical knowing. It is interested in bringing about a reorientation through transformation of the assumptions and intentions on which thought and action rest. There may be preconceived norms, values, images of man and the world, assumptions about knowledge, root metaphors, and perspectives. Competence as critical venturing together, then, with its interests in liberating man from hidden assumptions and techniques, promotes a theory of man and society that is grounded in the moral attitude of liberation.16
While familiarization with inherited knowledge complexes is indispensable for the social subject, it is not adequate to bring about a reflective consciousness. For that it requires praxis, or the transformation of the teaching situation. We have to start by looking for other ways of thinking about education than the cognitive and the acquisitive. Competence as “critical venturing” in togetherness examines all the encrustations of thought and various formulaic attitudes that surface in intersubjective interactions. That which has been normalized and naturalized through blind conformity, intellectual laziness, commonsense idolatry, historical contingency, technicist ideology, or the mere exercise of institutional power, is now questioned, and all that once appeared solid now melts, to paraphrase Marx. Aoki writes,
Within the framework of “praxis” and emancipatory actions, these actors and speakers are oriented toward “de-naturalizing” that which common sense declares to be human nature; they explore and condemn the commonsensical dismissal of alternative realities, and they attempt to restore the legitimacy of those existential issues that common sense, following human historical predicament, pulverizes into a multitude of mini-problems as can be articulated in purely instrumental terms. Ultimately, critical competence or competence as praxis as I have outlined it is for people for whom the way competence is known is not reason enough for the way competence is known by the mainstream []. In essence, critical competence is the way we choose to act to oppose inhumanity in songs and acts of joy, be they in the everyday idiom of music, art, play, poetry, pottery, or everyday language.17
The key to praxis is the acknowledgement and realization of alternate realities and other ways of being than the established one. The human condition or the historical predicament of human beings has submerged these alternative existential beliefs, attitudes, and practices, which now resurface under sustained and relentless inquiry. For example, critical competence might find that education can be thought of in terms of engagement in multiple realms other than the mainstream cognitive one whose root metaphor is symbolic learning. Thoughtful engagement in tasks other than symbolic learning such as those of physical coordination, relationality, caring, manual labor, craftsmanship, self-knowledge, performing arts are all capable of bringing about expanded and responsible participation in the world.
Such engagement, by involving different areas of consciousness, help open our eyes to reflective ways of being and thinking in the midst of the mainstream current of thought. In the refusal to settle down to convenient existential formulas we learn to problematize all our daily actions and assumptions.
Reflection in the foregoing sense is not the kind of activity school people, as actors, engage in their ongoing lives. In their everyday existence, actors deal with their concerns in routine ways, guided by the commonplace recipes that sustain them in good stead. What is missing is a conscious effort to examine critically the assumptions and intentions underlying their practical thoughts and acts. They may be reflective but not critically reflective. Critical reflection leads to an understanding of what is beyond the actor’s ordinary view, by making the familiar unfamiliar, by making the invisible visible. Such reflective activity not only allows liberation from the unconsciously held assumptions and intentions that lie buried and hidden. For example, at the personal level the content of reflection may be the “rationalization” an actor uses to hide underlying motives for his actions. Or at the societal level, the content may be the “ideology” used to support social practices and policies, rendering obscure society’s manipulative ethos and interests that lie beneath. Critical interest thus sees interest in uncovering the “true” interests embedded in some given personal or social condition.18
Critical reflection must make the obvious visible; the obvious is not (critically) visible precisely because it is so plainly manifest. Let us proceed by taking a concrete example of a pedagogic act that is more and more common across classrooms everywhere and at all levels. The teacher comes in to class, connects his computer to the projector, and there, on the screen, is the ubiquitous ‘Power Point’ presentation. It is clean, reasonable, linearly progressive, adequately expressive, self-contained, and helpful. And yet, on critical reflective inquiry, something else becomes visible, a different disclosure is apparent. In a pedagogic setting, probably the biggest thing against the visibility of the ‘PPP’ is its apparent finality. It glows there above everyone’s head in large letters drawing attention to itself, to its own truth, rather than letting the mind disperse to the various phenomenological corners of experience. It passively dominates the conversation and helps centralize what the teacher wants to centralize. Against the “clarity” of its lettering and symbolization, all incipient arguments appear fuzzy and directionless. In the teacher’s hands it is like a benign tool: It says, “Look, Here it is!” It is a sublime speaker from the background, one who appears as neutral, impersonal, and beyond reproach or contradiction, and for this very reason dangerous to the pedagogic situation. It allows the teacher to offset his authority onto the symbols on the screen. The teacher thus has his moral backup, and is able to speak in two voices at once thus making the classroom subtly even more authoritarian. The PPP is a fait accompli where the last thing one needs is such a convergence. Instead of making the classroom a situation where it is simply the context of an invitation to questioning from the participant, the teacher turns to the screen as though it was some kind of on-screen revelation. The teacher’s own hesitations, anxieties, anomalous understandings, phenomenological struggles, etc. are not visible on the screen. What is apparent is a sanitized and sterile string of symbols that seem to contain a kind of certainty and surety that are, in truth, inimical to the teaching situation. Anyone who has critical understanding of epistemic cultures and knowledge processes would know why. A particular way of knowing or appropriating the world comes about at the expense of other ways of knowing and being.
