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‘Understanding things from within’. A Husserlian phenomenological

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‘Understanding things from within’. A Husserlian

phenomenological approach to doing educational
research and inquiring about learning

Edwin Creely

To cite this article: Edwin Creely (2016): ‘Understanding things from within’. A
Husserlian phenomenological approach to doing educational research and inquiring
about learning, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, DOI:
10.1080/1743727X.2016.1182482

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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1182482

‘Understanding things from within’. A Husserlian

phenomenological approach to doing educational research and
inquiring about learning
Edwin Creely
Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article describes a phenomenological approach to doing educational Received 6 September 2015
inquiry and understanding learning. Working within the qualitative Accepted 21 April 2016
tradition, the research is conceived as ‘narrow and deep’, intimate
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KEYWORDS
research that focuses definitively on internality and on first-hand Phenomenological;
experiences of learning. The theoretical background for doing phenomenology; learning;
phenomenological research is explained, especially in regard to the methodology; educational
ideas of Edmund Husserl. Then, the author’s own systematic process for inquiry; Husserl
doing phenomenological research in education and exploring learning is
offered with examples from his doctoral research project in which he
investigated doctoral students and their experience of negotiating their
learning. Samples from the author’s writing in regard to one research
participant are used to illustrate the research process explicated in the
article.

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself. (Dewey
1897)
Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and
understanding things from within. (Husserl in Moran and Mooney 2002, 133)

1. Conceiving a phenomenological educational inquiry

As an experienced educator, I have always been challenged by the fundamental nature of what con-
stitutes learning, both for the student and the instructor. In the dynamic and embodied presentation
of the learner, the constitution of the learning within the learner is not always apparent or easy to
locate. In researching the nature of learning, its disposition remains, arguably, relatively elusive;
though, of course, researchers have many theories about learning and there is exhaustive literature
about this subject in a range fields, including education and educational psychology (Antonacopou-
lou 2014; Balsam and Tomie 1985; Engeström 2015; Streeck and LeBaron 2011).
In my own educational research projects, I have asked the following inductive questions about
learning. How do learners understand their own learning? What is their experience of it from the
inside? What types of learning are happening for a learner in the temporality of experience? What
strategies of learning appear to work and not work for learners? These questions, among many
others, are instrumental to what I want to research because they bring the issue of the disposition
of learning back to the corporeal and to the being of the learner.

CONTACT Edwin Creely edwin.creely@monash.edu

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2 E. CREELY

This article addresses the problem of researching the constituency of learning by introducing a
methodological approach that is about understanding learning from the inside or from within experi-
ence. The phenomenological method of inquiry and the ensuing process I explain in this article are
designed to gather and analyse experience from within the whole life of a learner. However, I make
no claim that this method resolves the seeming inscrutability of learning. Nevertheless, it might be
useful as a complementary approach to understanding learning among a variety of other approaches
to inquiry, including other phenomenological approaches.
Now let me take a step back and consider what I believe learning is as a starting proposition. By
learning I refer to the totality of those capacities or capabilities to acquire, to embody, to collaborate,
to connect, to adapt, to experience, to know, to investigate, to perform, to apply skills, to generate or
construct knowledge, to self-regulate, to transform and then to demonstrate competencies (Danaher
2012; Goldman and Pellegrino 2015; Hounsell, Entwistle, and Marton 1984; Ito et al. 2013; Merriam,
Caffarella, and Baumgartner 2007; Nuthall 2007; Siemens 2005). Learning finds particular expression
in an individual who is actively embodying learning situated within an institutional, cultural, techno-
logical and social context (Stolz 2015). It is also concerned with the nature of learning objects, learn-
ing performances and learning transactions as experienced by learners in a particular social and
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cultural milieu (Bingham and Connor 2015). Educational research, I contend, pivots fundamentally
on learning in all its complexity and profundity.
In doing educational research, and in investigating learning, the methods of inquiry, the theoreti-
cal perspectives and the approaches deployed to examine its character are critical because they
shape what can actually be concluded about the learning and, importantly, what it means for indi-
vidual learners. In Figure 1, I schematize two approaches to educational research and inquiry, describ-
ing, in broad terms, the discrete focus of each. Additionally, I propose that there is a gamut of
theoretical frames that can inform any method or approach. The use of the term ‘frames’ suggests
the boundaries of epistemology (frames of knowing) and ontology (the frames of differentiating
and classifying) that come from a particular theoretical or philosophical positions adopted as part
of a method of inquiry in educational research.
One method of inquiry is to investigate groups or cohorts of learners through large-scale projects
that employ statistical analysis or experimentation, or what might be termed quantitative educational
research (Tuckman and Harper 2012; Wellington 2015). Depending on the scale of the research, gen-
eralizations can be made about learning across a range of learners and in terms of various dimensions
or facets of learning. A goal of such an approach is to look for themes or trends in populations (Babbie

Figure 1. Methods of inquiry in educational research.

