CRADALL seminar: The potential of phenomenography to provide insights into teaching and learning
Gerlese will speak about phenomenography and its application, particularly in understanding experiences and learning in HE. This seminar will be of interest to staff across the university with an interest in SoTL, as well as education researchers.
Centre for R&D in Adult and Lifelong Learning Seminars
Date: Friday 28 November 2025
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Venue: Room 227, St Andrews Building
Category: Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Gerlese Åkerlind, Professor Emerita, Australian National University
Phenomenography provides a unique approach to thinking about the nature of teaching, learning, and students’ understanding of subject matter. From a phenomenographic perspective, all subject matter is seen as inherently multidimensional in nature, and poor vs sophisticated understandings of subject topics may be thought of in terms of differential awareness of key dimensions of those topics. From this perspective, poor understandings can be reframed as partial understandings, resulting from noticing some dimensions of a topic but not others.
Research has shown that these dimensions are not necessarily obvious to teachers, and are best derived from a phenomenographic study of variation in understandings amongst students. Individual understandings are grouped into categories of qualitatively similar understandings, and each category analysed for awareness and non-awareness of different dimensions of a topic. In this way, phenomenographic research identifies what dimensions students need to become aware of in order to develop the desired understanding of a topic, plus the order in which the dimensions should be highlighted.
Phenomenography has also been used to study teaching itself, in terms of variation amongst teachers in their understanding of teaching, and the key dimensions of teaching and learning highlighted by different ways of understanding it. This has led to an approach to teacher development that moves away from a focus on theory and methods to a focus on changing teachers’ personal understandings of what teaching is.
This seminar will present empirical examples from various disciplines and levels of education to illustrate the nature of phenomenographic research and its potential for improving student learning. Empirical examples of different ways of understanding teaching will also be presented, including a study of variation in understandings amongst doctoral students in education.