i’ve been thinking a lot about the work of Edmund Husserl, lately.
Husserl was a philosopher who taught at the universities of Halle-Wittenberg, Göttingen, and Freiburg. Among (many) other things, he is often credited with having taken the early work of others on phenomenology, and developing those ideas in to how the latter is understood today.
i have been influenced by phenomenology since at least my doctoral studies. Back in 2003 to 2006, i constructed my thesis on how novice geographers sought to establish intersubjectivity when presented with wayfinding tasks.
more recently, my work on the Six Learnings curriculum design framework has been predicated on embodied cognition, which in turn has some phenomenological roots, as well.
i published my seminal work on the Six Learnings back in 2009, and continued thinking about cognition, learning, and curriculum design. The following was how i phrased my thoughts back in 2014:
"The design of curriculum for formal learning environments often presumes upon (whether explicitly or implicitly) the intuitions that learners bring to the table. These intuitions - to the extent that they exist in the first place - may have been developed through personal experience and prior knowledge, often through non-formal learning such as play. Such intuitions are, however, tacit by definition, and their qualities would vary from learner to learner. Both this tacit nature and this heterogeneity work against the explicit recognition of the role that such intuitions play in the curriculum design of more formalised learning environments; yet they are of critical importance - at the very least in terms of shaping the pre- and misconceptions that learners have, and consequently the likelihood that what is learnt endures beyond the immediate formalised experience. It is also proposed that the nature of such intuitions varies by subject discipline - intuitions about geography are likely different from intuitions about physics, for instance - and that such variations across disciplines need to be recognised, investigated and elaborated upon if learning environments in particular - and curricular designs as a whole - are to be truly effective."
At its heart, then, Disciplinary Intuitions is fundamentally phenomenological in its orientation. The central problematic articulated by Disciplinary Intuitions is that between phenomenology's 'lived experiences' and curriculum design. A curriculum designed from the perspective of Disciplinary Intuitions recognises the diversity of such lived experiences and attempts to facilitate greater intersubjectivity among learners.
Husserl’s earliest writings on phenomenology - Reine Phänomenologie - are now more than a century-old. They remain extremely relevant to the issues facing the learning sciences today.
Consider the two diagrams, juxtaposed below. One is a screenshot of an avatar rezzing a prim in Second Life. The other is a photo of interaction with Augmented Reality. i will leave you to mull over the similarities, and the differences, as well as on what Husserl might have made of these, were he alive today :-)