Realities in Pedagogical and Phenomenological Contexts Experience, Mediality, and Optimisation in Education

What is real? What is evident? What is true? These questions of the constitution of reality in our experiences are among the key questions of phenomenology since its beginning. Lately, they become especially relevant under conditions of digitalisation, acceleration, optimisation, crises, and pandemics. In this volume, these questions are taken up in different interdisciplinary and intercultural, phenomenological perspectives from a pedagogical point of view. Starting from a critique of instrumental scientism and optimisation, the contributions in this book ask about the theoretical, empirical, methodological, and practical constitution of reality within experiences of learning, Bildung, and education, as well as the subjects, materialities, and mediality of such experiences in different pedagogical fields and institutions. The contributions show how Phenomenological Pedagogy is fruitful to explore the realities of pedagogical practices, by grasping lifeworldy, lived-bodily, and social experiences in a qualitatively meaningful, empirical and experience-oriented way. It can thus serve as an alternative to positivistic, scientistic, idealistic, or psychologistic approaches.

Introduction.- Bildung in the World – Phenomenological Thoughts on Reality, Givenness, and Experience of the World under conditions of destruction.- The Method of Empirical Phenomenology.- (Re-)turning to Reality. Phenomenological and New Materialist Perspectives on Reflection in Teacher Education.- Eugen Fink and the Renewed Experience of Reality.- Merleau-Ponty on child psychology and pedagogy: reappraising students embodied, and intersubjective learning in contemporary education.- The Digital Colonisation of the Virtual and the Persistence of (Proto)Virtuality in Educational Settings.- Emergency Remote Learning: A Phenomenology of Pointing and the Computer.- The embodied experience of reality in film education.- Musical listening between everyday reality and sensitive experience. On the aesthetic education of young people.- From inattention to attentiveness: Learning to listen when nature speaks.- Realities and identities: Multiple realities in the classroom and the non-affirmative Bildung-theory.- A withdrawal of reality? Boredom, disembodiment, and isolation as aspects of teaching in pandemic times.- Learning Atmospheres in Pandemic Times – Different Realities.- Applying Phenomenology in Education. The Case of Special Educational Needs.- The Dialogue in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: Implications to Perceive, Experience, and Interpret in Chemistry Education.- Making the complexity of realities tangible. Ethical-ecological aspects of collaborative constitutions of reality in the context of early childhood education and care (ECEC).- Caring, emotion, optimisation.- Negative emotions, exclusionary practices and the optimisation of learning.- Affects, Atmospheres and the Perception of Education – Addressing Methodological Problems in Educational Research with Practice Theory, Phenomenology and New Materialism.

Prof. Dr. Malte Brinkmann holds the Chair for General Pedagogy at the Department of Education Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Johannes Türstig and Martin Weber-Spanknebel are research assistants at the Department of Education Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.