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 3

2010). Cognizance of such trends may be important for the implementation of educational policies,
the deployment of funding or the recognition of need. In sum, this is research that is wide and
categorical.
Another method is to examine in depth the social and cultural circumstances of a particular group
or cohort and to see the learning of individuals within that set of conditions and discursive practices
(Lichtman 2013; Merriam and Merriam 2009). This qualitative research approach to education is con-
cerned with the experiences and the socio-cultural functioning of a learner within a defined setting
(Ary et al. 2014; Hartas 2010). This approach to educational inquiry could be conceived as narrow and
deep.
A phenomenological approach to inquiry is fundamentally grounded in the consciousness of the
individual (van Manen 1990; Moustakas 1994; Rossiter 1999). It could thus be regarded as a particular
mode of doing qualitative research, a position supported by established phenomenological research-
ers such as Giorgi (1985, 1994, 1997). In phenomenological analysis the researcher aims to see learn-
ing strictly from the point-of-view of the experiencer (first-hand) as an immediate state in
consciousness and as an intentional expression of self or ego in the world (Ary et al. 2014; Creswell
2013; Crotty 1996; Denzin and Lincoln 2011). There is a focus on internal (unseen) human experiential
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and thought states, as well as external (seen) corporeal, performative and cognitive outcomes of
those states. Such an approach is thus framed in internality, whilst not ignoring the substantial
need for exploration of externality or that which is seen corporally in the world. However, I distinguish
this phenomenological approach from other in-depth qualitative approaches such as narrative analy-
sis, which focuses on life stories and the construction of narratives of meaning rather than analysis of
elemental objects or structures of consciousness typical of this phenomenological approach (Franzosi
2010).
Put crudely, it is a looking or an examination from the inside out, and is generally typified by
description and interpretation of learning which is both deep and narrow and centred in the con-
sciousness of a person. This notion of ‘deep and narrow’ is exemplified in the case study of Sonya,
a doctoral student, that I present in the later sections of this article.
Through using a phenomenological approach to educational research, I envisage that the under-
lying meanings and existential experiences of participants (the ‘why’), as well as the strategic think-
ing, practicalities, hands-on approaches and embodiments (the ‘how’) are accounted for in
descriptions, analyses and interpretations. To sum up, in this take on phenomenological educational
research, experiences of learning are personal and intimate, ‘narrow and deep’, and involve non-
observable states of internality as well as external actions that reflect the volition of the individual.

2. A description of phenomenology as an approach to inquiry

It is important to clarify the nomenclature of this research approach, as I have described it. In general
terms, phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy which is orientated to the body, to human
experience, to consciousness, to intentionality and to the existential nature of living in the world
(McBride 1979; Welton 1983). Phenomenology refers to the discipline within philosophy, or what
could be called Continental Philosophy, since the key phenomenologists of the twentieth century
taught in Germany and France. Phenomenology is a highly contested area within philosophy, with
a history of scholarly work, original writing and debate that began in the early twentieth century
and continues in specialized phenomenology journals (Gallagher 2012).
However, the term ‘phenomenological’ is taken to mean the deployment of concepts drawn from
phenomenology, or from particular phenomenologists, in a range of disciplines outside philosophy,
including education (Dahlberg 2006; Dall’Alba 2009; Lindseth and Norberg 2004; Spiegelberg 1982).
The theoretical frameworks and underpinnings of the phenomenological approach to inquiry offered
in this article are closely aligned with the philosophical roots of phenomenology as a branch of phil-
osophy, as I demonstrate in the explanations that follow.
 4 E. CREELY

There are a number of phenomenological philosophers whose perspectives have been, and I
believe potentially could be, employed in research into learning and as a means of describing and
interpreting human experiences of learning. Arguably, the most important of the phenomenological
philosophers is Edmund Husserl, a German philosopher (often called the father of phenomenology),
who, among many other concepts, developed the notion of ‘Lifeworld’ in the early twentieth century,
a concept that was fully conceptualized by sociologist Alfred Schütz (1967) in the 1930s. By Lifeworld
he meant the entire sphere of experience of the world, including the sphere of experience with other
sentient beings in a social realm (Ashworth 2003; Husserl 1969, 1970, 2001; Sokolowski 1988; Todres
1995).
A person apprehends this sphere, which includes other beings, objects, technologies and places,
through the senses, and the sphere becomes structured in consciousness, as objects in conscious-
ness, and then imbued with meaning or sense. To extrapolate from Husserl’s work, learning
becomes a series of adaptations evidenced within the structures of consciousness or in the mind-
scape of a person and externalized as a set of intentional responses and performance acts.
Drawing on these fundamental concepts from Husserl and other phenomenologists, the distinc-
tive phenomenological approach to educational research that I have adopted in my research can be
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articulated in at least three ways. First, there is a phenomenological approach in seeking to under-
stand and analyse the lived experiences and discursive strategies of learners as they engage
with learning contextually within their Lifeworlds. The processes and procedures of doing this
species of qualitative educational research are orientated to the phenomenological when there is
a deliberative holistic attitude to understanding and working with participants and to apprehending
their expressions that emerge from internality and thus disclose the nature of their learning
experiences.
Second, such a phenomenological approach is also operative in terms of the methods of textual
analysis of transcripts and other texts produced as part of the generation of textual research
materials. The analysis of research materials from a phenomenological perspective should be consist-
ent with its gathering and the circumstances of it collection. For instance, an interview with a partici-
pant is phenomenological in focusing on all that encompasses a person’s Lifeworld and in being
orientated to the analysis of consciousness, to intentionality and to the essences of experience in
consciousness.
The textual coding of interview transcripts, for instance, is especially centred on this internality in
all its manifestations in experience and consciousness. However, the suitability of transcripts for phe-
nomenological analysis presumes that there is focus in the interview itself on consciousness, inten-
tionality and experience. Therefore, questions given and themes developed in the interview are
necessarily framed phenomenologically.
Finally, there is a phenomenological approach in elucidating the research problem. In postulating
that the research is about experiences of learning and in viewing consciousness and intentionality as
the ground for such experiences, the problem is shifted to human existential questions in education,
such as volition about what to learn or what to do with learning, and the states of internality which
impinge on these existential questions. So, it is not only a question of how learning is enacted or what
are the machinations of the learning or even what supports or hinders learning, but what the learning
means for a person as an internal existential experience concomitant with a person’s whole life.
However, it is one thing to claim that the focus is on existential experience, and it is quite another
to develop the practicalities of getting inside a person’s Lifeworld. Such an incisive investigation can, I
argue, only be undertaken by an uncompromising, person-centred approach in which the participant
not only has trust in the researcher but becomes a fellow phenomenological explorer. This state of
exploration was pivotal to my own research with doctoral students and was fundamental in my
praxis of working with participants. The case examples used in the second half of this article
reflect this praxis.
A phenomenological approach to educational research, as I conceive it, has an important comple-
mentarity to other approaches to educational research and research about learning. What is offered,
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 5

