On Phenomenography, Learning and Teaching

Abstract Phenomenographic research has tackled questions concerning the variation in ways in which people experience the phenomena they meet in the world around them. The empirical work directly addressing educational issues has to a large extent focused on describing qualitatively different ways in which particular sorts of students understand a phenomenon, or experience some aspect of the world, which is central to their education, and setting the results into the educational context of interest. Learning is viewed as being a change in the ways in which one is capable of experiencing some aspect of the world and other research has been linked to attempts to bring about such changes by utilising certain approaches to teaching. This article will outline principles for teaching based, on the one hand, on the body of empirical phenomenographic research and, on the other hand, on an emerging picture of the nature of human awareness. The principles will first be drawn, explicated with the help of a number of empirical studies in the phenomenographic tradition, and then the whole will be illustrated through an example of a study of learning and teaching programming at university.