El problema de concurrencia y operatividad de la falta de conformidad

Variation in experience has been studied in higher education through a

phenomenographic approach, which has evolved from the seminal studies into student approaches to learning undertaken by Marton and Säljö (1976a, 1976b). These studies introduced the idea that there were different intentions underlying a basic learning activity and rather than assume that everyone experienced something in the same way studies began to explore how a phenomenon might be experienced differently (e.g. Marton et al. 1984, Trigwell & Prosser 1997, Trigwell et al. 1999, Bowden et al. 2005). Phenomenography has some affinities with phenomenology (Hasselgren & Beach 1997) in respect to a concern with human experiences of everyday life (Berger & Luckmann 1967) but according to Svensson (1997) it has relations to a number of theoretical and philosophical aspects but allegiances to

none. It is based on an empirical approach to understanding human experience, usually through interviews. Using a phenomenographic approach requires starting without preconceptions of categories or looking for specific kinds of experience within the data, but forming the categories as a result of the data (see Walsh 2000 for a discussion of constructing or emergent categories). This allows the researcher to examine the data and construe the variation found within a range of accounts of the experience. In assuming that there are different ways that practice/ teaching relations might be constituted, not simply those already found in other practice-based learning environments, phenomenography would appear to provide an appropriate

methodology to understand just how the relationship between practice and teaching in art and design might be constituted.

Experience in phenomenographic terms depends on seeing reality as something that is constituted between the person and the world, and as such is a non-dualist,

relational approach (Marton & Booth 1997, Marton 2000). The person who is

experiencing something is central to the approach, it is the person and the world that constitutes reality and from this perspective research is not about the object existing independently, but about how people experience particular objects and the different ways that these can be experienced. Rather than examine the object from the

researcher’s point of view, ‘A more reasonable idea is to see the object as a complex of the different ways in which it can be experienced’ (Marton 2000: 105). The different ways are logically related, but together constitute the phenomenon. However, most researchers would acknowledge that the constitution of the outcome space, the structure of the phenomenon, is the researcher’s interpretation and constitution (Åkerlind 2005, Ashwin 2005).

Within phenomenography the idea that a phenomenon consists of different aspects of experience is accounted for by the notion of being able to hold in our awareness

different aspects of a phenomenon simultaneously (Marton & Booth 1997). The different ways are not always present to consciousness and can be more or less to the foreground or to the background of our awareness.

Certain things come to the fore, they are thematised, while other things recede to the ground, they are tacit, they are unthematised……There are different degrees of how figural, thematised, and explicit things or aspects are in our awareness. (Marton, 2000: 110)

Therefore, at a certain time there will be some aspects of a phenomenon that are more to the forefront of awareness than others and this may be to do with our previous experiences or the context of our current experiences. Marton and Booth (1997: 83) argue that situations are always experienced ‘within a context, a time, and a place’ and phenomena are divorced, abstracted, or transcend such constraints. However, the two are ‘inextricably intertwined’ (p83) and as such the researcher may focus on ways to experience the situation or the phenomenon, but cannot focus on both simultaneously. The researcher however, will realise relations between the phenomenon and the situation.

We cannot separate our understanding of the situation and our understanding of the phenomena that lend sense to the situation. Not only is the situation understood in terms of the phenomena involved, but we are aware of the phenomena from the point of view of the particular situation. Furthermore, not only is our experience of the situation molded (sic) by the phenomena as we experience them, but out experience of the phenomena is modified,

transformed, and developed through the situations we experience them in. (Marton & Booth 1997: 83 emphasis in original).

The situation, or the context of the experience, is therefore always critical to the way that the phenomenon is experienced. Marton and Booth’s definition of the situation also includes the individual’s past experiences as being present and influencing the way that the phenomenon is experienced. Phenomenography is therefore dependent on understanding the way that something is experienced by individuals and

recounted through the individual’s awareness of the experience at a particular time and place (Marton et al. 1984). In terms of understanding how practitioner tutors might experience the relationship between their practice and their teaching, this particular phenomenon is dependent on the two physical contexts of practice and teaching and also on individual’s previous experiences which all influence the way that the relationship between practice and teaching, the phenomenon in question, is experienced.

The method looks for the variation, the qualitatively different ways of experiencing a phenomenon that are possible (Marton & Booth 1997). Although individuals form the basis of the generation of the data, the whole set of transcripts are used to construct the categories which are qualitatively different and logically interrelated. This provides a geography of the potential ways in which something can be experienced and

because there is an internal relationship between the categories it provides a range from the more limited ways to the more expansive ways in which that phenomenon can be experienced (Åkerlind 2005, Ashwin 2006). Thus an apparently unified entity can be seen as potentially fragmented as participation can no longer be assumed to be uni-dimensional. These ways of experiencing are not fixed traits of the individual but are said to be influenced by the context and how the individual perceives the context of the experience at the time (see Prosser & Trigwell 1999). However, linking the contextual factors into the differences in ways of experiencing is not part of the empirical methodology of phenomenography.

The issue of the context in phenomenographic research has been addressed in a particular way by Adawi et al. (2001), but this limits the notion of context to a narrow area of the researcher and researched experience, not addressing the wider socio- cultural or political aspects of experience. The influences of the context are often deduced from the wider literature such as the idea of presage, process, and product (Trigwell & Prosser 1997, Biggs 2003). In order to consider the wider social context empirically an additional theoretical approach is needed to extend the understanding illuminated by a phenomenographic methodology. Whilst phenomenography might provide an understanding of variation in practice/ teaching relations it does not explain how variation might be influenced by the social worlds of practice and teaching. The ontological and epistemological emphasis in phenomenography remains largely within the individual’s perception, that is, the way in which they understand, or experience, at the time, the phenomenon in question, but the individual voice, the personal history of experience and their relation to the social context is lost in the collective analysis.