Researching Lived Experience introduces an approach to qualitative research methodology in education and related fields that is distinct from traditional approaches derived from the behavioral or natural sciences—an approach rooted in the “everyday lived experience” of human beings in educational situations. Rather than relying on abstract generalizations and theories, van Manen offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation. The book offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself (...) to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material that forms the basis for textual reflections. Van Manen also discusses the part played by language in educational research, and the importance of pursuing human science research critically as a semiotic writing practice. He focuses on the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in human science research, and offers methods for structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied. Finally, van Manen argues that the choice of research method is itself a pedagogic commitment and that it shows how one stands in life as an educator. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

Recent research has found diat family caregivers do not discuss their caregiving in terms of tasks but instead describe their care as shaped by concerns, commitments and goals. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the ways in which nurses approach die family caregiving process and to explore possibilities for evolving nursing knowledge by questioning existing practice in die light of developing insight into die ways in which being a family caregiver is meaningful. A critique of die philosophical orientations (...) of rationalism and empiricism provides a platform to discuss the merits of a Heideggerian phe-nomenological approach in assisting nurses to better understand family caring experience. Such critique serves to support the notion of displacing die traditional scientific view as die prime means of disclosing trudi, acknowledging alternative ways of knowing. (shrink)