alongside exploration of a large cohort of learners, for instance, is a ‘deep’ exploration into individual
experience and an analysis of the key features of consciousness that are juxtaposed with meaningful
engagement with the world. These could include the following:

. The materiality of an educational event as a phenomenon in the world from the point of view of an
individual
. The embodiments of learning in particular locations (including what is felt, thought and sensed)
. The transcendence of learning as an object in consciousness
. The residual traces of learning in memory and what is remembered and forgotten
. The states of co-corporeality and connection with other learners
. Performative acts as an expression of learning
. The essentialities to and contingencies of learning

An examination of these states of internality, which are then embodied in externality, provides a
perspective on the idiosyncratic sense of how learning operates in and is experienced by individual
learners.
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3. Theoretical foundations to this phenomenological approach

So, what is the philosophical basis for this approach to qualitative educational research and inquiry?
Quite explicitly, it is derived from the philosophical field of phenomenology, and especially the ideas
of Husserl, as briefly discussed above. The diverse European phenomenology movement of the last
century developed out of or had its genesis in his ideas and methods (Lauer 1965; Pettit 1969; Smith
2009). The purpose of Husserl’s work was to bring philosophy back to human experience and con-
sciousness, back to the vicissitudes of the person and back to the body as an inextricable presence
in the world (Behnke 1996; Lotz 2007; Zahavi 2003). In doing so he has significantly affected the fields
of existentialism and contemporary humanism, and moved philosophy away from the rationalism
and the idealism that had characterized the concerns of philosophy in the previous two centuries,
though, undoubtedly, they influenced his work (Melle 2002). Most significantly in terms of the
content of this article, his ideas about a descriptive or investigative philosophy have led to the appli-
cation of phenomenology to real-world contexts as diverse as nursing and architecture (Dowling
2007; Tweed 2011).
Put another way, Husserl’s approach to knowing, his epistemology, involves identifying and
interpreting a phenomenon as experienced by a person in consciousness and investigating its manifes-
tations and structures in consciousness as an event, object or process (Landgrebe 1973; Vandevelde
and Luft 2010). It is important to note the crucial connection and unity between corporeality (the
body) and consciousness (the mind) in phenomenology, as Husserl understood it, since experience
and action in the world are integrally connected and thus there is no duality or binary categories in
phenomenology, since consciousness and action from the body are different aspects of the one
unified experience.
Husserl’s phenomenology is based on the ways of knowing of a person who experiences, and a
phenomenon is the nexus between this embodied consciousness and the objects in the world
that are at the periphery of a person’s body and at the horizon of the senses (Welton 2000). Phenom-
enological philosophers who followed Husserl, including Merleau-Ponty (1962), Sarte (2003), Heideg-
ger (1996) and Ricœur (1991), developed this holistic aspect of phenomenology, though they differed
in rejecting the idea that the self is transcendent or that there is a static set of structures in conscious-
ness. For them self (or the ego) is a construction of inter-subjectivity and of a meaning relationship
with objects in the world (Durfee and Rodier 1989). Certainly, my theorizing, while driven strongly by
Husserl, is cognizant of such criticisms and those of more recent scholars such as Sass (2014), who
critiques the notion of the autonomous self so prominent in transcendental phenomenology.
 6 E. CREELY

The core of Husserl’s phenomenology, and indeed the whole gamut of phenomenological
approaches since he wrote in the early Twentieth Century, is intentionality (Kriegel 2011). Husserl bor-
rowed this term from German philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano, who saw a distinction
between mental phenomena and physical phenomenon. Mental phenomena are non-corporeal rep-
resentations of objects in the real world, suffused with a sense brought to them by a person (Brentano
and Müller 1995).
This analytic term should not be taken to mean an act of the will, which suggests a highly self-
aware state of volition. Intentionality is, rather, the essential structure in consciousness and refers
to both the act of interacting with objects in the world and the content or sense that is brought to
objects in the act itself (Dreyfus and Wrathall 2006; Hopkins 2011). Intentionality implies both a
doing and a sense in doing, with both action and meaning experienced together, tacitly, in
consciousness.
Another way of conceiving intentionality is to see it metaphorically as residing in a conduit
between the experience of a person on the one hand and objects in the material world on the
other. Across the conduit between inner and outer, intentionality is a means of making sense of
the world and structuring this sense as distinctive patterns in consciousness which shape a
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person’s Lifeworld. Making sense of and adapting to the world are core aspects of learning and is
thus a critical part of the interpretive framework of my research.
In sum, phenomenology is about the world as experienced in a particular phenomenon and also
about the intentionality that is at the core of that experiencing and then acting. Both the experience
of and the intentionality in engagement with the world are structured in consciousness according to
meanings assigned to this engagement. I contend that a phenomenological researcher is best placed
to understand learning when there is an examination of both the whole and the parts of a learning
phenomenon as experienced. This included describing the constituency of parts of its existence (its
ontology), locating its essence as experienced in intentionality and applying an interpretive or her-
meneutic framework to a learning phenomenon as it arises in a person’s consciousness.
Phenomenological analysis is especially concerned with finding the essentiality of a phenomenon
(its eidetic qualities), through a process of phenomenological reduction, a process that is at the core of
the phenomenological method as espoused by Husserl, and one that could be adopted as one
method of textual analysis in educational research (Giorgi 1997).
In The Shorter Logical Investigations, Husserl (2001) describes the reduction this way: ‘Phenomen-
ological reduction yields the really self-enclosed, temporally growing unity of the stream of experi-
ence’ (208). In other words, phenomenological reduction concerns identifying the core unifying
structures of the experience of an event, object or process and then understanding and interpreting
such structures. Husserl, however, was of the view that we can only know a phenomenon in con-
sciousness, such that the self that knows is transcendent from the materiality of the world. This is
why his approach to phenomenology is often termed transcendental phenomenology (Welton
1983). Through sensory input a person experiences objects in the world; however, such experience
is then ordered in consciousness according to structures that are both instinctual (innately present)
and evolving through the formation of sense or meaning.
Schmitt (1959) synthesizes Husserl’s method this way:
The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is called ‘transcendental’ because it uncovers the ego for which
everything has meaning and existence. It is called ‘phenomenological’ because it transforms the world into mere
phenomenon. It is called ‘reduction’ because it leads us back (Lat. reducer) to the source of the meaning of the
experienced world, in so far as it is experienced, by uncovering intentionality. (240)

