Lola Valladares-Tayupanta

The focus of this research is to see the world from the teachers’ perspectives. Since the intention of phenomenography is to describe qualitative variation in the ways in which a phenomenon is experienced (in this case the experience of student-centred teaching), it is considered as being particularly suitable for the exploration and investigation of the variation in the ways that nursing teachers experience student-

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centred teaching in their practice (Sjöström and Dahlgren, 2002). Phenomenography is therefore:

…the empirical study of the limited number of qualitatively different ways in which various phenomena in, and aspects of, the world around us are experienced, conceptualised, understood, perceived and apprehended.

(Marton, 1994, p.4424)

The outcome of phenomenographic research is the production of a set of categories of description that describe the variation in experiences of phenomena (Lucas, 1999). By focusing on teachers’ experience of student-centred teaching within their respective nursing programmes, this restricted the phenomena under investigation and set the phenomena in a particular context to avoid discussions of other phenomena.

Phenomenography is considered to be a 'second order' qualitative research approach that can help researchers investigating how teachers, and others, experience specified phenomena (Trigwell et al, 1994). Taking this distinction between first-order and second-order qualitative approaches further, Marton (1981) asserts that, 'From the

first-order perspective we aim at describing various aspects of the world and from the

second-order perspective we aim at describing people's experience of various aspects of the world' (p.177). When conducting a phenomenographic study, it is asserted that the second-order perspective must be adopted throughout the whole research process from problem posing to analysis: ‘explicitly adopted when research problems are being posed, when material is being gathered, and when analysis is being done. It means taking the place of the respondent, trying to see the phenomenon and the situation through her eyes, and living her experience vicariously. At every stage of the phenomenographic project the researcher has to step back consciously from her own experience of the phenomenon and use it only to illustrate the ways in which others

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are talking of it, handling it, experiencing it, and understanding it’ (Marton & Booth, 1997, p.121).

The investigation was not concerned with the psychological processes underlying teachers’ experience, but with the internal relation between the teachers as

‘experiencers’ and the world around them as experienced by them, that is, a second- order perspective (Marton & Booth, 1997). The implication in this sense is that human thinking and the world around are not isolated from each other (Säljö, 1997). The experiencer is focally aware of the object of experiencing, but not of ‘her way of experiencing it,’ it is the ways in which these underlying ways of experiencing the world (phenomena and situations) that are the object of research in phenomenography (Marton and Booth, 1997, p. 118). The first-order perspective, on the other hand, is considered to describe the world as it is (Marton, 1981). In this latter sense, whilst teachers of nursing may say that they experience being student-centred in their teaching practice, they may not be aware of the way in which they experience being student-centred in their practice or what being student-centred means to them. These are the objects of this research.

Phenomenography, whilst having certain similarities to phenomenology, is seen as an appropriate alternative for exploring variation in people's experience of specified phenomena and addresses some of the limitations of phenomenology (See Table 2 for an overview of the relationship between phenomenography and phenomenology). Although phenomenology and phenomenography both aim to reveal people's experience and awareness as a focus for research, phenomenography is not so much interested in individual experience as more on emphasising collective meaning:

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'Rather than a noumenal first-order perspective in which the world is described as it is, phenomenography is phenomenal or experiential and aims to describe the world as it is understood...The emphasis is on how things appear to people in their world and the way in which people explain to themselves and others what goes on around them and how these explanations change' (Barnard et al, 1999, p.213-214). For further

elaboration on the philosophical assumptions underpinning this approach see Marton (1981), Marton & Booth (1997).

Table 2. Relationship between Phenomenography and Phenomenology

Phenomenography Phenomenology

 The structure and meaning of a phenomenon as experienced can be found in pre-reflective and conceptual thought

 The aim is to describe variation in

understanding from a perspective that views ways of experiencing phenomena as closed but not finite

 An emphasis on collective meaning

 A second-order perspective in which

experience remains at the descriptive level of participant's understanding, and research is presented in a distinctive, empirical manner

 Analysis leads to the identification of conceptions and outcome space

 A division is claimed between pre-reflective experience and conceptual thought

 The aim is to clarify experiential foundations in the form of a singular essence

 An emphasis on individual experience

 A noumenal first-order perspective that engages in the psychological reduction of experience

 Analysis leads to the identification of meaning units

(Barnard et al, 1999, p.213-214).

The key features of a phenomenographic research approach have been outlined by Trigwell (1999) and are as follows:

A phenomenographic research approach is an approach that:

- takes a (1) relational (or non-dualist) (2) qualitative, (3) second order

perspective

- aims to describe the (4) key aspects of the variation of the experience of a phenomenon rather than the richness of individual experiences

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- yields a (5) limited number of internally related, hierarchical categories of description of the variation

According to Brew (2001), when people experience something, they differentiate the phenomenon from its context seeing some things but not others. In so doing, some aspects are in the foreground and others recede to the background, and different people notice and interpret different things. People are aware of is related to the meaning that they attach to the particular phenomenon. When people share a common culture and language, there are relationships between all the different ways of

experiencing that particular phenomenon. From phenomenographic research exploring a range of phenomena it has been established that there are a limited number of ways in which people experience a particular phenomenon.

The implications of the above for this study are that teachers, who indicate that they have experienced being student-centred teaching in their practice, will experience the same phenomenon (student-centred teaching) in a limited number of different ways and that these different ways of experiencing the same phenomenon can be accessed and identified.