Post-Intentional Phenomenology
This framed my understanding that knowledge of the phenomena is fluid, always becoming, since knowing is “changed to the extent that reality also moves and changes” (Horton & Freire, 1990, p. 101). P-IP researchers recognized that phenomena are not rigid, but are temporal and partial, the focus is on examining the essential features of the phenomenon “at a given point in time, for a given group of participants, contexts, or cultures” (Valentine et al., 2020, p. 466). Thus, post-intentional phenomenologists took into account the “multi-dimensionality, multi-stability, and the multiple ‘voices’ of things” (Ihde, 2003, p. 25) and the variant ways participants’ lifeworlds emerged. P-IP was theoretically linked to connectivism (Siemens, 2018) in that intentionality was a “commitment to the idea of connection – and that the meaningfulness of living and the lifeworld resides in the connectivity among humans, things, ideas, concepts, conflicts, etc., not in humans or in things or in ideas alone” (Vagle, 2018, p. 128).
Research within a P-IP paradigm shifted away from a notion of ‘giveness’ or that there is a “brute reality out there – present and fixed – with an essence that can be both immediately perceived … and brought to light and expressed in language” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 651). It shifted toward Derrida’s conception of différence (as cited in St. Pierre, 2013) whereby phenomena were transcendental illusions, contaminated by past, present, and future. It was shaped by Foucault’s focus on the ‘materiality of linguistic and discursive practice” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 652) where language and reality existed together. It followed an experimental Deleuzian ontology (St. Pierre, 2013) with lines of flight as a central concept, while rejecting binary logic in favour of a logic of connection (St. Pierre, 2013; Vagle, 2018). It was through the Deleuzian conceptions of assemblage and rhizomatics that the notion of becoming a digitally literate, open educational practitioner as a teacher educator was posited as “entangled, connected, indefinite, impersonal, shifting into different multiplicities” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 653). Rocha (2015) built on this conception of assemblage by describing the shifts in phenomenology as it moved from a focus on objects, on being, and on giveness, while adding his own reduction with a focus on offerings.
Since P-IP researchers must “examine practices rather than going deep, looking for origins and hidden meanings that exist outside of being” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 649), it was an appropriate theoretical framework for this research. It was through intentionality, or the “directional shape of experiences” (Ihde, 2012, p. 24), as evident through productions and provocations created with and without technologies, that the temporal, partial, and contextual features of highly ambiguous, emergent, and variant phenomena (Valentine et al., 2018) were revealed. This P-IP research relied on gathering rich data from a variety of sources and from lived-experiences “meant to stand as testimony, bearing witness” (hooks, 1994, p. 11). In this research, proxies for teacher educators’ MDL within their OEPr were revealed in writing, interviews, observations, media productions, discourses, and histories. Rocha (2015) referred to these as “offerings” (p. 6). In this way, the phenomena of becoming a media and digitally literate open educational practitioner in Canadian FoE was understood as a “relation of possible meanings being shaped, produced, and provoked” (Valentine et al., 2018, p. 467) and as a “movement against and beyond boundaries” (hooks, 1994, p. 12).
For P-IP researchers, reflexivity required a “dogged questioning of one’s own knowledge as opposed to a suspension of this knowledge” (Vagle, 2018, p. 82). This involved continual attention to moments where connection/disconnection become evident, where normality was assumed, where bottom lines were discovered, and where shock or insights emerged (Valentine, 2018). Research data were iteratively analyzed through wholistic, selective and detailed readings (van Manen, 2014) that shaped and crystallized the facets found within whole, parts, meanings, particularities, and unique assemblages. It was in these crystallizing moments that I, as a P-IP researcher, used reflexivity to open the potentialities of turning to wonder (Rocha, 2015; Vagle, 2018). It was in these moments when the lived experiences being researched created feelings of awe, perplexity, and surprise. In this way, the research and the writing of phenomenological research benefited from multi-modal expressions of visual, auditory, language, images, art, video, or music (Vagle, 2018; van Manen, 2014). From this review of P-IP, I confirmed that this framework is the best fit for this research.