Casos de uso expandidos

The phenomenographic approach is a fairly new approach introduced in the literature by Marton in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Marton, 1981, 1986). It has been described by Marton (1980, 1981, and 1997) Svensson (1994; 1995) and Bruce (1999) as a qualitative and interpretative research. Giorgi (1999) saw it as a social, radical and constructivist approach able to perceive and describe people subjective relationship with the real world. Sandberg (1997) and Svensson (1997) understood it as a qualitative empirical approach.

Despite the fact that the approach has been understood and described in many ways, the core of phenomenography focuses not on paying special attention to investigate specific

phenomenon only but to study the people who are experiencing the phenomenon (Bowden and Walsh, 1994). Thus, it focuses on understanding and reflecting the relation between both the phenomenon and the people who experience it. It highlights the ways in which people experience or think about the phenomenon; this makes the subject and object in

phenomenography to be seen as one set rather than separate. In other words, it describes the subject‘s experience of the object that creates the relation between the two. As Marton stated ―phenomenography is about constitution. People's experiences of the world are relations between people and the world, reflecting one as much as the other ―(Marton, 1996: p 168). This makes phenomenographer able to discover the people‘s awareness of something rather than measuring their mental representation or a cognitive structure.

The early thought of phenomenographic as Marton claimed was based on Husserlian phenomenological philosophy (Marton, 1980) and on Gurwitsch‘s ideas on the nature of human awareness (Marton, 1964). It began by questioning the different ways in which people experience or conceive phenomenon; why they understood learning differently (Pramling, 1994, Marton, 2000). This question was introduced in such ways which were distinctive and unusual to be asked that time. Early studies in learning have identified the different ways that learners understand text and how these differences were related to the ways in which learners read the task (Marton and Säljö, 1976a). A few research studies also acknowledged deep and surface learning as different ways of experiencing learning and the distinctive research

75

approach used to identify these both was later called phenomenographic (Marton 1981, 1986, 1994). The early definition of phenomenography was introduced by Marton (1986) as an approach ―For investigating the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive and understand various aspects of phenomenon in the world around them (Marton, 1986: P.31). Thus, the main aim of phenomenography is to ―see the world through the eyes of people in the world‖ (Burns, 2000, p.71). It does not try to describe things as they are, but aims to understand how they appear to people and attempts to know about people‘s experience of a specific phenomenon (Marton, 1988b). Johansson, Marton and Svensson (1985) stated that ―… we are not trying to look into the (individuals ‘) mind, but we are trying to see what he or she sees, we are not describing minds, but prescriptions, we are not describing the (individual) but his or her perceptual world‖ (p.247)

The year 1997 witnessed the emergence of a new trend of phenomenographic approach. Much attention was paid to the epistemological and ontological assumption underpinning the status of the variations in the ways of experiencing specific phenomenon and how these ways would reflect ones concepts of the world (Marton and Pang 1999; Marton and Booth 1997). The focus is on understanding the nature of ways of experiencing phenomenon and

differences between different ways of experiencing the same phenomenon in terms of the samples of aspects of phenomenon which are in the theme of people‘s awareness. The new trend was based on Gurwitsch‘s theory about the people‘s awareness. Marton with his new direction emphasized that people become aware of the specific aspects of the phenomenon by discerning variation in the dimensions linking to these aspects. People become aware of new ways of experiencing phenomenon by simultaneously discerning and focusing on the critical aspects for that way of experiencing (Marton and Booth, 1997).

76

The phenomenographic approach has been adopted in relatively considerable number of studies in social science territory, especially, education. Alexanderson (1994) stated that, the phenomenographic approach has been used in more than 1000 studies and 50 doctoral theses for the last two decades; obviously this number has increased dramatically since that time (Alexanderson, 1994 cited in Sandberg, 1997). Phenomenographic studies conducted in the last two decades tended to be one of the three following branches

1. The first branch focused on studying and understanding the conception of teaching and learning; this has dominated because the idea of phenomenography started with it (Marton, Dall Alaba, 1999; McKenzie, 2003). Some of these researches aimed to observe the interaction between two phenomenona such as Limberg (1999) who studied the interaction between information seeking and learning.