So, the ‘reduction’ is about ascertaining what the world and objects in the world become
(phenomena) because of the transformative sense that is brought to the world through the ego.
Put simply, in educational terms, the ‘reduction’ locates that which is most central to a person’s mean-
ingful learning experiences in the world or the objects of learning in the person’s Lifeworld.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 7

For Husserl a phenomenon is given through fundamental intuitive structures in consciousness and
is identified via ‘pure seeing’ (Pettit 1969, 16–26). As Husserl states:
If higher, theoretical cognition is to begin at all, objects belonging to the sphere in question must be intuited.
Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. Experiencing
is consciousness that intuits something and values it to be actual. (Moran and Mooney 2002, 125)

As objects are ‘given’ (or come into being) in consciousness through intentional encounter, through
experiencing them directly, they can then take form and be intuited in ‘pure consciousness’ (129). So,
objects in the world are experienced imminently and then they take structural form in consciousness,
to which is added what Husserl calls ‘higher, theoretical cognition’.
In Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl (1969) proposes the dual ideas of
noema and noesis in order to give a more concrete conceptual formation to this intentional experi-
ential encounter that is the central structure in the phenomenological reduction. The noema rep-
resents the transcendent ‘I’ or ego behind an intentional act, and the noesis is the object of that
act. Noetic content is the import generated in the exchange between noema and noesis; it is the
meaning that is produced out of this encounter. I have schematized the structure of this phenomen-
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ological formation in Figure 2. The diagram suggests the dynamism of this encounter, one in which
there is a continuous generation of meaning states.
In the context of learning in educational settings, I suggest that the noema is the self (or ego) of a
learner intentionally engaging within a learning context as part of the person’s Lifeworld, and the
noesis is the materiality and embodiments of that which is encountered and used as part of the
person’s educational and learning engagements. The noetic content of the encounter is, I believe,
the substance of phenomenological educational research because it contains within it the experi-
ences, strategies, negotiations and meanings that are embodied by students in the context of
their education and their emerging ego formation as learners.
To summarize, the goal of Husserlian phenomenological investigation, and phenomenological
reduction as a discrete feature of this investigation, is to find the deepest organizing principles, mean-
ings or structures that are at the core of a phenomenon as experienced in the present. Husserl was
adamant about the importance of the closeness of an encounter with a phenomenon. For Husserl, in
Ideas, there is a full grasping of the world in consciousness, in a mind that is fine-tuned to the sensory
data of the world (Vannatta 2007). It is this close and intimate description of the world of learners as
they experience it in its givenness, and the organizing principles of that experience (or essences or
eidetic qualities), that are the core focus of my Husserlian approach to educational research (Marion
2002).
Arguably, the essential feature of Husserl’s work that is pivotal to phenomenological educational
research is not the notion of a transcendent ego at all but transcendence of meaning. Meaning is

Figure 2. Noetic content.

 8 E. CREELY

transcendent in the sense that it is grounded in significances that are ascribed to objects in the world
that go beyond their ordinariness and move them to a disposition of otherness (Moran 2008). It is this
transcendent understanding of meaning as significance that is core to the research concept pre-
sented in this article. Such a notion of meaning is built around structures of consciousness that
become meaning structures centred on intentionality as a core feature of meaning. As Welton
(1983) points out in regard to Husserl’s concept of transcendence, mental representations that are
referred to in psychology and the formal structures of language used in linguistics should be differ-
entiated from the notion of meaning that is phenomenological. Meaning, for Husserl, is a transcen-
dent quality of consciousness that comes out of immanent experience, and, as such, can be described
almost as an experiential object (or, in this context, a learning object) that can be described (Giorgi
1994, 2002).
It is this Husserlian phenomenological sense of meaning as a transcendent attribute of conscious-
ness, one that is describable, that I consider to be cogent for developing a phenomenological
approach to educational research, and which resonated with me as an approach that had this
deep and narrow investigative quality. However, it is employed with cognizance of the divergence
of approaches that come under the banner of ‘phenomenology’ and qualitative research, including
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interpretive phenomenological analysis (Pringle et al. 2011).

