Educational Possibilities: Teaching toward the Phenomenological Attitude

This chapter explores the possibilities of, and ways for, teaching toward a phenomenological attitude with students. Historically, much educational phenomenological literature highlights the way in which researchers, teachers and teacher educators can deepen their understandings of the unique lives and experiences of their students by developing a phenomenological attitude. And by extension improve their practices as educators and researchers. Yet if developing such an attitude is useful to understanding the lives of others and relational ways of being, then we suggest such abilities and the resulting insights may also be directly useful in the lives of students. This chapter offers an understanding of the phenomenological attitude via a descriptive example and then suggests five pedagogical aids for facilitating the development of a phenomenological attitude in students; i) prioritizing aesthetic components of experience, ii) applying the reduction: returning to lived experience, iii) asking phenomenological questions, iv) engaging with phenomenological literature, and v) non-linguistic methods. In addition, the chapter highlights the way in which teaching toward the phenomenological attitude might also provide a relationally focussed way of responding to the ecological and social crises of our time.