Teaching phenomenological research as a method of therapeutic art-making: A Covid-19 case study

Abstract

This article is a case study about teaching undergraduate students to use hermeneutic phenomenological research methodology as a vehicle to make art which evokes the essence of lived experience. This study focuses on the phenomenon of living in a time of Coronavirus as human beings; 30 students were taught research steps to transform their experiences of living amidst a pandemic into phenomenological Covid-19 art. First, I taught students the craft of writing rich, descriptive, autobiographical anecdotes about lived experience, guided by Van Manen (1990) and Finlay’s (2012) approach to writing first-person phenomenological accounts. Second, I taught students to interpret and code their anecdotes to extract themes. Third, I guided students to transform the themes into phenomenological art, supported by Heidegger (1950), Merleau-Ponty (1945), and Van Manen’s (1990) affirmations of phenomenology as an aesthetic endeavour whereby art is the ideal language of phenomenology. A digital phenomenological art gallery was created to celebrate students’ work as a website which showcased Coronavirus paintings, songs, dance, video/film, photography, poetry and collages. This paper is methodological and pedagogical in nature, detailing step-by-step procedures in effort to inspire educators who teach qualitative methods to assign this arts-based phenomenological research project to students to foster healing through phenomenological art-making.