The phenomenography tradition in the study of classroom teaching

ABSTRACT

Phenomenography is internationally well-known for its use in studying learning and teaching in educational settings. This paper begins with the discussion of two approaches reported in the literature to study classroom teaching in the phenomenography tradition. The paper goes on to put forward a third approach that is in essence to return to the original idea of phenomenography and use observation of teaching activities for identifying the qualitatively different ways of seeing the object of learning. Observational data are collected and analysed by categorizing the teaching activities according to the ways of seeing that emerge from the data. This approach has been developed from a number of our projects on learning to teach Chinese. In this paper, the focus of the discussion is on the differences in the methodological assumptions underlying the three approaches to study teaching in the phenomenography tradition.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom teaching
• conceptions of teaching
• methodological assumptions
• phenomenography
• and variation theory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all of the kindergartens we stayed under the School Attachment scheme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In the original work of phenomenography (Marton 1981a, 1981b, 1986, 1988), no specific term was defined for describing these aspects that critically differentiate the categories. Different terms were then used by different researchers. For example, Pang and Ki (2016) referred these aspects also to as ‘critical aspects’. When we use the term ‘distinctive aspects’, we take no regard of which particular ways of seeing are desirable (i.e. without considering the purpose of a learning situation as in the case of ‘critical aspects’).

2 Lam (2012) offers a critical scrutiny of the epistemological assumptions of variation theory.

3 The majority, if not all, of kindergartens in Hong Kong follow the curriculum guide of the Curriculum Development Council (2006) and teach older children (e.g. K3, ages 5–6) to write Chinese characters.

4 We would like to make a distinction between the teacher’s side and the learners’ side of the enacted object of learning. In the third approach, how a teacher enacts the object of learning is used to reflect a way of seeing of the teacher. Thus only the teacher’s side of the enacted object of learning is of concern. In contrast, the learners’ side of the enacted object of learning relates to how the learners contribute to, or their experience of (Svensson and Doumas 2013), the teaching activities.

5 The four parts in the brackets denote, respectively, the level of the children, the number of children participating in the teaching activity, the nature of the teaching activity, and the district where the kindergarten was located.