Being an educator as “having-been”

Abstract

My doctoral study explored the phenomenon of “being an educator” in higher education, specifically, in the niche field of youth worker education. Using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, I conducted interview conversations with Australian Youth Work lecturers about their lived experiences of being an educator in the university. I then drew on Heidegger's account of temporality when interpreting these stories, which revealed ontological dynamics that, though integral to a person's everyday experiences of “being” as an educator (including my own), had become concealed from me in the everyday of teaching. Re-seeing what had become hidden enabled me to renew and expand my own pre-understandings of how it “is” to be in the university work-world as an educator. In this chapter, I focus on just one of Heidegger's notions that captured my thinking, helping to unlock my interpretive analysis of crafted stories and enriched my pre-understandings. Encountering Heidegger's notion of “having-been-ness” enabled me to re-see how, as human beings, having a sense of our own living past is essential to our being as educators in the world. Heidegger's unpacking of ways we exist as “having-been” also illuminated variable ways that educators are always living in relationship to their own having-been-ness. I present examples of participants' stories, accompanied with some interpretive comments, to reveal how an ontological interplay, in relation to an educator's own having-been-ness, is mostly taken-for-granted in the everydayness of teaching and working in the university sector. Overall, I show how engaging with Heidegger's writings on everyday temporality can be useful for the task of interpreting phenomenological data for hidden yet essential ontological aspects of phenomena.