Phenom draft section

 Most responsibility for planning and delivering topics within the curriculum is almost always assigned as the responsibility of teachers (Cho, 2001). They are often the ultimate decision makers who select and modify curriculum resources and activities to make teaching and learning meaningful in their own context (Spillane, 1999 #in Cho PHD). For this study, the narratives or lived experiences of teachers in this context are crucial factors to understand. It is these experiences of the teaching and learning processes where classroom practice can be understood and improved upon (Bailey, 1996). This research has two main aims. Firstly, it aims to follow teachers through the planning and delivery of piloting the new topic, and secondly to explore their experiences of doing so in-depth to get to the heart of what support might be needed for others in the future implementation of it into the curriculum. How implementation occurs in a curriculum change situation, in terms of teacher’s lived experiences, is an under-examined phenomenon (Carson, 1992; Cho, 2001), and little research illuminates what it is like to experience this type of implementation phenomenologically (Bailey, 1996; Carson, 1992). This study is therefore important to draw critical insights for both research and practice.

Qualitative research has the unique goal of facilitating the meaning-making process (Krauss, 2005) and meanings help to provide explanation and guidances for such experiences (Chen, 2001). Phenomenology is a useful research approach for those wanting to understand the thinking and meaning-making of teachers or pupils (Crotty, 1998; Denscombe, 1998). Phenomenology takes into account the multiple realities of interpretive research, the social construction of reality and has proven popular in the social sciences (Creswell and Creswell 2013; Denscombe, 2011). It is not primarily concerned with explaining causes or offering explanations, but asks what is the meaning, structure and essence of a lived experience for a person or group of people (Moustakas, 1994).

Phenomenology offers this study the opportunity to capture a ‘thick’ description (REF) through the eyes of teacher participants, and captures the importance of the everyday, including the mundane and the trivial which otherwise gets missed (Moustakas, 1994). It is these insights that could prove useful and significant to understand the intricacies of teaching practice and to help expose the more deeply taken for granted assumptions about lived experiences (Starks and Trinidad, 2007). However, because phenomenological studies are contextually focused and often smaller scale with a lower number of participants, it comes with its criticisms as lacking in the more scientific rigour, and because of its broad descriptive focus rather than numerical data or generalised findings that could be replicated it can be seen as unimportant compared to the bigger issues and studies that could inform policy (Denscombe, 1998). However, to mitigate this argument this research aims only to be exploratory, to act as a guide into everyday insights of the teachers experiencing the piloting of ideas for a new curriculum topic and to identify the types of everyday support needed in planning and delivering the teaching of digital accessibility.

 Another criticism of interpretive research such as phenomenology is the concern about researcher bias (Moustakas, 1994). Interpretivism is considered inherently subjective because the researcher is the instrument of analysis and makes all the judgments, from the questions asked to the coding, categorising, decontextualising and decontextualising the data (Starks and Trinidad, 2007; p.1375). Heidegger (YEAR) believes that a researcher of phenomenology can never truly put aside their own assumptions and experiences when conducting or analysing research. Whereas Husserl (YEAR) refers to ‘epoche’ or ‘bracketing’ where the researcher puts aside their biases and presuppositions and lets the data speak for itself, intentionally focusing and interpreting data from a fresh and naive perspective (Moustakas, 1994; Eddles-Hirsch, 2015). With this in mind, reflexivity therefore will need to play a central role in this study to remain as a researcher focused on the phenomenon being studied, while both reigning in and reflexively interpreting one’s own understandings of the data (Finlay, 2008; p.29) as well as being fully aware of researcher positionality in terms of beliefs, values and motivations and to remain as objective as possible (Clancy, 2013). Based on their differences about the researcher’s position, Heidegger and Husserl have different philosophies for phenomenology. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology takes a more descriptive approach, whereas Heidegger takes an interpretative hermeneutic approach which not only describes the phenomena, but also through both participants and the researchers analysis explore the interpretation of it (Moustakas, 1994).

Husserl (REF) considered the transcendental and bracketed approach to be a valid alternative to the scientific method of research. He describes the intentional research of a transcendental phenomena as consisting of a noema and noesis. The noema represents the objective experience of the object of study, whereas the noesis represents the subjective. In this case the planning and delivery of the teaching would be the noema ‘the what of teaching’, whereas the noesis would relate to how different teachers perceived the experience of teaching it. In phenomenological research both the noema and the noesis needs to be considered in order to understand the experiences described by participants and the underlying essence of it (Eddles-Hirsch, 2015; p.252). This multidimensional aspect lends itself to the intended structure of this study that both aims to explore the situated context of implementing the teaching topic and an in-depth reflection of the teachers’ experiences of it.

In terms of analysis, using in-depth studies of three teachers, this research is keen to draw any conclusions or thematic understanding from the participant data itself. Focusing on what the data reveals describes several analytical processes. Grounded theory, for example, seeks to develop an explanatory theory of social processes studied within the environment in which they take place or create explanatory frameworks to understand the phenomena (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). However grounded theory aims at more generalised outcomes and the research relies on theoretical sampling by recruiting and adding participants to re-explore the data until it reaches theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). Typically grounded theory studies report sample sizes ranging from 10 to 60 participants (Starks and Trinidad, 2007; p.1375). Phenomenology on the other hand has interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). IPA is best suited to smaller participant numbers but invites participants to offer a richer, more detailed, first person account of their experiences (Smith, Flowers and Larkin, 2009; p.56). IPA recognises that analysis involves interpretation and the researcher is central to interpreting the data (Brocki and Wearden, 2006; Noon, 2018), and these interpretations are bounded by the researchers capacity to dissect what was articulated by the participants (Noon, 2018). The objective however is to obtain and present a description that gets as close to the participants view as possible (Larkin, Watts and Clifton, 2006). The tradition of IPA has its relevance for the latter aim of this study to understand the experience of teaching ‘the noesis’. Thematic analysis (Braun and Clark, 2006), however will be more appropriate for the former part of the study to make sense of the more pragmatic aspects of how teaching practice and implementation works, the ‘noema’ (Husserl, YEAR). In a study that combined both IPA and thematic analysis (Spiers and Riley, 2018), they refer to analytical pluralism (Clark et al, 2015) where studies use and combine mixed qualitative methods and point out that studies such as this are growing in popularity (Burke, 2005; Frost et al, 2011; Frost and Nolas, 2013; Savage, 2000; Robinson and Smith, 2010). Mixed studies such as these uncover a multidimensional understanding of the various elements at play, have the potential to be disseminated and appeal to a wider range of audiences (Frost et al, 2011), as well as uncover both the pragmatic and phenomenological aspects of practice (Spiers and Riley, 2018). This also means that the data from teaching observations, learner work and feedback can be used to compliment the reflective descriptions of the teacher experience to identify the broader context of support needed for teachers to be able to implement the new curriculum topic in the future.

The following table outlines the intended pedagogical iterations of the design based research study and the types of research activities, data collection and analysis.

TABLE

Conclusion…


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