Phenomenological insights for the classroom
Summary
The work combines theory with practice, addressing positionality, AI’s impact, and institutional transformation, with a focus on African education’s unique challenges. It reconceptualizes education as an ‘act of care’ while acknowledging historical influences and proposing pathways to transformation This accessible text bridges philosophical depth with practical insights for teachers, postgraduate students and researchers, contributing to global discourse on authenticity and technology in education.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1. Introduction and Overview: Phenomenology in the Classroom: Foundations for Teaching and Research
- Chapter 2. Approaching Phenomenological Understanding: Positionality and Reflexivity in Education and Education Research
- Chapter 3. Phenomenology and Music: A New Path for 21st Century Education
- Chapter 4. Towards Reclaiming the Primacy of Lived Experience in an Artificial Intelligence-Centred World of Teaching and Learning in South Africa
- Chapter 5. Critical Phenomenological Perspectives of Reflective Entrepreneurial Learning Through Mini-Enterprise Projects
- Chapter 6. Insights into the Lived Experiences of a South African Black High School Principal in Leading the School Towards a Learning Organisation
- Chapter 7. Unveiling Power Dynamics in South African Classrooms: A Critical Phenomenological Exploration into Student Teachers’ Teaching Practicum Schooling Placements
- Chapter 8. Conclusion: Towards Education and Educational Research: As an “Act of Caring” for the African Learner
- Biographies of Authors
- Index
FOREWORD
Oscar Koopman’s reputation as a science teacher and practitioner emerged in the early 2000s’, flourishing amidst challenging circumstances. He taught science at schools situated in communities grappling with poverty, limited resources, broken communities, and a curriculum still carrying the burden of a regime lingering under the “shadow burdens” of coloniality and an inhuman apartheid system that left deep scars, not only on the education system but on people of colour across the country.
In this era, teachers were reduced to mere “deliverers” of the curriculum and constrained by a rigid technocratic managerial system—the very system that had shaped Oscar’s own education from primary school through to university. It was when he joined the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in 2008 that I came to know Oscar. At the time I was teaching philosophy and psychology, amongst other subjects, in the Faculty of Education, which led to our intellectual journeys as academics. At CPUT, Oscar faced a new and different challenge: he had to prepare science teachers for the same schooling system in which he taught. It was then that I met him as a serious and resolute lecturer and an emerging scholar. His scholarly journey, I believe, required him to reinvent himself, as he ventured from the structured world of natural science to the humanities. I think his quest for personal authenticity drew him to the work of phenomenological thinkers—from Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and later curriculum scholars that draws extensively on the ideas of existential phenomenologists like Aoki, Greene, and Pinar, amongst others.
My history with Karen is remarkably similar, like with Oscar, I made my acquaintance with her at CPUT. She brings a rich history and broad experience spanning multiple educational context—from her own business ventures to colleges, high school, the technical university (CPUT), and the University of the Western Cape (UWC) where she currently works.
Her experience even extends internationally, including a teaching position at a primary school in South Korea. This varied background provides her with a Birdseye view on learners’ lived experiences across different educational settings. Throughout her career she has always been engaged in innovative work and served on key committees as well as mentoring peers in these institutions. She brings this richness and breadth of experience to inform her research publications. She is well placed both experience-wise and as an astute academic as a guest co-editor of journals. Like Oscar, her commitment to education and care for students and learners resonates with a culture of care and a focus on lived experience as explored from a phenomenological stance in this book.
It was inevitable that their common concern for the legitimisation of human development and reclaiming of the authentic self would result in a book like this. They are prolific authors as they published in highly respected journals and have authored books and functioned as guest editors of accredited journals of the academic esteem. I raise this as context to this very book. A novel and courageous response to the educational research and teaching challenges facing the African continent. They have managed to gather experts in the field of phenomenology from South Africa and Botswana, countries representing a broad perspective and a rich lived experience as well as two experts from the United States. In this way, this book, “Phenomenological Insights for the Classroom,” bridges a current gap in the literature that students and scholars of education and research battle to bridge.
The book opens with an introductory chapter by Karen Koopman, Oscar Koopman and Jeffrey Beyer. That examines the crucial role of phenomenology in educational research and teaching and learning. The authors establish a fundamental premise that the learners’ lived experiences underpin and inform all forms of learning. Through a researcher’s lens, they demonstrate how phenomenological approaches can unveil subtle yet significant insights into educational complexities. This opening chapter establishes phenomenology as a powerful analytical framework through which to examine education, offering sharp focus on the lived experiences of its key participants—insights that prove essential for meaningful educational improvement and transformation.
In Chapter 2, Russ Walsh, discusses “Positionality and Reflexivity in Education and Educational Research”. This he does by engaging seminal thinkers like Giorgi, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Betti among others by exploring relational aspects of phenomenological understanding and competing methodological positions. He then discusses different forms of reflexivity and the concomitant implications for education and education research.
Chapters 3 and 4 employ phenomenology to engage with two contrasting worlds as their intersection with education, namely, Music education on the one hand and artificial intelligence on the other. In Chapter 3, Chatradari Devroop challenges conventional educational models, rooted in rationalist-empiricist thinking, arguing they inadequately prepare learners/students for the modern world. Devroop concludes by redefining the role of educators as facilitators of lived experiences and navigators of ambiguity, guiding students from mere knowing towards being and becoming in an increasingly complex world.
