Human Science Research Page: Methodology

Human Science in Education

This research contributes to an understanding of the ethical character of professional knowledge in action, and how pedagogical reflection plays a role in the lives of professional educators with children. The Human Science in Education Project departs from the assumption that the interactive practice of pedagogy (teaching, parenting, childcare) has a subtle and highly normative or ethical character. By definition pedagogy is always concerned with the ability to distinguish between what is good (appropriate) and what is bad (less appropriate) for children. The ethical character of everyday interactions with children in classrooms and schools is peculiar in that “immediate acting” does not permit detached moral reasoning or deliberative decision making. Yet educators need to be thoughtfully aware of how children think, learn, see things, or experience difficulty. This requires on the part of the educator an embodied form of knowing and of understanding children—“pedagogical tact”—that enables instant acting and immediate judging when involved with students. This research project is a text-mediated (computer-publication) study of the structure of pedagogical tact and how tact functions improvisationally like a moral intuition in educational practitioners. It is a human science study of how practitoners change and deepen themselves by the process of reflecting—as subjects and as co-researchers—on pedagogical themes through the method of phenomenological writing. In one part of the research program, the human science model focusses on the pedagogical theme of children’s secrets in the formation of self, identity, and personal growth.

The publication oriented methodological model underlying this approach proposes that interpretive research cannot be separated from the textual practice of writing. This research program is being developed by integrating and elaborating in pragmatic directions European (hermeneutic phenomenological) and North American strands of qualitative research—combining the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences as disciplinary sources.

In sum: The objectives of the Human Science in Education Project are (1) to elaborate a human science research methodology; (2) to elaborate and sponsor a reflective theory of “pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact” based on this research methodology; (3) to test and pursue publication-based applications of the research-writing theory with educational practitioners and to develop publishable research data of this process; (4) to investigate the concept of the teacher-student “pedagogical relation” in learning.