2. The second branch focused on understanding students‘ and academics‘ various ways in seeing and describing a specific cognitive discipline such as IL (Booth, 1997; Marton and Booth, 1997; Cope, 2000, Webber, 2003, 2007). This research undertakes underneath this branch share a common interest in studying the varying ways in which people experience X phenomenon

3. The third has studied more people‘s experiences of skills in their work (Sandberg, 1994; Gerber and Velde, 1996; Davey 2002, Kirk, 2002).

The first connection between phenomenography and IL was presented by Bruce‘s work (1997). She created a holistic description of the ways in which people experience IL as an aspect of learning, rather than the assessment of measurable attributes and skills associated with specific information-seeking practices. This study adopts Bruce‘s thoughts which are based on Marton‘s definition of learning as [. . .] a qualitative change in a person‘s way of seeing, experiencing, understanding, and conceptualising something in the real world – rather than a change in the amount of knowledge which someone possesses (cited in Bruce, 1997, p. 60).

Bruce‘s findings integrated with Marton‘s definition of learning have changed the

benchmarks in the pedagogy from the teachers‘ perspectives to variation in the ways that the learners understand and perceive IL. Describing IL in terms of the varying ways in which it is

77

experienced by people, that is their conceptions, is another alternative purpose of this research. Studying IL from the viewpoint of the people‖ [. . .] is the first step towards a relational view of information literacy‖ (Bruce, 1997, p. 39)

For that, the sense of the variations is related to sense of people‘s awareness of the

phenomenon and the different meaning that they create during their experiences. On the other hand, a phenomenon is always experienced as it is embedded in situation, but not as it reflects specific situation (Marton and Booth, 1997). An individual‘s fundamental awareness of phenomenon is different because it is related to different situations which the individual receive during the phenomenon. If the individual receive these situations in ways that introduce different aspect of phenomenon then the main awareness will become core and others will be recorded in the background (Pong, 1999). This means while someone experiences a phenomenon in specific way the other individual experiences the same

phenomenon in different ways in relations to different situations (figure 12). Transferring the individual perspective to the research considers in the phenomenographic philosophy as second – order perspective which is focus on how the people experience the phenomenon not the phenomenon itself. A new direction of variation is introducing the variety not only with the individual perspectives but also the variety in the phenomenon.

78

In summary, the sense of variation in regarding to phenomenographic research introduces in the literature in four main faces. The first face of variation reflects the qualitative in different ways in which people experience the phenomenon (Marton and Pang, 1999; Pang, 2002). The second face focuses on the variations as experienced by the individual. This is reflecting the ontological perspective (Marton and Pang, 1999; Pang, 2002). The third face focuses on describing the nature of ways of experiencing in terms of the person‘s awareness of critical aspects and corresponding dimensions of variations and the fourth face focuses on describing the variations of people‘s perspectives to the interaction between different phenomena. This study fits with the first and the third faces of phenomenographic approach; it is more likely to be a combined approach.

Although this study provides a new way, which is less common, to conduct two

phenomenographic researches in the same study, the researcher was not working outside the flock. The researcher followed, for example, Mackenzie‘s (2003) steps in her well known work: the variation and change in teachers‘ ways of experiencing teaching adopted a similar approach. Furthermore, the researcher‘s future mission is to go back to Syria to teach at the Library and Information Science Department and being interested in Marton‘s Theory of awareness, the researcher wanted to understand how people‘s conceptions toward specific phenomenon would change their conceptions of the same phenomenon after receiving systemic learning experience . Also, to what extent would the systemic learning change peoples‘ perspectives toward a specific phenomenon? Understanding such issues help the researcher in her future career rather than any other approach because as Cheery stated (2008) ―[phenomenographic] approach is very useful approach when people wanted to unhook from deeply owned perspectives and experiment with different way of knowing and understanding. Sometime the more passionately committed we are as stakeholders, the more powerful the circuit-breakers needed to help us un-hook‖ (P.62). Moreover, this research has the honour to be the pioneer in introducing phenomenography to the Arabic literature and to develop the concept not only of IL but also phenomenography conceptions.

This study uses a longitudinal and discursive phenomenographic approaches conducted in two parts in 16 months durations counting the time spent for piloting. The researcher started her research with the assumption that IL could be identified in the Syrian‘s context but had not been conceptualised yet. Thereby; she sought to understand how the people will conceive

79

a phenomenon which has not been conceptualised by them before and the types of variation in the conceptions that would emerge.