Engaging in reflective practices: investigating pupils' experiences of art from a phenomenological perspective

Abstract

This article reports on three cases of primary and secondary schoolteachers investigating their pupils' experiences of art from a phenomenological perspective. Using the three cases as illustrations, the article discusses how these teachers, having limited knowledge of research and aesthetics, selected study topics, determined the scope and method of data collection, conducted conversational interviews and interpreted the data collected. The article reveals the ways in which small-scale phenomenological studies can be carried out in a school context, with the ultimate aim of improving teachers' own practices. The article concludes with an analysis of phenomenological studies as a form of professional reflective practice.

Confessing Critical Frictions in the Arts and Education

“…Within the arts and education, several scholars draw upon phenomenology (Vagle, 2018;Van Manen, 2018) to account for embodied experiences around aspects of social and cultural identity (Travis et al, 2018;Lewis, 2015;Tam, 2010) and I share in this interest in employing phenomenology to describe deeply embedded phenomena. Regarding phenomenology, Samuel D. Rocha (2018) writes: "What I have called folk phenomenology (Rocha, 2015) is the attempt to imagine the real, to describe what appears within consciousness as faithfully as possi-ble….…”