But it is often argued that technology can help classroom processes when we do not allow it to dominate proceedings. How shall we critically consider such a claim? Such a statement is not a critically reflective statement. That is, it may be correct but not true. How so? Aoki cites Heidegger: “The correct fixes upon something pertinent in whatever is under consideration. However … this fixing by no means needs to uncover the thing in question in its essence. Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true.”19 Something may be “correct” in the sense that it accurately fixes upon some superficial or partial aspect of a thing under consideration. But for critical reflection toward praxis, the essence of a situation or thing must be disclosed. Aoki goes on to write:
How, then, is this essence revealed? It is revealed as an enframing, the ordering of both man and nature that aims at mastery. This enframing reduces man and beings to a sort of “standing reserve,” a stockpile of resources to be at hand and on call for utilitarian ends. Thus, the essence of computer technology reveals the real as “standing reserve,” and man, in the midst of it, becomes nothing but the orderer of this “standing reserve.” But by so becoming, man tends to be forgetful of his own essence, no longer able to encounter himself authentically. Hence, what endangers man where revealing as ordering holds sway is his inability to present other possibilities of revealing. In this, it is not computer technology that is dangerous; it is the essence of computer technology that is dangerous.20
Whereas it is in unconcealment of essence that the truth of any situation resides, man’s technological prowess actually obstructs the possibility of revealment of essence. The human moves away from the task of encountering itself to the ordering of externalities, thus missing the point of its existence. These priorities are reflected in schooling and education, which more and more deflect attention toward the technological. It is toward the disclosure of essence that critical reflectivity and praxis must work in the pedagogic situation. Offering simple certainties rather than the disclosure of essence merely establish the hegemony of the established ideologies and choke off the possible different interpretations and intersubjective experiences that work toward revealment in a living pedagogic situation. Thus the inner rationalization of the teacher, toward the use of computerized teaching aid of the kind discussed above that ultimately displace true dialogue, is revealed by critically inquiring into the apparently benign motives and unreflective stances. To the teacher awakened to becoming critically reflective, it discloses the subtle societal ideology of efficiency and control that has worked its way into his or her inner core, and now appears as benevolent. The apparent benevolence renders obscure “society’s manipulative ethos” that resides beneath the taken-for-grantedness of everyday attitudes toward teaching and learning. Once liberated from a group of assumptions, and uncritical intentions and attitudes, critical reflection can become an ongoing process that goes progressively deeper into the structures of thinking that govern our realities and actions. This is praxis as an ongoing transformation of consciousness.
Praxis is the supra-personal search for mature consciousness free of duplicity and contradiction. It must be relentless and uncompromising in its critical unearthing of the motive for each little thing—action and attitude—transforming it as it remains underway to a different understanding of life and world relations. “We know that the true magic of the educating act is so much more than a simple, albeit justifiable, concern for improved resources, more sensitively stated objectives, better preservice and in-service training for teachers, or improved bureaucratic efficiency. Rather it has to do with the whole meaning of a society’s search for true maturity and responsible freedom through its young people.”21 Bureaucratic and institutional thinking imagines teaching as disciplined “delivery” of curriculum plans within a given resource availability and training. Curriculum is projected as a neat blueprint that is implementable in the manner of an architectural plan or wiring diagram. Where there are difficulties, it is believed to be a problem of unclear objectives, inadequate resources, or insufficient training. In truth, education is not about the management of resources, training, or objectives. It is about the coming-to-be of existential potentialities, the incubation of reason, and the maturation of instincts toward what it means to live a wholesome life. The gap between the instrumental vision of implementation and the existential vision of aiding thoughtful becoming is large.
Hence concerned teachers and sensitive curriculum developers, Aoki observes, must show acute awareness of this vast gulf that exists between curriculum as lived experience and curriculum as plan. The phenomenologist in Aoki picks out the zone of in-between in which teachers are placed—between lived experience and planned matter, and the corresponding tension of the situation.
For curriculum planners who understand the nuances of the indwelling of teachers in the Zone of Between, the challenge seems clear. If, as many of us believe, the quality of curriculum-as-lived experiences is the heart and core as to why we exist as teachers, principals, superintendents, curriculum developers, curriculum consultants, and teacher educators, curriculum planning should have as its central interest a way of contributing to the aliveness of school life as lived by teachers and students. Hence, what authorizes curriculum developers to be curriculum developers is not only their expertness in doing tasks of curriculum development, but more so a deeply conscious sensitivity to what it means to have a developer’s touch, a developer’s tact, a developer’s attunement that acknowledges in some deep sense the uniqueness of every teaching situation. Such a sensitivity calls for humility without which they will not be able to minister to the calling of teachers who are themselves dedicated to searching out a deep sense of what it means to educate and to be educated. To raise curriculum planning from being mired in a technical view is a major challenge to curriculum developers of this day.22
Sensitivity, touch, tact, attunement, uniqueness, humility—these are rare words in the mainstream educational discourse. However, these do form some fundamental notions in a phenomenological view wherein things must reveal themselves to you rather than being imposed upon from the outside. The “expert” decides everything from the outside by means of objective data and her/his expert judgement. But the phenomenologist must bracket her/his judgement and wait for the situation itself to reveal itself. For this, one requires both attunement and humility. What does this mean for phenomenological pedagogy?