4. A process for doing phenomenological educational research

4.1. The genesis of this phenomenological approach
The development of this phenomenological approach began with my doctoral project, which was
about understanding the learning experiences of doctoral students. I was looking for an appropriate
method for investigating how doctoral students negotiated their learning and how this negotiation
was reflected in their deep experiences, that is, experiences not often revealed and not easily
accessed by researchers. I was particularly intrigued with the role that digital technologies played
in this negotiation, given their pervasive functionality and affordances in contemporary educational
delivery and inter-personal communication, especially in social media.
What I found was that such an intimate human project required a substantial level of penetration
into experience and a closeness with the internality of participants that did not seem to be possible
with a range of other qualitative methodologies in the literature. Having read about phenomenolo-
gical approaches in the research literature (such as Finlay 2012; Todres 2000), and having then rea-
lized the potential of this approach for understanding learning, I embarked on a reading programme
that included number of important phenomenologists, especially Husserl and Ricœur. The process
elucidated in this article is the result of this evaluative and reflexive engagement with this philoso-
phical movement and with the core extant literature of phenomenology.

4.2. Introducing the process

The distinctive phenomenological approach to educational research I propose in this article consists
of a four-stage process, as illustrated in Figure 3. An important preliminary to the analysis process is
adopting a phenomenologically textured holistic manner of working with participants and designing
information-gathering tools that suit this method of inquiry.
Then, the first stage of textual analysis is ontological description in which the constituent parts or
content of experience are identified, labelled and described. Secondly, the identification of the
‘essences’ of experience is undertaken through a phenomenological reduction. Thirdly, the meanings
associated with experience and intentional action in the world are interpreted through a selection of
phenomenological philosophers who provide lenses or hermeneutical perspectives in order to reveal
or amplify meanings. Finally, the findings of ontological description, reduction and hermeneutical
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 9
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Figure 3. A process for doing phenomenological research.

analysis are coalesced into a comprehensive synthesis of findings in which the researcher is also
mindful of the holistic and person-centred character of the research.

4.2.1. Stage 1: Ontological description

Most often what is left for a phenomenological researcher after the process of gathering fragments of
the experiences of research participants are textual materials (transcripts and the like), much like eth-
nographic research. In fact, in my research I adapted information-gathering tools from ethnography
to suit the phenomenological turn of the research (Katz and Csordas 2003). These tools include semi-
structured interviews, participant journals or diaries, forums, visual media and researcher field notes.
Phenomenological textual analysis begins with the identification and labelling of specific experien-
tial content as derived from the recollections and textual recordings of research participants about
their experiences of learning. From my point-of-view, it is important to identify content specifically
and then to categorize it because it provides the sense and thus the meaning that is directed from
 10 E. CREELY

Figure 4. Intentionality and experience.

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internality to objects related to learning in the external world through intentionality. In Figure 4, this
directing from internality and from the experience of a person to objects in a person’s Lifeworld is
schematized. Objects in the Lifeworld of a person are given significance through the sense that is
directed to them by a person. In this way the objects become constructed or have a meaning-
shape in a person’s consciousness and in the externalizing through action and performance.
Equally, as suggested by the two-way arrow, objects shape a person and a person’s consciousness
of objects such that there is a reciprocal or dual phenomenological relationship between object and
person. Without a consideration and analysis of this specific experiential content and the inter-play
between person and object, it is difficult to explore the intentionality of a participant with any pre-
cision or detail, making phenomenological analysis potentially fuzzy.
Ontological description, as part of the ground for phenomenological interpretation of a person’s
experiences, focuses on the specificities or particulars of experience. The word ‘experience’ is taken in
its tacit or unified sense of being holistic embodied knowing that is subjective and internal. This hol-
istic totality designated as ‘experience’ is, however, composed of parts or categories of knowing and
awareness. In this elaboration there are experiences of different orders. These include sensorial per-
ception (especially touch, sight and hearing), felt states and emotion, somatic or corporeal states,
cognition, volition, expectations and thought (Bayne 2013; Merleau-Ponty 1962; Valle and Halling
1989). The term ‘internality’ is employed in this article to encompass this diversity of such internal
states of experiencing, embodying and being.
Further, the vicissitudes of experience include both an immediate temporal state with its varying
levels of awareness (Leder 1990; Throop 2003) and a long-term accumulation of experiences in
memory (Dewey 1971; Forgas 1991; Turner and Bruner 1986). Ontological description is reflective
of both the temporal and the longer term experiential and memory content. As descriptive categories
I have used the following labels for different orders of experience:

(1) To act: bodily actions connected to intentionality and volition. It involves a movement from
internality to an externality that can be observed.
(2) To be: awareness of self and body as a visceral state of temporal being in space, and its links to
identity and who a user believes he or she is as a person.
(3) To sense: states of perception and sensory input.
(4) To feel: somatic or corporal states, felt states and emotional categories (or the affective).
(5) To think: contemplation, strategic problem solving, thoughts and cognitive processes in
consciousness.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 11

(6) To connect: inter-subjectivity and inter-corporeality or being with others through digital or disem-
bodied (as well as corporeal) connections.
(7) To learn: awareness of the changes, adjustments, acquisitions and skills that are considered by a
participant as educative.
(8) To create: the making of discrete texts, media content or objects that are seen to have existence
apart from a participant.
(9) To imagine: imagery and metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and the function of language con-
structs in consciousness.

These nine categories that I have devised can be used to mark-up texts as a set of ontological
coding types. What is important is the link between these categories of experience and the
objects in a participant’s Lifeworld, especially objects deemed as associated with learning or reflect-
ing the conditions of learning. Of course these categories are arbitrary ways of dividing experience
and another researcher could well use a range of other taxonomies for ontological description.

