Lars Wicke/Judith Küper - (Re-)Turning to Reality
Channel: Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft an der HU Berlin
Date: 2023-02-16

Dr. Lars Wicke (Göttingen, GER)/Dr.in Judith Küper (Münster, GER)

(Re-)Turning to Reality. Phenomenological and New Materialist Perspectives on Reflection in Educational Research

Panel on September 17th, 2022 as part of the 6th International Symposium on Phenomenological Research in Education: Realities. Phenomenological and pedagogical perspectives.

Prof. Brinkmann's homepage: https://hu.berlin/aew_eng
Blog: http://paed.ophen.org/?lang=en
Symposion on Phenomenological Research in Education: https://hu.berlin/sym_phen_ed

Abstract:
In pedagogical discourses, the term of reflection is closely tied to the idea of pedagogical professionality (Helsper 2001). The ideal pedagogical practitioner mirrors a researcher. This researcher distances him- or herself from the object in question (Eysel 2006). Thereby, a separation between the spheres of the researcher and the researched is set in place. 
Phenomenology takes a critical stance towards this ideal by challenging the idea of a disembodied and isolated subject as it dissolves the separation of the spheres of reality. In the assumption of "being-in-the-world" (Heidegger 2006) – that is a reference to a shared reality of the researcher and the phenomenon observed – the experience of the researcher is made possible by the fact that he or she is part of the world. However, this assumption does not lead to an immediacy in the description of experiences. Rather the distinction between the reality of the observed, which remains to a certain extent unavailable, and the observation as a methodologically controlled operation of perception is crucial for phenomenology (Brinkmann 2015). With the introduction of this distinction phenomenology reflects on the conditions of perception in doing research. 
In contrast to this, new materialist approaches provide an understanding of reality in which phenomena are not experienced as something different from the operations through which they are addressed in research. Rather the relationship of the researcher and the observed comes into view as an entanglement that performatively produces meaning (Barad 2007). That opens a way of reflection that not only turns to the conditions of perception in doing research but to researchers and researching processes in their part of the constitution of the phenomenon observed. Therefore, reflection can be understood not only as a mode of distancing oneself from a strictly separated world, but rather as a way of reconnecting to it.
An idea of reflection that is rooted in the subject’s entanglement in relations of doing research is especially fruitful when addressing educational phenomena. The examination of such phenomena is accompanied by an uncertainty that refers to whether what is observed is pedagogical at all. To think of the research process as an entangled phenomenon and of the researcher as an affectively attached part of it highlights the productive moment of this uncertainty (Wicke 2021). 
In our presentation we first map out a dominant ideal of reflection and the connected understanding of a dominant model of research that separates the realities of the observation and the observed. We then contrast phenomenological perspectives to that standard understanding, but also point to the ineluctable distinction between experience and the experienced which tends to disregard the involvement of the researcher in the phenomenon of observation. Drawing on new materialist perspectives, we offer an alternative way of modelling research regarding operations of reflection in which the subject does not suspend its lively relations to the world. Rather, we highlight the significance of these relations in the constitution of the phenomenon in question.