ABSTRACT. This speculative and theoretical analysis, born of a conceptual phenomenological model of research grounded in textual analysis, reveals for the reader the common ontological threads connecting three phenomenological readings of education and curriculum: William Pinar’s “curriculum as a complicated conversation,” Dwayne Huebner’s phenomenology of “poetic” language in relation to curriculum writing, and Michael Bonnett’s contemporary phenomenology of education and the teacher-pupil relationship as a “form of the poetic.” The results of the analysis propose an alternative mode of phenomenological inquiry that incorporates a non-technical and non-representational language related to a renewed relationship to the human’s Being-in-the-world as a learner that stands in sharp contrast to and transcends the standardized technical-scientific modes of research and thought regimes that govern much of contemporary education in the age of Social Efficiency. The essay demonstrates that the poetic language of phenomenology holds the possibility to facilitate the re-conceptualization of the “world of education,” opening the potential for educators and students to appropriate that world in new and unique ways, occurring through a form of revelatory, emancipatory, and attuned “conversation” that offers the hope of adopting an informed and enlivened stance amid the unfolding of education as an ontological phenomenon that lives beyond the grip of metaphysical instrumentalism. pp. 167–202

Keywords: phenomenology; education; teacher–pupil relations; poetic language; continental philosophy

How to cite: Magrini, James M. (2016), “A Conceptual-Phenomenological Approach to Exploring Education: Re-conceiving Standardized Curriculum in Terms of a Poetic, Transcendent, and Complicated Conversation,” Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 15: 167–202.

Received 27 October 2015 • Received in revised form 4 December 2015
Accepted 5 December 2015 • Available online 1 April 2016