I walk into class with the task of teaching physics. I am teaching optics to grade 7. John is thinking of the scolding he received in the previous class. Anu is worried about her grandma’s illness. Sunny is looking forward to her birthday. Amy overheard her parents arguing about custody. There are forty other children in the room, each one preoccupied with their own world of experience and problems. What does optics mean to any one of them? Possibly nothing. And if it does not mean anything will it make any difference to them if the angle of the incident ray is equal or not equal to the angle of the reflected ray? Will it add a cubit to their mental or psychological growth? Am I to go through an institutional ritual in the name of education? Am I to enact the fraud that is enacted in countless classrooms throughout the world in the name of education? Should I then not teach physics and instead do something else? Am I not obligated to carry out the institutional duty? These and many other questions surface when one de-familiarizes the familiar and refuses the taken-for-grantedness of the institutionalized ritual and power relations of the situation. One must not immediately demand or go seeking for answers to these questions. One must allow the situation to come towards one in a sensitive manner without hurry or impatience. When one listens to the Other seriously, the Other turns to the listening. Then one can hand a small mirror to Bill and ask casually what he is able to see in the mirror? One can ask Jane, whether what Bill said was true, and how she knew it was true. And so on. One is then on the way to a dialogue that is far richer and less oppressive than starting with formal abstractions such as incident rays and reflected rays. Phenomenological pedagogy looks for openings by means of which one may be led to a rich plane of intersubjectivity and interpretation.
But if teachers are merely regarded as curriculum transactors then we have a serious problem. The word ‘transaction’ has actually caught on in the mainstream educational discourse. It sounds and smells similar to the word “installer” that Aoki refers to below. Both reflect the worst kind of instrumentality and poverty of the imagination in the educational context; they have the technological as their reference point. They deny that teaching is an act of poesy and creativity.
If the planners regard teachers as essentially installers of the curriculum, implementing assumes an instrumental flavour. It becomes a process, making of teacher-installers, in the fashion of plumbers who install their wares. Within this scheme of things, teachers are asked to be doers, and often they are asked to participate in implementation workshops on “how to do this and that.” Teachers are “trained,” and in becoming trained, they become effective in trained ways of “doing.” At times, at such workshops, ignored are the teachers’ own skills that emerge from reflection on their experiences of teaching, and, more seriously, there is forgetfulness that what matters deeply in the situated world of the classroom is how the teachers’ “doings” flow from who they are, their beings. That is, there is a forgetfulness that teaching is fundamentally a mode of being.23
To the phenomenological thinker, the phrases “curriculum installation” or implementation bring up the vision of machinery being installed or some scheme being implemented. It bespeaks of the factory or at best a knowledge industry. It does not in the least coincide with the vision of education of human beings, which is, or must be, the practice of freedom, which means the critical investigation of experience. Creative cooperation and critical concern are two watchwords of this process. The idea of school life as a bunch of “students” coming in daily to be instructed in subject matter by a bunch of “teachers” is a stunted and arrested understanding of education. What is sought here within this inhibited and repressed atmosphere is a smooth and risk-less monadic individualism fenced in by de-natured knowledge that leaves young people isolated, self-centered, bewildered, and directionless, an inevitable state that is the result of not paying attention to experience and its ground of possibility.
We also can see how [in teaching] indwelling dialectically is a living in tensionality, a mode of being that knows not only that living school life means living simultaneously with limitations and with openness, but also that this openness harbours within it risks and possibilities as we quest for a change from the is to the not yet. This tensionality calls on us as pedagogues to make time for meaningful striving and struggling, time for letting things be, time for question, time for singing, time for crying, time for anger, time for praying and hoping. Within this tensionality, guided by a sense of the pedagogic good, we are called on as teachers to be alert to the possibilities of our pedagogic touch, pedagogic tact, pedagogic attunement—those subtle features about being teachers that we know, but are not yet in our lexicon, for we have tended to be seduced by the seemingly lofty and prosaic talk in the language of conceptual abstractions. We must recognize the flight from the meaningful and turn back again to an understanding of our own being as teachers. It is here, I feel, that teachers can contribute to fresh curriculum understandings.24
Formal knowledge as precise abstractions tend to anaesthetize us to the subtle and the real. Its finished character applies premature closure to ways of thinking, feeling and knowing, not remaining sufficiently open for experience to interact with it meaningfully. We become pious in our allegiance to the unerring symbol and dogmatic in its certainties. But education is not a movement from certainty to certainty; rather, it is an exploration from essence to essence, that is, from disclosure to disclosure. Hence openness must be an inalienable part of the pedagogic situation—phenomenological pedagogy must be open to struggle and inventiveness, to striving and uncertainty, to disappointment and surprise. In the open is encountered a tension of risks and possibilities. These are invariably a part of engaging with life and cannot be excluded from an authentic pedagogic situation. The language of certainties and pre-figured outcomes cannot take into account this tensionality that resides in the authentic pedagogic situation, which is why it turns the educational situation into a dead one. This is why lofty discourse about education turns out to be false because it hovers high above the sensibilities that are directly involved in the intersubjective process of unconcealment that is pedagogy.
