Attunement as a Pedagogical Starting Point

For many teachers, the value of pedagogical reflection is missing from practice. Rational educational approaches that prioritize judging and measuring students overshadow the relational dimension of teaching. Our study investigated this relational gap to explore more fully teachers’ attunement to the child as a unique person. We examined lived experiences of six teachers pedagogically engaged with children (K–12) participating in an active outdoor living program. The program aimed to develop a youth network of friends, nurturing positive self-esteem and youth leadership. Using a phenomenological method, we facilitated open-ended interviews to show teachers’ pedagogical awareness through hermeneutic conversations. We present the data as three anecdotes representing a synthesis of teacher reflection, writing, and on-going conversation. Our findings reveal the importance of being-in-time with children as teachers relate pedagogical moments with children learning outdoors. Through attunement as the flexibility to adapt educational challenges and approaches to suit the moment and uniqueness of the child, teachers became careful observers, allowing students to be children without the competing tensions of institutional expectations.

Language-ing the Earth: Experiential Renewal for a Relationally Sensitive Environmentalism

This paper investigates human relationship with the larger living landscape that is grounded in experiential renewal. Phenomenology is antithesis to the process of abstraction and objectification through which the world as we experience it is diminished by conceptualization and categorization. Recent studies to understand the natural world as a hermeneutic text offers important reflections on the human mediation of the meaning of the more-than-human-world and assists in understanding the implications of our encounters with the world. Phenomenology, however, is unique in its capacity to bring to expression, rather than silencing, our relationship with the natural world and our human inherency in it. This paper explores phenomenologically sensate reciprocity as it is encountered in lived experience. Through deepening our attunement for our embodied integration in a living world we may relearn and restore a capacity to dwell more thoughtfully with newfound sensitivity, respect, and restraint in the ecosystems on which we wholly depend.

Experiential Intensity of Exploring Place Abandoned

There is a growing global shift towards urbanization resulting in diminishing connections with the traditional rural placescape. Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) has a long history of out-migration and internal migration between communities in coastal areas within the province. Resettlement programs initiated by the NL government between 1954 and 1975 accounted for the internal migration of approximately 30,000 people from 300 communities. Modern-day encounters with these abandoned communities are relevant to understanding the loss of place and home, as significant numbers of students in NL today are affected by migration. This paper is a phenomenological study of the experiences of educators as they explored the remnants of an abandoned community. The participants of the study were six experienced public school educators with teaching experience at the primary, elementary, intermediate, and secondary levels. The study took place in eight abandoned communities located on the western shore of Placentia Bay, where mainly the remnants of Isle Valen, St. Leonard’s, St. Kyran’s, and Great Paradise were explored. Data collection consisted of two personal interviews and one group hermeneutic circle, with the aim to answer one fundamental question: What is the experience of educators exploring the remnants of an abandoned community? Data in this study are represented by lived experience descriptions, which were interpreted hermeneutically and guided by four phenomenological existentials: temporality, corporeality, spatiality, and relationality. The results of this study not only provide deeper insight into intense experiences in communities abandoned through resettlement; they also reveal the significance of place in our lives, place as heuristic teacher, the pedagogical power of place, the need for local, meaningful place-based experiences in a curriculum as lived, and their potential for furthering personal and educational insight no matter where in this world we live or dwell.

Hermeneutics in an Age of Alternative Facts, Fake News, and Climate Change Denial

A Review of Clingerman, F., Treanor, B., Drenthen, M., and Utsler, D. (Eds.) Interpreting Nature: The emerging field of environmental hermeneutics.

Pre-Service Teachers in the Outdoors: A Phenomenological Exploration

While a child’s sense of wonder is thought to come naturally, less is known about how adults foster or connect with their sense of wonder. For the purposes of this exploration, wonder is the openness that comes when one dwells with the present moment, allowing questions to arise, rather than using wonder as a tool to answer a question (Gadamer, 2004; van Manen, 2014). Spending time in the outdoors is a common way to engage wonder, but there may be differences in the ways adults experience their surroundings compared to children. If teachers or parents aim to foster a child’s sense of wonder then it is important to understand how adults experience and connect to the outdoors so they can model and promote the connection for children. This paper explores the experiences of adults in the outdoors in order to better understand the barriers and paths that may lead to wonder. Five anecdotes from outdoor experiences are phenomenologically analyzed to better understand the lived experience of adults in the outdoors. Themes from the anecdotes are discussed, as well as the implications for teacher education programs.

Being Outdoors: Lived Experience on the Franklin River

Being outdoors can provide experiential possibilities not readily available indoors. In this paper we draw on phenomenological research undertaken with participants on 10-day outdoor Franklin River journeys in Tasmania, Australia, to illustrate such possibilities. By exploring multiple aspects and variations of participant lived experience outdoors we focus, in particular, on the potential ontological implications of these experiences. We detail three key findings that emerged from participant descriptions: i) a feeling of humility, ii) being alive to the present, and iii) paradox and living with the irresolvable via anecdotes, experiential structures and quotes. In doing so we highlight and discuss what, we suggest, are profound possibilities for participants’ ways of being outdoors with/in this vibrant riverscape.

Experiences of the Outdoors

Editorial

Painting Deep Time: Encountering Landforms’ Alterity and Phusis Through Phenomenology and Oil Painting

The practice of oil painting landforms, rocks and sea water in Jervis Inlet, British Columbia (BC) puts me in dialogue with land’s resistant alterity. By closely attuning to landforms, and by stepping back and blurring my focus at regular intervals while practicing oil painting of landforms, I experience phusis of land and of my painting. Through self-concealment and emergence, land alternates between revealing and enfolding its character, resisting my human comprehension but speaking to more-than-human elements in myself. The slow accretive process of oil painting lends itself to phenomenological research, taking days and weeks for paint to dry before new layers can be applied. This slowness produces phusis within me as an artist, as I am forced to withdraw from the painting while its layers dry and we reassume an unfamiliarity with one another as dual subjects. Through oil painting, landforms’ alterity shifts towards familiarity. Earth’s elements originate in deep time, pre-dating human experience. Cycling within me is a repository of minerals, water, and salinity originating in deep time. This draws attention to alterity within my own body. By practicing phenomenological research through painting landforms, I encounter the phenomenological paradox of deep time and come face-to-face with the originary elemental origin I share with landforms.

Phenomenological Research is Existential

Editorial

Relational Perception and ‘the feel’ for Tools in the Wooden Boat Workshop

This paper presents insights into the lived experience of maritime carpentry practices, based on six months of sensory-ethnographic fieldwork as a wooden boat builder’s apprentice. In particular, the author explores the widely-reported experience of tools ‘withdrawing’ from consciousness as craftspeople master their use. Without contradicting these interpretations – many of which are constructed by way of reference to ideas from Merleau-Ponty – the author suggests further theoretical resources to examine the perceptual experience of work after tools cease to be the main focus of the craftsperson’s attention. Heidegger’s idea of ‘circumspection’ is presented as a way to illuminate the relational nature of the subsequent mode of perception, in which the work as a whole fills the consciousness, rather than the individual instruments through which the work is achieved.