Carina Henriksson

Hermeneutic Phenomenology and Pedagogical Practice

The Swedish scholar, Oscar Oquist (1992), once complained that everything he loves about people – our complexity, our vagueness, our irrationality, and our insecurity, in other words, our humanness – is being persecuted and demeaned by technology’s distant and logical ideals. The values we cherish today – such as efficiency, assessment, and productivity – leave no room for softer, human qualities such as intuition, emotions, imagination, and creativity. They are denigrated as feminine, childish, or immature. And yet we implicitly know how important these qualities are for human growth and development.

What did you learn in school today

Abstract This article conveys some of the findings from a hermeneutic-phenomenological study on lived experiences of school failure. The informants were students in Swedish senior high schools and teenagers in Swedish juvenile institutions. Contrary to the common belief that school failure is related to low grades or failing exams, the students’ descriptions of lived experiences of failure had little to do with intellectual shortcomings. The students’ interpretation of my research question did not encompass cognitive deficiencies. They rarely spoke of failure to understand, or failure to meet scholastic demands. Instead, the students offered stories about failure to behave according to expectations and the way in which they experienced their teachers’ reactions to this ‘deviant’ behaviour. Thus, the question of school failure did not revolve around the students’ cognitive knowledge and proficiency – or lack of thereof – but around the hidden curriculum. The feelings the students lived through while experiencing failure included lack of trust, confidence, belief, joyfulness, patience, hope, and serenity. The study has moral implications for pedagogical practice and the formative relationship between teachers and students.

An Event in Sound

In this chapter, we endeavor to describe some of the linguistic textures of hermeneutic-phenomenological writing and, in so doing, point to the close connection between lived experience and the ethical-aesthetic traits in interpreting and writing the experience.