Max van Manen

University of Alberta | UAlberta · Department of Secondary Educations

When looking through phenomenology articles in human science and philosophy journals, we may be excused to get the impression that they offer an inconsistent array of phenomenology publications. In this article, we describe three simple but helpful distinctions for determining some order: first, the great foundational publications; second, exegetic...

This rebuttal responds to the article “Getting it quite wrong” (published in this journal issue of QHR). My work is described as “amassing experiential descriptions,” simply aiming to “reproduce the original experience unaltered,” naively claiming “that the fundamental question of phenomenology is to understand what it is like to have this or that...

I appreciate this opportunity to join Jonathan Smith in his rebuttal to my discussion of the meaning and method of his interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Different forms of inquiry make unique contributions to our understanding of professional practices of psychology, education, pedagogy, nursing, medicine, and other health sciences. S...

Phenomenology, peekaboo, and play are notions that may not tempt the reader to take a paper very seriously. Phenomenology is a philosophical form of qualitative research that is guided more often by the fortuitous serendipity of contemplative insights than by the rationality of reproducible social science procedures. Peekaboo is an infant game of t...

In this article, I try to think through the question, “What distinguishes phenomenology in its original sense?” My intent is to focus on the project and methodology of phenomenology in a manner that is not overly technical and that may help others to further elaborate on or question the singular features that make phenomenology into a unique qualit...

In The Tact of Teaching bestselling author Max van Manen offers teachers at every stage an original and inspiring interpretation of the notion of pedagogy, one that searches for its roots in the experience of in loco parentis. Using dozens of anecdotes and scenes taken directly from life in classrooms, including many from the often-neglected domain...

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Where Are We When We Write?Writing PublicCyberwritingWriting the Distance to the OtherEntering the Page: Proximity and DistanceWriting RevisitedNoteReferences

Through cable and wireless connections at home and at work, through Wi-Fi networks and wireless spots in hotels, coffee shops, and town squares, we are indeed connected to each other. But what is the phenomenology of this connection? Technologies of expression such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking technologies increasingly...

Phenomenology is an approach to qualitative inquiry that is grounded in certain traditions of philosophy and the humanities, and that aims to reflect on prereflective human experience. The phenomenological researcher attempts to recapture and express in language experiential meanings as lived through, before we conceptualize, abstract, or explain t...

In this paper we explore the phenomenon of writing online. We ask, ‘Is writing by means of online technologies affected in a manner that differs significantly from the older technologies of pen on paper, typewriter, or even the word processor in an off-line environment?’ In writing online, the author is engaged in a spatial complexity of physical,...

2007. The author, Max van Manen, assigns to Phenomenology & Practice the right of first publication and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive license to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. Any other usage is prohibite...

Phenomenology of practice is formative of sensitive practice, issuing from the pathic power of phenomenological reflections. Pathic knowing inheres in the sense and sensuality of our practical actions, in encounters with others and in the ways that our bodies are responsive to the things of our world and to the situations and relations in which we...

Have you ever said this or heard someone say this: “I have done all of my data analysis— I just have to write it down.” Or, “I just have to write it up”? I will suggest that within the context of phenomenological inquiry, it is not necessarily helpful to try to assist researchers learning “how to write down” their reflections or “how to write up” t...

Care, or caring, is one of the central concepts in North American health science and nursing theories. Yet, experiential accounts of caring show dimensions of meaning that have received little attention in the literature. The author compares the meanings of the terms care and caring with their counterparts in other languages. He explores the signif...

This paper attempts to show how the pedagogical task of teaching involves cultivating pathic dimensions of the epistemology of teaching practice. Teacher knowledge is pathic to the extent that the act of teaching depends on the teacher's personal presence, relational perceptiveness, tact for knowing what to say and do in contingent situations, thou...

In 1975 Herbert Spiegelberg seized a title for a text on phenomenology that still speaks to the pragmatic sensibilities of many of my colleagues and graduate students. A visitor glances at my bookshelves and notices Spiegelberg’s title Doing Phenomenology; the book is pulled and perused. Some of the section headings make attractive promises: “A new...

One of the first to apply phenomenological method in the Netherlands was the Philosopher and linguist Hendrick J. Pos (1898–1955). He invited Husserl in 1928 to give the so-called Amsterdamer Vorträge (Amsterdam Lectures) on phenomenological psychology. But it was not until after World War II that phenomenology became more deeply established in Dut...

