The purpose of this study was to acquire a philosophical basis of curriculum contents and it’s instructional method. The frame of inquiry employed in this study was based on Husserl’s later phenomenological approach to the nature of knowledge. Dom...
The purpose of this study was to acquire a philosophical basis of curriculum contents and it’s instructional method. The frame of inquiry employed in this study was based on Husserl’s later phenomenological approach to the nature of knowledge. Dominant thoughts in knowledge education todays consider the knowledge as universal and value-free. As the result, the students inner consciousness and their life-world are basically neglected in the classroom activities related to knowledge education. Regarding this issue, the study investigated the meaning of learners inner consciousness and their life-world.
Phenomenology in this study was considered as methodology to delve into the nature of knowledge and the foundation for this methodology was searched through epistemological principles and contents of phenomenologists view including Husserl, a prominent scholar of phenomenological methodology.
The questions investigated in this study were summarized as follows:
First, What are the problems in the existing view of knowledge demanding the phenomenological approach?
Second, How important is the role of the knower in related to the phenomenological nature of knowledge?
Third, What is the structure of knowledge education founded in phenomenological epistemology and what are the implications from this structure to curriculum contents and instructional method?
The results of this study were phrased as follows:
It is generally believed in positivism that knowledge is objective and universal, and the subject(the knower) is considered to be separated from the object(the knowledge). Consequently, the positivism rejects the inner consciousness of the knower in the process of knowing the object (knowledge) and therefore, school curriculum based upon this view pays little attention on the participants’(teachers and students) life situation and their dynamic participation in knowledge constituting activities.
On the contrary, phenomenology takes life-world as a foundation for knowledge building and it’s related theories. In phenomenology, knowledge is understood only in relation with the subject (the knower) in the context of his life-world. Hence, one of major tasks of phenomenology is to delve into the essential features of life-world of which structure is constructed inter-subjectively through each particulars.
Through this phenomenological discussion, some educational implications were obtained. Knowledge education can not successfully be performed without positive considerations of the inner worlds of both students and teachers. The phenomenological view provides the possibility of knowledge education by emphasizing the life-situation in curriculum activities. The concept of intersubjectivity discussed in this study shows us the possibility of building the commonalties between particulars and this possibility in turn provides us a philosophical basis for contents selection in curriculum. Furthermore, phenomenological epistemology leads us to believe that knowledge and experience of individual can be expanded through dialogues between them.
However, some issues remained to be investigated were summarized below. These are oversimplication of phenomenological approach in educational practice, relationship between consciousness and social structure, specificity of knowledge organization in phenomenology, and classification of subject matter and phenomenological knowledge. These problems need a thorough study in educational research, particularly in curriculum philosophy.