Methodology of studying values and meanings of teacher education: hermeneutical approach

Abstract

The hermeneutical approach as a traditional one for philosophy and philology, but quite new for educational science, can complement axiological approach in studying value-semantic aspects of teacher education. Pedagogic hermeneutics is a developing direction of humanitarian culture studies, based on comprehension of pedagogic reality’s objects, presented in form of a text and studied with help of a text, taking into account social and individual experience. At the same time, the text is interpreted in hermeneutics both literally and broadly, in the second case as a text can be taken any sign system, including pedagogic processes, systems, phenomena, relationships and other objects accessible to potential comprehension and interpretation by a researcher. This article provides justification for use of the hermeneutical approach as a methodology for studying values of teacher education. The author highlights a set of principles of pedagogic hermeneutics – the hermeneutic circle, information pre-understanding, dialogue understanding, text contextuality, superior understanding. Hermeneutical methods of studying the teacher education values which go back to philosophical or philological knowledge (terminological analysis, intellectual dialogue with the text’s author, diachronic analysis of the text, metaphorisation and demetaphorisation) concretise those principles. A mechanism of hermeneutical methodology, its driving forces, term base and main provisions of the hermeneutical approach in relation to studying teacher education are presented.