Conference Agenda

This methodological contribution offers a phenomenological approach to education research, specifically for understanding the various effects of education reform vis-à-vis the intricate conditions of schooling that such reforms encounter in specific socio-economic places with their particular histories and contexts. In reaching beyond narrow ideas of data as evidence, the approach captures the various ways in which reforms manifest in schooling through collecting the experiences of those involved and systematizing those experiences into a structure of experience of reform. Such work is markedly different from evaluation, implementation or best practice research that inevitably presuppose a degree of sameness of the experience of schooling (Salmen, 2021, S. 6), i.e. that schooling is the same for everyone who experiences it. Human experience, however, is unique: the same event is different events to different people, and renders contrary conclusions and actions. This position counters current research tendencies to "homogenize the heterogeneous reality of education through abstract and context-indifferent standards and outcome metrics" (Mayer et al., 2014, p. 2). The approach is a viable alternative to technocratic ideas of teaching and learning that narrow schooling and student achievement to test scores, grades, and meeting expectations (Hopmann, 2008). Instead, the phenomenologically oriented researcher affirms through their work that those involved in schooling act on what they understand to be good reasons. Their actions make sense against their horizons and in the context of their intentionality, and to elicit their mindsets and lines of reasoning in order to learn about their sense-making provides unique insights into the dynamics of schooling, a "complex entity with a character of its own" (Tröhler, 2008, p. 10). The aim is to understand school reform and schooling in the way it presents itself to those involved in schooling, and to let them assign meaning and relevance to their experiences. Such inquiry focuses on schooling as specific to its place and its people; it highlights the conditions of schooling and the way those involved in it construct their practice.

The approach understands a social structure through the elements that sustain and negotiate it (Labaree, 2020, p. 100) rather than assuming that individuals' trajectories are a mere result of their choices: “All roles appear more solid and defined than they really are. (…) Structures appear concrete but are actually emergent patterns that depend on people to keep the pattern going.” (Labaree, 2020, p. 102) Social structures include caveats of flexibility that rich descriptions may be able to carve out and use to understand "the causes that derive from social relations (as) more than personal traits" (Labaree, 2020, p. 102) and therefore leave the linear presumption of accountability. Schooling may then be approached not primarily as an instrument for social efficacy or social mobility but as a place shaped by democratic ways of living and learning. (Salmen, 2021, S. 59)

This approach embraces human diversity through accounting for diverse histories and contexts, perspectives and lifeworlds throughout the research design. Rather than seeking to identify schooling universals, the approach affirms multiple realities (Schütz, 1975) of experiencing schooling as equally relevant to ongoing discussions about the quality of public schooling. Multiple realities in the phenomenological understanding of the social world suggests that "objectively the same behavior may have (…) very different meanings or no meaning at all" (Schütz, 1945, p. 535) for the individual because "meaning (…) is not a quality inherent to certain experiences (…) but the result of an interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present Now with a reflective attitude." (ibid.) Empirically, this interpretation is elicited through synthesizing Bevan’s (2014) structure of phenomenological interviewing and Kolbe’s (2016) existential communication.

Heidegger (1996) posits being in the world in relation to one’s thrownness, fallenness, and projection. We move through these with concern for the world and care for others, as shaped by the circumstances of our ready-to-hand and present-at-hand experiences. Heidegger claims that it is neither God nor some metaphysical sense of possibility that guides our inclinations for care; rather, he avers, it is the horizon of our inevitable deaths that gives shape to our encounters, choices, state-of-mind, and understanding. Our time is finite, and it is this finitude—as Dasein is thrown into a particular place at a particular time for a bounded horizon—that gives us both the primordial characteristic of Dasein (a being for whom the question of being is at stake) and the conditions for state of mind, understanding, and discourse. Heidegger also notes that “proximally and for the most part” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 210), the average everydayness of our encounters is what shapes most of our time in the world: we spend most days in conformity with the masses, engaged in the inauthentic and in idle talk.

Taking Heidegger’s existential analytic as a point of departure, in this paper, I seek to explore how the evolution of neoliberalism as a totalizing force of hegemony has implications for Dasein. I argue that the last fifty years of neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the possibilities and qualities that shape Dasein, the found conditions of thrownness, the average everydayness of our encounters, and thus, on the potentials of projection. Failures of interruption to the inauthentic, failures to have authentic moments, occur because, in the neoliberal era, the superficiality of idol talk is idealized; economic and consumerist ends are all that appear on the horizon to shape the conditions for care, concern, and mattering.

In a globalised world shaped by decades of neoliberal capitalism, the thereness in which we find ourselves is remarkably similar across the world. As Brown (2015, 2019) notes, neoliberalism’s greatest strength as an ideological force has been its ability to traverse boundaries, adapt and adopt customs and cultures, and inflect the central premise of individualism, competition, and capital creation into all manner of non-market spaces, including politics, healthcare, and education. The totality of neoliberalism increasingly furnishes a kind of taken-for-grantedness in these spaces and, over time, diminishes the possibilities for alternatives. In this paper, I argue that Heidegger’s existential analytic furnishes a useful framework for understanding the current conditions of our thrownness, the implications for fallenness, and—more pressingly—the limitations for projection.

The failure for Dasein to establish the clearing for authentic appearances in neoliberal ontologies is evident in three ways, discussed in detail below: First, I suggest that authentic moments are more difficult because of the impoverished conceptions of what it means to learn. Second, I contend that we have become preoccupied with a limited view of what it means to care or be concerned. Lastly, I argue that our existential anxiety has been heightened and redirected to wholly neoliberal ends of capital acquisition, provoking an unresolvable and lifelong tension as what we care about is always constructed as outside our reach. To conclude the paper, I outline the challenges of contemporary neoliberal Dasein through an educational lens, thinking about education as a system, curriculum as a mechanism of totality, and pedagogy as a tool of compliance.