/// methodology

Writing also separates us from lived experience and through this separation we are able to reflect on everyday experience. Immersed in the experience, the experience is seamless without reflection. To step back in reflection, the edges begin to be clear, and slowly we began to see what has been nothing more than a sequence of activities.

"Writing decontextualizes thought from practice and yet it returns thought to praxis…. [It] focuses our reflective awareness by disregarding the incidentals and contingencies that constitute the social, physical, and biographic context of a particular situation. But as we gain in this manner a deeper sense of meanings embedded in some isolated aspect of practice we are also being prepared to become more discerning of the meaning of new life experiences." (van Manen, 1990, p. 128)

"Writing objectifies thought into print and yet it subjectifies our understanding of something that truly engages us" (van Manen, 1990, p. 129). For van Manen, "research is writing in that it places consciousness in the position of the possibility of confronting itself, in a self-reflective relation" (p. 129). In phenomenological text, "it lets us see that which shines through, that which tends to hide itself…. To read or write phenomenologically requires that we be sensitively attentive to the silence around the words by means of which we attempt to disclose the deep meaning of the world" (p. 131).

/// Phenomenology as an Educational Research Method by van Manen

http://otal.umd.edu/~paulette/Dissertation/methodology/phenomenology.html