Understanding transitions in educational organizations requires an understanding of how actors in the field deal with the tensions between experiences of the past and those of an emerging future (Scharmer 2007). Because of their formative effect on the individuals involved in transition processes we call them transformative experiences which are usually embedded in the complexity of the educational context. In this symposium three organizational contexts from three different countries will be presented which are connected with transition processes occurring on different system levels: The Austrian paper offers insights into a school reform model in secondary education dealing with the macro level of transformational experiences. A joint paper covering Switzerland and Austria highlights the experiences of school principals in transition processes on the meso level of the school system. The Italian paper looks at the transition of individual students transferring from primary to lower secondary education dealing with the micro level of transformational experiences. All papers are based on a phenomenological approach studying the personal experiences in the respective transition. Using this perspective, the three presentations do not only show how people and systems change as a result of transition but see transition itself as a transformative experience (Schratz & Walker 1995). As will be shown in the three presentations, the evidence-generating nature of transition has an impact on educational research. Practitioners become the drivers of research, revealing gaps and needs through innovation. This switch from evidence-based to evidence-generating practice has significant implications for the roles of researchers, in particular in applied education research. Therefore an approach is used which uses the potential of phenomenological narratives in form of vignettes (Schratz, Schwarz & Westfall-Greiter 2012) and anecdotes (Schratz, Ammann & Eckart 2015) as phenomenological narratives for research on transitions in educational organizations. Vignette and anecdote research is a form of qualitative research where different methods are used to approach the experiences happening to students, teachers or principals. For van Manen (1990) vignettes and anecdotes are narratives and the result of the research process. Crafting vignettes and anecdotes is theoretically grounded and argued among others with Husserl’s phenomenological epoché. This process aims at bringing the researcher back to the things themselves (zu den Sachen selbst!). The symposium will discuss the potential of vignettes and anecdotes especially for research on transition of educational organizations by presenting the results of the three different projects from the three countries where anecdotes or/and vignettes have been used so far on the different levels of the system (micro, meso, macro).

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