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As educators are challenged to develop a moral vocabulary of teaching, such a language needs to be sensitive to the way that pedagogical relations are lived and experienced. This exploration into the meanings of care offers a phenomenological puzzle. It concerns the relation between, on the one hand, commonly accepted and professionally received me...

How do we experience our body in illness or health? This is a question that can easily comprise a book-length study. In this article, a selection of basic distinctions is explored that may be especially appropriate for pursuing this question. Increasingly the health science professional is becoming aware that people require not only health care ass...

This article explores aspects of the relation between language, meaning, and method in human science research. Phenomenology poses two distinct challenges: the thematic and the expressive dimensions of inquiry, which have implications for semantic and mantic, discursive and nondiscursive understanding. When we turn from thematic meaning to expressi...

Schön (1987) has suggested that professional education undervalues practical knowledge and grants privileged status to intellectual scientific and rational knowledge forms that may only be marginally relevant to practical acting. This is not just an issue of sociology of knowledge. The literature of teaching and teacher education has shown that pro...

The preceding articles in this section were presented at a symposium of the American Education Research Association Annuai Conference (1992). I was asked to respond to these papers and to their focus on "educational discourse and the ways such discourse constructs and reflects notions of self, other, and the profession" (Barritt, AERA Calen dar). I...

Partant de l'hypothese de Langeveld (M. J.) selon laquelle les relations eleve-maitre ne peuvent etre eclairees que si l'on admet la nature normative de la reflexion et de l'action pedagogiques, l'A. tente de determiner phenomenologiquement les normes de l'activite pedagogique dans les activites quotidiennes avec l'enfant sur le terrain et a domici...

Cover Blurb: Researching Lived Experience introduces an approach to qualitative research methodology in education and related fields that is distinct from traditional approaches derived from the behavioral or natural sciences—an approach rooted in the “everyday lived experience” of human beings in educational situations. Rather than relying on abst...

Anecdote as a Methodological Device In 1983, when the Dutch author Lize Stilma was invited to pub lish some of her wonderfully evocative narratives in Phenorne nology + Pedagogy, she was pleased that the journal would translate and publish her stories. However, she did not like the suggestion that her stories would be gathered in a section under th...

Un nombre important d'éducateurs se sont récemment faits critiques d'un mode courant de pensée qui se veut instrumental et rationnel, lequel mode prédomine lorsqu'il s'agit de recherche dans le domaine des programmes d'études. On a mentionné que la phénoménologie et l'herméneutique pourraient fournir d'autres paradigmes de recherche, mais jusqu'ici...

This paper argues that the social studies curriculum should extend the concept of critical thinking to social criticism. The purpose of social criticism is to foster a society that is characterized by community, freedom, and equality. In essence, it raises the question of how to live. The social critic looks beyond the symptoms of a social problem...

Il y a deux ans les auteurs ont fait faire des évaluations d'une sélection du matériel du programme d'études sociales (histoire et géographie) rédigé par des éducateurs canadiens et ils ont publié les résultats de ces évaluations dans "The History and Social Science Teacher." Dans cet article ils ébauchent les origines et le contenu du schéma d'éva...

An interpretation of the concept of the practical for the field for curriculum must pay critical attention to the philosophies of knowledge in which the interpretation is grounded. The main traditions of social science (broadly conceived as the empirical-analytic, the hermeneuticphenomenological, and the critical-dialectical) each have associated w...

The notion of the practical as a language for curriculum and the concept of curriculum as the study of educational experience are investigated and elaborated for their methodological implications. It is shown philosophically and by means of concrete illustrations that different forms of curriculum enquiry produce different forms of discourse and di...

Traducción de: Chilhood's secrets Incluye índice Incluye bibliografía Esta obra realiza una interesante exploración del sentido y la importancia de los secretos en la infancia, cuestionando las ideas que los señalan como indeseables o insanos, y planteando su relación con el desarrollo de identidad, responsabilidad personal, privacidad, autonomía.

Traducción de: The Tone of Teaching Obra que aborda la comunicación entre profesores y sus alumnos, niños y jóvenes, en su trato cotidiano, de manera que se desarrolle la habilidad de dirigirse a cada uno de ellos de manera individual, según sus propias singularidades y, por lo tanto, se aprenda a verlos, escucharlos y responderles según la situaci...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 1973. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 252-264). Microfiche of typescript.

Los autores abordan la relevancia de la producción de conocimiento educativo y su recreación en la práctica educativa a la que no pueden ser ajenos los profesionales de la educación. El libro se estructura en tres partes: la primera dedicada a investigación y conocimiento en educación, en la que se abordan los temas relacionados con la investigació...