In Chapter 4, “Towards Reclaiming the Primacy of Lived Experience in an Artificial Intelligence Driven World of Teaching and Learning,” Oscar Koopman and Karen Joy Koopman, examine AI’s impact on students’ lived experiences. They contrasts authentic bodied experience with AI-driven approaches, metaphorically describing their contest for shared teaching and learning space as “dancing on a moving carpet.” They make a compelling case for the irreplaceable value of embodied experience and call for a more holistic approach to education that honours the inherently interactive and complex nature of learning. Thus, they conclude advocating for engaging learning spaces that forge generative relationships with technological innovations utilised to advance the teaching and learning agenda keeping the authentic human experience at its core.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 follow the empirical path focusing on the work done on phenomenology in the opening chapters. These chapters take phenomenology into a practical research application. Gosaite Solomon and Suriamurtee Maistry, in Chapter 5 titled, “Critical Phenomenological Perspectives of Reflective Entrepreneurial Learning through Mini-Enterprise Projects”, show how phenomenology has made it possible for them, as qualitative researchers, to suspend personal bias when using principles and techniques of bracketing, more commonly known in phenomenological language as the epoché and phenomenological reduction. They employed a hermeneutic phenomenological case study design to explore students’ entrepreneurial learning experiences with an up-close perspective guided by a pragmatist orientated phenomenological theoretical framework, drawing on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Dewey. The outcome of the research shows both positive and negative experiences, made possible by this approach. The research also suggested a curriculum design and implementation that is insensitive to student realities. They could consequently challenge curriculum designers and teachers to be more conscious of students’ lived experiences.
Chapter 6, authored by Karen Koopman, Juliana Smith and Keith Long, examines the lived realities of a Black African high school principal in a township school, chronicling his journey to transform the institution into a learning organisation. Through his narrative, we witness firsthand the complexity, messiness, and structured chaos that unfolds both within and beyond the school gates. The chapter reveals the existential challenges this principal faces daily and his strategic navigation toward organisational learning objectives despite numerous obstacles.
What profound insights emerge from this principal’s experience? As researchers, we often presume we can accurately map the inner landscapes of school leadership through our engagement with theoretical literature. However, it is only when we allow his story to emerge organically that we truly comprehend the complex reality in which he operates. This principal’s narrative powerfully demonstrates the value of phenomenology as a research methodology—offering intimate insights into the everyday lived world as people experience it in real time. In Chapter 7, Unveiling Power Dynamics in South African classrooms: A Critical Phenomenological Exploration into Student Teachers’ Reaching Practicum Schooling Practices, Clive Brown and Sara Reddy explore the lived experiences of two student-teachers from an insider-perspective as narrated by themselves, taking ownership of the primary meaning-making requiring the researchers to the mechanisms of this process. Brown and Reddy point out that individual meaning-making is influenced by its socio-political embeddedness. This is a dynamic study that is located at the intersection of personal and social dimensions of lived experiences navigating the lingering shadows of social inequalities and racial tensions still endemic to our broader society and its schooling system. Finally, they argue that the phenomenological approach adopted has broadened the paradigm to incorporate a “critical phenomenological” perspective.
This book closes with Chapter 8, Towards Education and Education Research as an Act of Care, by Oscar Koopman and Karen Koopman, reframing both as “acts of care” for the African child—a direct response to the persistent “shadow burdens” of colonialism, Apartheid, and systemic poverty that continue to traumatise African learners. The authors knit together the book’s central theme by drawing on Aoki’s concepts of, “the teacher as care” and “dwelling humanly together,” alongside Patŏcka’s, philosophy of, “care for the human soul.” This synthesis brings all the strands together culminating in a proposed framework that transcends traditional pedagogical and research approaches to address the scourge of lingering and pervasive “shadow burdens” that manifests in human trauma. Finally, by incorporating insights from trauma theory and psychological concepts, they introduce this proposed transcendental framework to redefine education and research as acts of care, capable of shattering the shadow burdens and drawing a new and self-actualised generation of African learners into the light of human dignity, becoming and just being their authentic selves hovering in the winds of the African skies.
This book arrives at a critical juncture in our history, with the potential to exorcise the ghosts of the past and release a future long dormant within the African consciousness. It opens the way for children to dream dreams and reach out and embrace a future promised but withheld, and we may well have cause to reflect in the future on how important its contribution really was.
I am blessed to have been afforded this opportunity to write this foreword. The editors hold a special place in my heart and their tireless work is a blessing to our children, our nation, the continent and all those who are still groping in the shadow burdens that will not go away.
Dr Vince C. Bosman
Details
- Pages
- XXII, 180
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783034355599
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783034355605
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783034355285
- DOI
- 10.3726/b22803
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (September)
- Keywords
- Education Curriculum Studies Phenomenology Teaching Learning Pedagogy Lived Experience Embodiment Classroom Spaces Learners Students Phenomenological insights for the classroom Karen Joy Koopman Oscar Koopman
- Published
- New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XXII, 180 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