This is also perhaps why, often, research fails to unearth anything that is truly valuable in relation to the pedagogic situation. Aoki notes that in recent times, there has been a lot of interest in classrooms and what teachers do. Sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists and others have descended on the school to make sense of what goes on. However, each group has approached the teaching situation from their own theoretical perspectives and categories external to the phenomenological reality of the situation.
[A] psychological understanding of teaching is popularly framed within the psychological concepts of motivation, reinforcement, retention, and transfer. These are, incidentally, the titles of a monograph series on teaching by Madeleine Hunter (1982). An understanding of teaching framed within the sociopsychological concepts has given birth to a whole array of interaction analysis systems, founded by Ned Flanders (1960); a sociological understanding of teaching based on role analysis often sees teaching in terms of the roles of classroom management, lesson planning, classroom discipline, surrogate parenting, mediating knowledge, and so on, popular themes that occupy a large terrain of the teacher education curriculum and instruction syllabi. An anthropological understanding of teaching frequently sees teaching as cultural activity, ethnographically understandable. As such, all of these are knowledge formulations of behavior, roles, and activities that provide some understanding of human doings: observable, measurable, and within the grasp of reasoned control. They present, indeed, a seductively scholarly and intellectual quality and legitimacy that make the understanding of teaching uncannily correct. But we must remember that these portrayals, although correct, although illuminative, are all distanced seeing in the images of abstract conceptual schemes that are idealizations, somewhat removed, missing the preconceptual, pretheoretical fleshy, familiar, very concrete world of teachers and students.25
Again we see the distinction between the correct and the true. All the scholarly revelations about the teaching situation are correct in their own ways. But there is an intimate, organic dimension that is not captured within their idealized theorizations. Their categories and conceptual schemas are unable to uncover the deep corporeality of the pedagogic situation with its layered meanings intertwined with lives producing singular moments. The latter Aoki calls the “elusively true.” The elusively true appears fleetingly but remains as a lasting beacon amidst the turmoil of life. Let me recall my teacher in undergraduate mathematics. Professor B taught Real Analysis. There were times when he would write down something that looked fairly complex and then turn to the class with a wan smile and say “But this is trivial.” I have forgotten most of Real Analysis but have not forgotten the admonishment of the “trivial.” That word had caught the young person’s fancy, and all his life he learnt to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential, and in a peculiar way, his whole intellectual life was to be guided by this distinction. Perhaps this is what Aoki refers to as the elusive moment. Its truth is felt corporeally, in the marrow as it were, and cannot be captured in sophisticated analysis or measurement of the classroom, however correct.
I will end this section by returning us hermeneutically to two phrases that Aoki uses frequently: pedagogic thoughtfulness and pedagogic watchfulness. Pedagogic thoughtfulness is not a “positive” state that can be easily described or measured. The state of thoughtfulness in this context might be taken to indicate the capacity to look beyond existing ways of thinking. Perhaps the biggest block to considerate living is the ways in which we are continually enframed by existing world relations and the image of thought. It does not allow us to break out of prevailing ways of thinking about ourselves and hence to develop the capacity to look past the crisis in the human condition. To shake this to its core in the psyche is the primary pedagogic task. This task is enjoined upon all in the teaching context. Thus comes about a thoughtful, watchful, and attentive situation. Thoughtfulness and watchfulness are things that happen in-between elements in a situation and do not inhere in the elements themselves. In other words, thoughtfulness ultimately is not a personal or individual characteristic; it is the quality of relationships that come to pass in a situation. This is a very different way of viewing reality, one that is far removed from the world of psychometric evaluations and standardized testing, and one which requires much contemplation and change within and without. But ultimately it is a rewarding world, trustworthy, sensitive, oriented toward the essence of what is.
Van Manen: Researching Experience
Let me turn next to another distinguished scholar and educator in the phenomenological tradition—Max Van Manen. But am I deliberately mixing up phenomenology with ontology here? Let us for a moment consider the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s exhortation “Back to the things themselves.” There is here a marriage of what is and what appears. By contrast, to Kant, the former, or the ding-an-sich, was not available to human understanding; only appearance was available as datum. But phenomenologists in the Husserlian tradition attempt to bracket conditioned reception and invite disclosure of the essence of phenomena . Thus there is an onto-phenomenology at work here. Bringing Van Manen into the discussion presents us with the great opportunity to address the methodological aspect—a method that is not a method—of phenomenological reflection in education. To recollect, Van Manen is the author of the landmark work: Researching Lived Experience. If the point of phenomenological work is concentrated on “reachieving a direct and primitive contact with the world,” as Merleau Ponty had put it, then the implicit ontological assertion of an essential world of experience, as well as the possibility of coming into primitive or unmediated contact with it, invite the prospect of a methodical approach to the possibility of disclosure or unconcealment.