4.2.2. Stage 2: Phenomenological ‘reduction’

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A second component of textual analysis as part of my phenomenological approach to educational

research is a Husserlian reduction derived from the traces of consciousness in the texts generated
from each participant and referenced to a research participant’s Lifeworld as a whole. This means
that the essences or foundational meaning structures of participants’ experiences and intentionalities
are identified and analysed (Rahilly 1993; Schacht 1972). The ‘reduction’ is a process of finding and
harvesting essences, which are the deep, absolutely necessary and substantive structures that
reside in consciousness and in thoughts about an object, process or event. They are the frameworks
on which experience and consciousness are based. This process of reduction is really a process of
generative abstraction from experience (from internality) and from the materiality of an object
that is the focus of intentional experience.
So, for instance, students’ experiences of negotiating their studies and learning might include the
essence or eidetic structure of planning, which has become manifest due to its substantive place in
transcripts from a research interview. The use of digital technologies could be connected to this
essence by being represented in transcripts as creative and flexible tools for brainstorming,
forward thinking and allocation of time/dates that facilitate planning. Or digital technologies may,
in fact, be viewed as inhibitors of students’ desire to be organized, and students may experience frus-
tration with and resistance to the technology.
The important question in terms of locating essences is this: What is the ground of participants’
experiences of learning? It is this elemental level as the necessary and prior foundation of experience
and intentionality which is the focus of reduction.
These essences are located through a process called ‘bracketing’. This process of deliberative
differentiation is schematized in Figure 5. Bracketing is a procedure of taking out what is not essential;
it is a process of selection that amounts to a ‘bracketing in’ and a ‘bracketing out’ (Fischer 2009; Groe-
newald 2004).
To facilitate the procedure of bracketing, the following techniques were employed as part of my
research:

. Bracketing out what is immediate in experience and contingent to the context

. Bracketing in what participants identify as the core or the ground of their experiences
. Bracketing out aspects of identity that are not the essential ground of a participant’s experience
. Bracketing in what are repeated patterns in consciousness that appear to be prior to or support
experience

Reduction does not mean excluding experiences. All experiences of a participant are significant
and are analysed as part of an inclusive and holistic treatment of the totality of a person. The
 12 E. CREELY
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Figure 5. Bracketing and reduction.

reduction operates only to determine the ground of such experiences or the core structures in con-
sciousness that support or forge experience.
It is important to locate and analyse essences because these essences, in a phenomenological
textual analysis, are critical for an understanding of the prehension (or a taking hold) of the Lifeworld
by a participant and thus vital for engaging with meaning and, by extension, learning. Essences may
point to the significances or foci that learners bring to their learning. Essences can represent the
deepest structures in consciousness on which experiences of learning are assembled (Hycner
1985; Sadala and Adorno 2002).

4.2.3. Stage 3: Hermeneutical analysis

Hermeneutics is a vast field of philosophical and textual analysis that concerns a study of the mean-
ings in, understandings of and interpretations about texts in juxtaposition to the worlds of human
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 13

participants, culture and the social occasions in which such texts are formed (Gadamer 1976; Ricœur
1978, 1991; Zimmermann 2015). It is essentially linked to epistemology, or how humans know in
terms of our relating to the world. This knowing is indelibly constituted in the social and physical
matrices that comprise the Lifeworld of a learner, and include the objects in that Lifeworld such as
digital devices and other technologies.
Hermeneutical analysis can be employed in many fields, including educational research, as a
theoretical framework for understanding meaning and how we come to know and learn (Laverty
2003). In terms of the process of phenomenological analysis described in this article, phenomenolo-
gical hermeneutical analysis is emergent from both ontological description of experience and
phenomenological reduction from experience. As such, it is an interpretation of embodied experi-
ences and intentional action in the world as caught and revealed in the language of texts.
Hermeneutical analysis, as the third stage in my phenomenological approach to inquiry into learn-
ing, is based on phenomenological or hermeneutical philosophers whose ideas act as discrete inter-
pretive lenses on experience. Which philosophers are deemed suitable or appropriate as
hermeneutical or interpretive lenses for a particular investigation is predicated on the context of
research and the nature of the learners being investigated.
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In the case of my research, one such philosopher was Paul Ricœur and his hermeneutical phenom-
enology (Klemm 1983; Ricœur 1966, 1967, 1978, 1984, 1986, 1991). Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics is a
body of thought about the nature of human existential experience in the world and how that might
be interpreted. Ricœur suggests, for instance, that people create a narrative of their lives in the
freedom of being human with choices, and he also proposes that this narrative is the basis for
human understanding of the world and of conceiving each person’s place in it. However, this
freedom of choice is, according to Ricœur, limited by the fact of being a biological entity. Ricœur con-
ceives this notion in terms of his twin categories of bios and logos. He argues that in the bios humans
are inextricably tied to the biosphere of the world and its exigencies, and in his notion of logos he
suggests that humans seek transcendence through their conscious constructions in which they
dream of escaping these limitations or going beyond their circumstances. He also suggests that
the memory of experiences and also the forgetting of some experiences that may be painful or diffi-
cult are core features of how humans shape their place in the world and form their narratives.
In investigating the experience of doctoral students, it seems to me that their stories about them-
selves as emerging academics are especially significant to this sense of self-transcendence. So, I
found Ricœur’s hermeneutical perspective about narratives especially relevant and compelling.

