Towards a Phenomenological Understanding of the Ontological Aspects of Teaching and Learning

ABSTRACT. In this essay, written for educators who might be unfamiliar with the more technical aspects of "existential-phenomenological" philosophy, I focus on diverse and alternative forms of meaning arising from the lived experience of educators and students in the process of learning, in order to reacquaint practitioners with the forgotten and more original aspects of education. Through a modified phenomenological method, I attempt to show how teacher/student alienation from the curriculum might be transcended through an understanding of authentic education, by means of recovering the forgotten ontological aspects of living and learning, which might lead in a positive direction to the reassessment of the standards, practices, and values of contemporary education. It is my claim that this "existential" form of insight into the human and education holds the potential to enrich our current notions of teaching and learning and inspire authentic professional development in order to improve the quality of our teaching and teacher education programs.Keywords: phenomenology, ontology, education, Heidegger, Sartre, social efficiencyThis paper falls into the following divisions: (1) I begin with a brief overview of "alienation" in education and focus on the crisis in contemporary education, which might be traced to two sources: the "professionalization agenda" in teacher education and "high-stakes testing" in public education, both of which emerge from social efficiency ideology·, (2) I move to consider how an authentic education might be conceived in terms of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, specifically I focus on the philosophies of both Sartre and Heidegger,1 concerned with the potential contribution their thought might make to education by focusing on the "existential" understand ing of the human; and (3) In a conceptual and speculative manner, I reveal how these philosophies might inspire renewed ways of thinking about education by those who teach and those who educate teachers.1. The Crisis in Contemporary EducationThe current definitions of a good teacher, or "expert teacher" (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005) and ideal Democratic student are grounded in sets of pre-determined competencies established and bureaucratically imposed. As Pinar (2004) rightly observes, contemporary American education is deterministic, and "in its press for efficiency and standardization," has the effect of reducing both teachers and students to "automata" (28). Ironically, by means of education, we have come to view teachers and students as "data," "numbers," "products," and "things," with mere present-at-hand existence to be manipulated, used, and discarded when their instrumental value is exhausted. We have forgotten what it means to be truly human from the "philosophical" perspective of what might generally be referred to as existential-phenomenological-ontology, with its perennial concern for what it means for us to be authentic communal beings engaged in heuristic acts of learning about our world through demonstrating a solicitous concern and care for our Being and the Being of others within learning communities, which always transcend the predictable and sterile conditions of high-stakes accountability within today's institutionalized education system. Teachers are increasingly becoming alienated from the curriculum (educational content and pedagogy), their students, and themselves with dire consequences to the overall view to authentic subject-hood and real education.There is a crisis in contemporary democratic education: radical achievement gaps in the public schools, a shortage of highly trained and effective teachers, and the continued bureaucratization of the American university where market place values dominate (Pinar, 2004; Spring, 2000; Solomon & Solomon, 1994). While a detailed, systematic diagnosis of this problem is beyond the scope of this essay, I consider two problems inhibiting the drive toward effective education emerging from the recent educational reform that produced the high-stakes accountability atmosphere linked with the ratification of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002). …