From a phenomenological point of view, to do research is always to question the way we experience the world, to want to know the world in which we live as human beings. And since to know the world is profoundly to be in the world in a certain way, the act of researching-questioning-theorizing is the intentional act of attaching ourselves to the world, to become more fully part of it, or better, to become the world. Phenomenology calls this inseparable connection to the world the principle of “intentionality.” In doing research we question the world’s very secrets and intimacies which are constitutive of the world, and which bring the world as world into being for us and in us. Then research is a caring act: we want to know that which is most essential to being. To care is to serve and to share our being with the one we love. We desire to truly know our loved one’s very nature. And if our love is strong enough, we not only will learn much about life, we also will come face to face with its mystery.26
Objectivist research takes for granted the way we experience the world, and from that taken-for-grantedness proceeds to determine causal relationships. Phenomenological research, on the other hand, questions and problematizes the very way we experience the world. Rather than the ‘why’ of things, it addresses the what-ness of things: what is this thing that appears? Knowing the world here is not in terms of external data about the world but what Heraclitus had called αγχιβσίη or moving-in-nearness to the world. In other words, to know the world is to be the world. And since there cannot be any pre-given formula for how to be or become the world, it opens the door to diverse constitutive avenues of exploration by which we become intimate with that which we call the world. Goethe had called it “delicate empiricism.” The very word delicate suggests a level of caring and tenderness toward what is. Mystery of essence is revealed in love. This is indeed strange language in thinking about research. But are we indulging in romantic mysticism here? Love is an attitude, just as positivism is an attitude, it is an attitude that is marked by heightened receptivity. We have got to learn to admit this. Love here indicates a profoundly caring openness, instead of the coldness of enterprise, that invites rather than impose.
But Love as a fundamental relation between the human and the world must demand a new way of conceiving subjectivity and objectivity, which, in turn, requires new capacities of perception. Goethe wrote: “Man knows himself only to the extent that he knows the world; he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself. Every new object, well contemplated, opens up a new organ of perception in us.”27 In other words, this is not simply about extending our sensibilities; it is about inaugurating and maturing a “new organ of perception” that exists now only as potential. This organ is not something biological or localized in the manner of physical organs, but is extended throughout the being as intra-corporeal intuition.
Phenomenological research and writing is a project in which the normal scientific requirements or standards of objectivity and subjectivity need to be re-conceived. In the human sciences, objectivity and subjectivity are not mutually exclusive categories. Both find their meaning and significance in the oriented (i.e., personal) relation that the researcher establishes with the “object” of his or her inquiry (Bollnow, 1974). Thus, “objectivity” means that the researcher is oriented to the object, that which stands in front of him or her. Objectivity means that the researcher remains true to the object. The researcher becomes in a sense a guardian and a defender of the true nature of the object. He or she wants to show it, describe it, interpret it while remaining faithful to it-aware that one is easily misled, side-tracked, or enchanted by extraneous elements. “Subjectivity” means that one needs to be as perceptive, insightful, and discerning as one can be in order to show or disclose the object in its full richness and in its greatest depth. Subjectivity means that we are strong in our orientation to the object of study in a unique and personal way-while avoiding the danger of becoming arbitrary, self-indulgent, or of getting captivated and carried away by our unreflected preconceptions.28
The reconceptualization of subjectivity and objectivity follows automatically once we take seriously Goethe’s idea of the human flowering of a new organ of perception. This is the development not merely of research into some phenomenon, of an outsider looking in, but of a combined growth of something new and unprecedented. Let us proceed by taking a concrete example. Let us assume that I wish to understand a particular aspect of the phenomenon of school violence. I have studied the media reports of school children killed by schoolmates for reasons varying from sexual jealousy to wanting examinations deferred. The usual way would be to go about gathering data within a particular framework in order to reject or validate hypotheses. There is a clear division between the researcher and the researched. Phenomenological research on the other hand would in all probability not begin with hypotheses; rather it would first orient itself to the situation by considering deeply the narratives coming out of it. It would consider the major and minor streams of conditions that have a bearing on the situation. Most importantly, it would attempt to go to the root of the phenomenon of violence that is under study. In a specific situation called the school, what makes it possible for a situation to come about where the elimination of another is thinkable? The researcher must go even deeper into the question of relations: the seeking of violating an-other by positing an ends-means relationship. For instance, at what point does an-other begin to appear as a means to an end? At the same time, the researcher does not remain entirely outside the frame of her research. No life is untouched by violence. For the caring, honest, and attentive investigator, the violence in the outer context cannot but bring up resonance of violence in the inner. Together it discloses with richness and depth a multi-layered reality in which different aspects and relationships are implicated. Clearly, the old ways of regarding subjectivity and objectivity have necessarily got to become reinterpreted in the process of this kind of research that looks into lived experience.
Phenomenological research is research into lived experience. But what exactly is “lived experience”? When can we call something out of the flow of existential phenomena lived experience? A particular cut in the existential flow that has a unified meaning and can be identified to have that meaning in relation to the totality could be thought of as lived experience. It reflects or exudes a certain quality or an essence that is peculiar to it. Thus the lived experience of a snake, for example, is very different from the idle viewing of a snake. In the latter, the snake is merely an object of interest or a spectacle, looked on possibly from a safe distance in the stance of a spectator. But the phenomenological experience of a snake is a qualitative intensity in which there is a comingling of affective and action states that produces a singular and silent meaning. On reflection it can yield a sense-moment or essential significance in relation to a larger associative world.