4.2.4. Stage 4: Synthesis

The process of synthesis as part of the phenomenological approach to educational inquiry offered in
this article is about an assembly of the findings from the narratives of participants, ontological
description, phenomenological reduction and hermeneutical analysis. The key to the synthesis is
to see the totality of the participant as far as can be revealed by the personal interactions and
textual materials produced as part of the research relationship. The synthesis is both a description
of key structural elements in consciousness, including key ‘essences’ identified, and also a
summing up of the hermeneutical perspectives about the participant’s experiences.

5. Applying the process to information generated through a research project

5.1. Introducing the participant and the research
In this part of the article the goal is to demonstrate the application of the phenomenological research
process described above to actual case information. The case study used for demonstration purposes
is that of Sonya, a doctoral student in education at an Australian university who was part of my doc-
toral research. She came to Australia from Chile to fulfil a scholarship awarded to her by her home
country, and also to pursue her goal of forging an academic career in English language education.
 14 E. CREELY

The research was conducted over a one-month period and consisted of a two interviews and online
daily reflexive journal using a structured survey-style form that focused her attention on aspects of
her internality and intentionality. The purpose of the phenomenological research inquiry was to
understand and analyse how Sonya negotiated her candidature, including her use of digital technol-
ogies, and also explore the learning in and experiences of being an international student in Australia
as part of a holistic approach to conceiving her Lifeworld.

5.2. Samples from my research project

Below are samples from the analysis of transcripts that are part of my doctoral work, and reflect the
process of phenomenological inquiry as described in this article. The samples are designed to reflect
many of the core ideas that have been articulated throughout the article. With each sample I have
added brief explanatory notes to further clarify the phenomenological process as a practical qualitat-
ive research methodology.
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5.2.1. Sample 1: Ontological description

Of the nine ontological categories used to describe experience in this research, the first category (To act) was the
most frequent and effusive in her writing. Sonya wrote in her opening journal entry: ‘I got to uni and turned on the
PC, I checked my emails [repeated many times] … I opened my facebook … I started focusing on my work … ’. In
subsequent entries she consistently employed language of action, engaging with the reader using an overtly
active voice. Her entries included the following: ‘I came to university’, ‘I kept on working [on her thesis]’, ‘I
skyped with my parents’, ‘I drove my older son to school’, ‘I use Google Calendar’, ‘I was talking to a friend’, ‘I
read the Chilean newspapers online’ and ‘I cooked for today’. This active, task-centred construction of self and
an affirmative sense of agency was often linked to specific software: ‘I used word today. I went through my
writing checking and updating stuff’. Indeed, Sonya nominated ‘Word, Google, the Library website, Endnote
[and] Google Calendar’ as the most important software in terms of her productivity. She wrote: ‘I couldn’t
work without them.’

The sample descriptive analysis above focuses on intentional actions in the life of Sonya, especially
her use of digital technologies and software. My purpose was to describe how she acted without
much in the way of interpretation. The sample demonstrates the concentration on description in
the first stage of analysis. In terms of learning, the sample suggests learning as a set of purposeful
performative actions in the world which are constructed in the dynamic from inner consciousness
to outer embodiment.

Figure 6. Essences of experience.

 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 15

5.2.2. Sample 2: Phenomenological reduction

In examining the content of Sonya’s experiences, and in bracketing the meta-experiential within her experiences,
two sets of quite closely related essences appear to be arrayed in apposition at this delineated and suspended
bracket of time. These essences are schematized in Figure 6. The first set involves the essences of action and inac-
tion. Sonya constructs a core of intentional action in her consciousness; a construction of doing that revolves
around her university workspace and includes discrete use of computer technologies and software that she con-
siders apt for the practicalities of completing thesis work.

Action is thus allied with particular technologies and software, which are imbued with the sense of purposeful
productivity and which, in turn, have within them affordances that suit the action of Sonya. This core of action
is especially evident in the online journal, where Sonya’s adopts an active voice with lexical patterns that
direct the reader to a series of admirable tasks. The ordered processes of action are framed as having a moral
imperative of Sonya, who wants to produce worthwhile or good work: work that creditably reflects of her com-
mitment to her candidature and to her supervisors.

In this sample, which includes the diagram above, the essences of Sonya’s ‘deep’ experiences of
negotiating learning and her academic work are identified and described. Following Husserl’s
notion of pure seeing, I saw in the transcripts two sets of essences in apposition: action versus inac-
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tion and nurture versus responsibility. At the core of these essences of experience was the learning
object of completing doctoral candidature, around which these essences appear to be operative in
experience.

5.2.3. Sample 3: Hermeneutical analysis

For Sonya the temporal location of Australia and the ensuing issues of language, family, geographical distance,
work, friends and culture, the bios, are pivotal in negotiating her life as a research student. She lives in that liminal
territory between two geographical and cultural locations or temporal frames; and that liminality has existential
consequences for Sonya as a person attempting to accommodate the complexities of her Lifeworld. In this living
with complexity and in finding agency in that complexity, Sonya is also vulnerable and susceptible because of the
difficulties of trying to find an authentic self, or perhaps, a set of selves. Sonya captures this liminality, this sense of
the in-between and the trans-cultural, in the fluid discourse of her language, which is situated in the various
actions that constitute her evolving notions of herself.
Her actions thus reside in three competing spheres of activity: in the domestic and familial, where Spanish is
infused with English and Chilean culture and in the academic sphere, where English and Australian culture
coalesce with the international texture of her experience as a new form of being that is evolving and
transmutative.
The cultural frame of Australia and its English language forms have shaped her self-identification and her disposi-
tion in regard to what she will be when she returns to her country of origin. Indeed, the input of this Australian
cultural-temporal frame, including her candidature at an Australian university, may have orientated Sonya
towards the logos, towards the possibilities in thought about what she could be or might become. Sonya is cer-
tainly bounded by her cultural background as a Chilean who is indentured to her government for the cost of her
research and study in Australia and also by her familial commitments and contingencies that are ever-present in
her consciousness and bind her to Australia.
At the same time there is an imagining of a future outside the frame of her temporal bios. This possible future
emerged in her interviews where she used more universally, rather than country-specific, language to describe
what she wanted for herself as a language educator and academic. There is a sense that she wishes to transcend
the confines of her cultural boundaries but, at the same time, there is desire to remain distinctly Chilean and to
constantly affirm her Chilean connections. Transcendence of culture and affinity with culture appear to be com-
peting intentions within Sonya’s consciousness that are creating a new narrative of self.

