Abstract
This study contends that phenomenography offers both a useful research method and practical tools for developing education and training for career practitioners. After introducing the basic principles of phenomenography, the study reviews previous research on its potential in developing pedagogical practices. It explores how the phenomenographic findings were utilized to design an online skills training programme for career practitioners. The study finds that phenomenographic research serves three practical pedagogical purposes: (1) revealing how learners understand certain concepts or phenomena, (2) elucidating how these understandings differ; and (3) identifying critical aspects in helping learners to widen and deepen their understanding.
Highlights
Since its emergence in the late 1970s, phenomenography has gained wide acceptance as a method of investigating the qualitatively different ways in which people experience or understand the same concept or phenomenon (e.g. Bowden & Green, 2005; Bowden & Marton, 1998; Bowden & Walsh, 2000; Marton, 1981, 1986, 1994; Marton & Booth, 1997)
We argue that phenomenography offers both a useful research method and practical tools for develop education and training for career practitioners
Based on an empirical example involving the design of a training programme for career practitioners, the present study confirms the utility of phenomenographic research as means of enhancing individual awareness of different ways of experiencing a target phenomenon
Summary
Since its emergence in the late 1970s, phenomenography has gained wide acceptance as a method of investigating the qualitatively different ways in which people experience or understand the same concept or phenomenon (e.g. Bowden & Green, 2005; Bowden & Marton, 1998; Bowden & Walsh, 2000; Marton, 1981, 1986, 1994; Marton & Booth, 1997). During the1990s, the focus shifted from the descriptive to the theoretical with Marton and Booth’s (1995) elaboration of phenomenographic theory, which conceptualized learning as an extension of awareness This invited exploration of what critical aspects of a given phenomenon are discerned by a learner in experiencing that phenomenon in a particular way (Runesson, 1999), and how different ways of experiencing a phenomenon may evolve. The phenomenographic approach is still rarely utilized for pedagogical planning and teaching in the education and training of guidance and counselling professionals, and the present study seeks to bridge this research gap. We go on to describe how the phenomenographic findings from a study of career practitioners’ conceptions of social media competency in career services were utilized to design a training programme for career practitioners
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