The interpretive examination of lived experience has this methodical feature of relating the particular to the universal, part to whole, episode to totality. Merleau-Ponty (1968) has given a more ontological expression to the notion of lived experience as immediate awareness which he calls “sensibility”: “The sensible is precisely that medium in which there can be being without it having to be posited; the sensible appearance of the sensible, the silent persuasion of the sensible is Being’s unique way of manifesting itself without becoming positivity, without ceasing to be ambiguous and transcendent …. The sensible is that: this possibility to be evident in silence, to be understood implicitly” (p. 214). Lived experience is the starting point and end point of phenomenological research. The aim of phenomenology is to transform lived experience into a textual expression of its essence—in such a way that the effect of the text is at once a reflexive re-living and a reflective appropriation of something meaningful: a notion by which a reader is powerfully animated in his or her own lived experience.29
Unlike in mere viewership, where the event or phenomenon under question, such as the snake in the example above, is posited, or consciously acknowledged, in experience, the appearance of the sensible is not entirely a positivity, in the sense of an external datum. The line between experiencer and experience is not clear. In other words, the appearance of the sensible in the sensibilities is laced with ambiguity, its meaning is largely apprehended implicitly, surrounded by a silence. This presents the key difficulty with phenomenological research and writing. A language has to be found to give textual expression and bring out the essence of something that only presents itself tacitly or obliquely. In the language of Dilthey, the unit of meaning that is experience may be thought of as a “structural nexus” that connect to other such units to form larger patterns of meaning. This structural nexus has to be made visible in phenomenological research. The “non-thematized” going-through-ness has to be made available to reflective consciousness. Obviously, in presenting such experience to reflection careful attention must be paid to language which is the medium of such reflection. We must consider the stance, for example, that everything is textual, or made sense of in language. My own sense is that this is where phenomenology and postmodernist approaches like deconstruction must part ways. If everything is textual, like Derrida once put it, then we lose sight of that “ambiguous and transcendent” essence that lies beneath phenomenological description.
In this context, let us examine what Van Manen has to say with regard to essence and textual interpretation:
“Phenomenology is the study of essences,” said Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. vii). But the word “essence” should not be mystified. By essence we do not mean some kind of mysterious entity or discovery, nor some ultimate core or residue of meaning. Rather, the term “essence” may be understood as a linguistic construction, a description of a phenomenon. A good description that constitutes the essence of something is construed so that the structure of a lived experience is revealed to us in such a fashion that we are now able to grasp the nature and significance of this experience in a hitherto unseen way. When a phenomenologist asks for the essence of a phenomenon—a lived experience—then the phenomenological inquiry is not unlike an artistic endeavor, a creative attempt to somehow capture a certain phenomenon of life in a linguistic description that is both holistic and analytical, evocative and precise, unique and universal, powerful and sensitive. So an appropriate topic for phenomenological inquiry is determined by the questioning of the essential nature of a lived experience: a certain way of being in the world.30
Here I differ from Van Manen that essence is a “linguistic construction.” In my own contact with native populations of the Gangetic delta of the eastern state of Bengal in India, the essential relationships with the forest, with the tiger, with the crocodile in the river are not mere linguistic constructions. These are pre-linguistic and are felt intensities that become nodal points in the locals’ effort to orient themselves. If we see these only as linguistic essence then we lose something vital. Reducing everything to language belongs to the “linguistic turn” of postmodernity rather than to phenomenology. Admitting a hidden essence in experience that is non-reducible and non-linguistic is not necessarily mystification. Besides, in the same passage which Van Manen quotes above, Merleau Ponty says that phenomenology is a philosophy “which puts essences back into existence.” Presumably, the “essences” that are reinstated are not merely linguistic; if it is to the contrary then there is nothing really to put back. But what is this essence if it is not linguistic construction? To proceed by example, a sense of deep reverence for the things of the forest felt by the autochthon is a pre-conceptual regard that is not to be confused with languaging. This reverence is a pre-conceptual, existential effulgence of the rootedness of a people that cannot be entirely understood in language, although an attempt may be made to be true to it in language. For a “phenomenon of life” to be interesting, it must have an essence that binds: the description of amour is so interesting only because love itself exceeds all concept and language. The Aristotelian to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι) or the “what-ness” of things is thus crucial to the phenomenological search for the core of an experience. This what-ness might also be described approximately by the cognate term “haecceity” coined by the philosopher Duns Scotus. Here I appropriate it to signify a union of the conceptual and the non-conceptual—an intensive body as much as a semantic one. Thus the sense-affect of a concept is spread throughout the mento-corporeal structure and not merely confined in thought. Each “going-through” leaves its ineffable stamp on the corpus connecting it to other events. Perhaps not every experience is gone through so acutely as to apparently afford an expressionable essence. But that is due to the fact that the “neighborhood” of the experience maybe crowded and/or there is inattention. Some experiences when recounted evoke a reflexive re-living and the positing of a meaning in others due to the fact that there is a shared ground. Such evocation may be absent when lifeworlds are very different or the experience is esoteric.