In this sample the descriptions derived from phenomenological reduction and ontological descrip-
tion are employed to create a hermeneutical analysis based on selected ideas from Ricœur. These
ideas become interpretive lenses on the experiences of Sonya as an international student coming
to Australia. Learning is contextualized and understood as part of the larger Lifeworld of Sonya, as
she adapts linguistically, culturally, geographically and existentially to the Australian cultural milieu.

5.2.4. Sample 4: Synthesis

For Sonya there is an explicit sense of ‘interculturality’ in regard to her felt experiences and conceptualizations as
an international student. ‘Interculturality’ is a term coined to express the transitional sense of being in-between or
 16 E. CREELY

in a liminal space between what was known and constructed in consciousness as a cultural/linguistic location and
what impinges on experience now in a different cultural, linguistic and temporal frame. Clear strategic nego-
tiations and adjustments in her life between these two cultural spheres are evident, mediated through exchanges
in social media that form for her an essential substrate in experience and a convenient strategy for maintaining
connection.
The will to traverse both worlds, the home country and the study country, appears to drive this digital, virtual
exchange, creating another meaning space that straddles the two as a notion in consciousness which is built
on the essences of nurture and responsibility. For Sonya this seems to be motivated by her wish to sustain
her role formation in Chile as pedagogue, while, at the same time avouching the intricate inter-personal and pro-
fessional connections established in Australia, including the ambivalence of wanting to be in Australia juxtaposed
to the inevitability of having to go back to Chile.

The final sample reflects an assembly and integration of the descriptive and the interpretive in the
phenomenological analysis process. This material reflects the core factors that shape her experience
and the learning structures in consciousness.

6. Conclusion
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In this article I introduced a distinctive phenomenological approach to educational inquiry, one with a
focus on doing a type of narrow and deep qualitative research about learning. Learning is a socio-
cultural phenomenon encompassing discursive social practices, learning communities and situated
understandings, but it is also located within and expressed through the experiences of individual lear-
ners (Salomon and Perkins 1998; Thoutenhoofd and Pirrie 2015). I contend that this phenomenolo-
gical approach is well placed to understand learning through detailed analysis of such experiences, as
I have indeed found in my own research with doctoral students. This approach can complement
other approaches to educational inquiry that are used to understand the complex nature of learning
that operates in a variety of social and institutional contexts.
I also explained the theoretical basis for such an approach, grounded especially in the work of
Edmund Husserl, and his key ideas of intentionality, Lifeworld and essential structures or objects in
consciousness. Using this theoretical perspective, I developed a particular sequential four-stage
process for enacting this approach, together with samples from my research about doctoral students
that exemplify the process.
Conceptually, the process moves from a more-or-less descriptive phenomenological method to
increasing levels of interpretation based on an informed reading of transcripts and other research
materials. In moving through the process of analysis (from description to interpretation), the core
essences of and threads in experience can be revealed and then understood so that there is an
appreciation of the often subtle nature of learning. Indeed, such a phenomenological approach to
educational inquiry can facilitate a profundity of understanding of the holistic experiences of learning
because of its particular focus on the core meaning structures within the consciousness of learner as a
person.
The case of Sonya was presented as an illustration of how the process operates as a schematic
methodological technique. In the case of this participant, describing her day-to-day experiences
and the functioning of her Lifeworld was an important first step for then understanding the disposi-
tion of her learning as a highly personal and deep core in her experience of completing her doctorate.
From the phenomenological analysis of the information Sonya offered as a research participant, a
significant range of findings about her experiences, her negotiations and her strategies of learning
were ascertained. For instance, negotiating her survival as an international doctoral student and dis-
covering strategies for dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of candidature, in the face of cul-
tural and linguistic barriers, were fundamental in the structures of her experience. The uncertainty she
felt appeared also to evoke anxiety about her wellbeing and this was juxtaposed to a desire to estab-
lish personal equilibrium in the face of the financial, relational and familial pressures in doing her Ph.
D. abroad. These findings have implications for how educational researchers might conceive the
learning experiences and needs of international graduate students.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH & METHOD IN EDUCATION 17

This methodological approach enabled me not only to investigate the details of and the intricacies
in her liminal experience of being a graduate student from another country but also allowed me to
connect and interpret the discrete parts or elements of that experience through identification of its
deep essences. I thus gained insight into the complexity of her internality as it related to her study in
an inter-country, cross-cultural setting, and I also became aware of how Sonya dealt strategically with
her difficulties, including the sense of displacement that she experienced.
The approach to educational inquiry articulated in this article was, for me, highly cogent for explor-
ing and interpreting the learning experiences and coping strategies of doctoral students. The method
is built on the proposition that a deep and systematic exploration of internality matters if a researcher
conceives learning as embodied in the intimate and personal experiences of individual learners. In
light of this, I believe that this methodology has potential as a way of examining the experiences
of learners in other educational and learning contexts.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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ORCID
Edwin Creely http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5009-4047

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