Tool 2: Ways of experiencing
What are we talking about here?
From this perspective learning involves a new ‘way of experiencing’, something which might sound quite similar to concepts and conceptual change.We are again interested in what learners know both before and after instruction – but there is one key difference that we need to note.With the term ‘ways of experiencing a phenomenon’ .
→ Read more
What does this mean for engineering education?
Although the purists would perhaps not agree, it is possible at this stage to see many links between this tool (ways of experiencing) and tool 1 (concepts).The underlying theory is different, but in both cases one is able to investigate a range of different ‘prior ideas’ as well as unpack ‘wrong answers’. One practical point is that where concepts and conceptual change have been very prominent in school level science education research, phenomenographic research which focuses on ways of experiencing has been widely used in research in higher education,especially in the UK, Australia and Sweden.At the very least you will come across papers which use these latter terms and so it is useful to know at least something of what they are talking about.
→ Read more
In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?
A focus on ‘ways of experiencing’ does open up new perspectives on teaching and learning. It is especially useful in the ways in which it links an understanding of student learning to acts of teaching. In recent work the awareness of a range of different ways of experiencing a phenomenon has led to a strong focus on variation. Here there is a claim that variation in experience is a necessary condition for all learning (See, for example, Pang 2003). When designing teaching one aims then to include variation, especially in what have been termed ‘educationally critical aspects’ of the object of study (See, for example, Linder ,Fraser and Pang 2006).
→ Read more
Show me an example
In this study Delia Marshall and colleagues focused on engineering students’ ways of experiencing learning itself, also termed ‘conceptions of learning’.The assumption is that the ways that students experience or conceptualise learning is an important determinant of their ‘approach to learning’ (see tool 3) in a given context. Most previous studies of conceptions of learning had focused on social science or humanities contexts and it was expected that things might be slightly different in engineering, as indeed they were.
→ Read more
Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?
Shirley Booth has played a key role in the area of phenomenographic research, starting with her PhD on students who were learning to program in a computer science and engineering course (Booth, 1992). She then co-authored a key text, Learning and Awareness (Marton and Booth, 1997), and has continued to be involved, especially in the application of this thinking in science and engineering education. In this paper she lays out a very practical argument for shiftingfrom a ‘transmissive’ to a broadly ‘constructivist’ pedagogy. She argues that rather than take a phenomenographic perspective.
→ Read more