In order that a meaningful and honest expressionality arises or presents itself through the phenomenological work one must be in a position of strong orientation toward the subject or situation under study, and be animated by it.
Every project of phenomenological inquiry is driven by a commitment of turning to an abiding concern. “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky,” said Heidegger (1971, p. 4). This commitment of never wavering from thinking a single thought more deeply is the practice of thoughtfulness, of a fullness of thinking. To be full of thought means not that we have a whole lot on our mind, but rather that we recognize our lot of minding the Whole-that which renders fullness or wholeness to life. So phenomenological research is a being-given-over to some quest, a true task, a deep questioning of something that restores an original sense of what it means to be a thinker, a researcher, a theorist. A phenomenological description is always one interpretation, and no single interpretation of human experience will ever exhaust the possibility of yet another complementary, or even potentially richer or deeper description.31
Delving deep into lived experience requires pushing aside idealist temptations and pre-conceived notions. By holding and pursuing a single thought—say, the experience of widespread disregard of the law in a particular context—and thinking it ever more deeply brings it gradually to a state of unwavering fixity. It is not that one arrives at some perfect generalization. Rather, the unwavering alignment with a single overwhelming concern brings to bear the entire body of intuitive-affective-reasoning-poetic ensemble in the researcher on the phenomenon under consideration. To take the above example further, the disregard of the law manifesting itself as the non-deterrence of its punitive provisions might throw up accounts of the loss of authority of the State which generally has monopoly over violence. This might have led to creation of pockets of anarchy. Going deeper, one may find groups forced to usurp the right to violence in order to maintain themselves. Further inquiry might bring out narratives of loss of existential meaning and relevance for particular members in a society who no longer wish to abide by norms. What is important in all this is not the overly-generalized understanding of the situation, in order, say, to make out a political or sociological case, but the dense stories or “thick descriptions” of lived experience, and the possibility of reflexively reliving or resonating with these experiential narratives. This kind of disclosure lies between universalism and particularism, a singularly important terrain in which we reach the inner core of existential dilemmas, accomplishments, conflicts, contradictions, and meaning creations through shared reflection on experience. The phenomenological approach neither loses sight of particularities nor does it become overly specific so that larger relevance is lost. It demands a sensitive and caring delving into the situation that at the same time sharpen our intuition as we give ourselves over to the quest. It is not the quest for some fixed “truth” but a situational or contextual disclosure-in-relation to the Whole. Thus a phenomenological description is never the description that captures the whole truth of a phenomenon. It is an interpretation; it might be a good one, but like all interpretation it never exhausts the situation. There always remains the possibility of other distinct descriptions and interpretations that are no more or no less true. There is a fundamental generosity at work here that does not look for exclusive positions and has the understanding that our perceptions can always be bettered by yet other descriptions, even welcoming these as complementary ones that only enhance the richness of the text and the intersubjectivity. This is very different from the social scientific attitude that tries to establish the truth or facticity of a particular description. Also unlike the social scientist, the phenomenological researcher aims at a certain effect by means of the structure, organization, and argument that she produces—it must have the effect of animating the reader and evoke in them a sense of quidditas .
Very broadly, there are four lifeworld essentials by means of which this quidditas may be evoked in any phenomenological situation.
The four fundamental existentials of spatiality, corporeality, temporality, and relationality may be seen to belong to the existential ground by way of which all human beings experience the world, although not all in the same modality of course. In the phenomenological literature these four categories have been considered as belonging to the fundamental structure of the lifeworld (see, for example, Merleau-Ponty, 1962). This is not difficult to understand, since about any experience we can always ask the fundamental questions that correspond to these four lifeworld existentials. Therefore, spatiality, corporeality, temporality, and relationality are productive categories for the process of phenomenological question posing, reflecting and writing.32
Phenomenologically, the question of time is of distinct significance. Outwardly, we are used to the time of the clock by which social and personal time is ordered. A uniform temporal order has done much to synchronize the world. This time is abstract and objective succession of moments free of subjective or qualitative understandings. In other words, the time of the clock or chronos orders experience but does not enter experience itself. We experience events in time, but we do not directly experience the passage of moments as a distinct item of sensation. Time itself, it appears, has no content that is experienceable. Nevertheless, philosophers such as Henri Bergson have argued that clock time and lived time are not the same. Bergson called this phenomenological time duration . “Bergson noted in his investigations that, to begin with, the homogeneous and metric perception of time is at odds with our lived lives in which time is experienced qualitatively. In terms of the everyday, who has not had the experience of time stretching or contracting, depending on the specific circumstances? For Bergson, this is not merely a psychological phenomenon; sensation has being and a complex ontology, and therefore these differential experiences are not to be dismissed as illusions or overwritten quickly with the metrical. Instead, they are to be seen as the preliminary evidence of the fact that there are other flows besides uniformly measurable time. This qualitative time has little to do with marking off equal intervals but, rather, is the arising of sensations differently folded into each other. Such time is plastic and is capable of infinite contortions producing heterogeneous and continuous multiplicities, and, consequently, different realities. The regular contractions that repeat occluded the other reading of time, according to Bergson. In fact, real duration comes out of infinite decomposition rather than the composition of successive, external moments that follow each other. It is thus our expression, our representation that makes time appear as it does rather than any a priori essence.”33 While chronological time composes or orders events, duration or phenomenological time is the result of decomposition of sensation which leaves its traces in the sensibilities. It is this distinct process with a different orientation, one that produces bundles or multiplicities of sensations that makes phenomenological time important to lived experience. Here, unlike in Kant, time has an essence, and is not just an empty background coordinate.
Similarly, we can think of spatiality differently than the Kantian a priori, approaching it phenomenologically as terrestrial densities rather than the geometry of empty distance. The latter way of experiencing space may just be cultural conditioning than any ontological fact. “Following Alois Riegl, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) set up a useful distinction between Nomad (tensional-tactile) space and State (optical) space. State space is likened to the Kantian a priori in that it is homogeneous and exists independently of what is in it … ‘It is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance, inertial points of reference immersion in an ambient milieu and constitution of a central perspective’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 494). Nomad space or the space of [tactile intensities] is indeterminate, complex, uncertain, and open to what might happen. It is quilted space, stitched together bit by bit, using phenomenological intensities … whose gradients are produced region by region, through connections, deterritorializations, and observances … It is thus indicative of a tactile space rather than a visual one, whose variability is an essential feature of its cartography.”34 Culturally, modernity gives great priority to opticality as a governing attitude toward experience. But optically perceived invariant space in terms of distance between objects is not the only way to understand spatiality. There is a kind of spatiality that enters experience itself and does not remain outside of it. This space the above writer calls “tactile space.” Forest people, nomads of the desert, tribes living in extreme conditions such as in Polar Regions, or the visually challenged are aware of space in a different manner. The Urban homogenized space is the space of a particular “compression”; it is one among many possible spatialities. Thus space itself becomes phenomenologically interesting and fundamental questions can be asked with regard to it in researching into lived experience.
Next, corporeality, or an acute sense of the body as body, and not a mental representation of it, is mostly missing in modernity. As an epochal tendency, the latter treats the body merely as a site of pleasure or pain, of indulgence or denial. It rarely reflects on the body as a mysterious process about whose totality we possess very little understanding even though we may know a lot about its parts and isolated processes. This rejection of the body as an important site of disclosure about existential meaning may have puritanical roots, but that is a different discussion. Suffice it to say here that vast pools of the unknown remain in the body since it is very ancient, much more so than thinking, and phenomenologically, corporeality, or being-in-the-body, remains a very important existential fundamental for inquiry. Secondly, the Cartesian split, and the historical prioritizing of the ‘mind’ over the body, has had profound consequences for societies, and differentially for sections and elements within them. Careful research into these sensibilities and their modes of experiencing the world is definitely needed as a way of dealing with the cumulative effect of historical attitudes.
Finally, Van Manen cautions about the difficulties inherent in phenomenological research in the sense that it is easy to be side-tracked into superficialities or some kind of story-telling exercise that merely recalls experience. We have to remember above all that we want to get to the essence of some phenomenon or lived relation by bracketing off personal beliefs, taken-for-granted notions, and established ideas.
Things turn very fuzzy just when they seemed to become so clear. To do a phenomenological study of any topic, therefore, it is not enough to simply recall experiences I or others may have had with respect to a particular phenomenon. Instead, I must recall the experience in such a way that the essential aspects, the meaning structures of this experience as lived through, are brought back, as it were, and in such a way that we recognize this description as a possible experience, which means as a possible interpretation of that experience. This then is the task of phenomenological research and writing: to construct a possible interpretation of the nature of a certain human experience.35
There can be a level of clarity that is quite superficial, and therefore dangerous. The question regarding the essence of a lived experience is not easily answered. A manic-depressive may know what happens to him as the pendulum begins to swing from one set of feelings to another. Yet, he may know this only at a relatively shallow level, contaminated by extraneous issues. He may not have observed all the changes and the triggers reflectively in order to be able to bring back into focus a particular episode adequately. Let us assume for the moment that he speaks of a “gathering darkness.” But this is a metaphoric description. Metaphors are shorthand for the actual which can be painstaking. We cannot be satisfied with a bunch of metaphors nor with simple recall. We must dig deeper in order to get beneath the skin of the phenomenon, as it were. The meaning structures spread through the essential description will then resonate with others who might then recognize it as an authentic description or a possible interpretation of an experience.
The reasons for the above excursus into phenomenological research or research into the essence of lived experience must be clear to the reader. In thinking about education, we are in search of a missing dimension—the ontological—in order to put it back into reckoning. The centrality of practice in education cannot be overstated, but this practice is often bereft of theory. It bears emphasizing that there is frequently a large gap between theory and practice in education. Phenomenological research helps us practice theory and theorize practice at the same time through the unearthing of the essence of lived experience in the teaching situation. Such unearthing cannot take place without proper use of theory, at the same time it is practice that we try to understand by intelligently probing into the teaching situation not as some outside observer looking in, but involved, caring, knowing fully well that the disclosures depend on our own level of sensitivity and depth of sensibilities. “Delicate empiricism” demands the emergence of a new organ of perception redefining subjectivity and objectivity.