Phenomenological research approaches whilst well-established in the health sciences, have only recently begun to be applied in educational research. Farrell (2020) finds the underrepresentation of phenomenological research in education surprising, given that, as she says, 'education is founded on attending to and building upon the knowledge and experiences of others'. As phenomenological research gains momentum in the educational domain, researchers will seek to understand how it can be applied. Those undertaking phenomenological research are cautioned to familiarise themselves with its origins as a philosophy rather than a methodology (Farrell, 2020, p.1) wherein principles rather than methods are outlined. Despite the lack of prescription by way of methods, as research practice in the field has developed, it is apparent that studies that adopt phenomenological approaches depend, almost exclusively, on data generated through in-depth interviews. This is unsurprising given the focus on description in phenomenological inquiry but it opens up the question of what experiences might remain untold in the dissemination of findings from phenomenological studies.

In this paper, the richness of possibilities to illuminate lived experiences using multi-modal data generation tools is discussed. The paper draws on a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry into the nature of the lived experiences of upper primary school teachers’ and pupils’ relationships with one another. Hermeneutic “texts” were generated using embodied methods, visual methods and artefacts. In this paper, I suggest that inviting participants to describe their experiences through a variety of modes constituted an inclusive research design and offered the potential to unearth experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible. In this study, teacher participants were invited to bring three artefacts, which helped them to describe their relationship with the children in their classes, to an in-depth interview. The use of the artefacts created an inclusive interview dynamic giving a degree of control of the interview to the participants and allowed both myself as researcher and the interview participants to have an ‘effective joint referent’ (Westcott and Littleton, 2005, p. 148). Further, using the artefacts as part of the conversational interviews enhanced the depth of descriptions of the child-teacher relationship.

Finally, in the context of an increasing recognition of children’s participation in research from a rights perspective (UNCRC, Article 12), and mindful that oral language can present a barrier, I share my experiences of using embodied drama research methods in the exploration of children’s experiences of the child-teacher relationship. I argue for the generative potential of inviting children to ‘show’ as well as to ‘tell’ in phenomenological inquiry honouring the sometimes neglected idea of corporeal knowledge.

Hermeneutic phenomenology describes the methodology underpinning this enquiry into teachers’ and students’ ‘lived experiences’ of the student–teacher relationship in an Irish upper primary school context. Following Van Manen (1990, 2014) this study focused on five fundamental life-world themes used in phenomenological inquiry namely lived space (spatiality); lived body (corporeality); lived time (temporality) , lived relation (relationality) and lived things (materiality). ‘Lived body’ relates to the ‘felt sense’ dimension of bodily experience (Finlay, 2011) which, in this study, related to how it feels to be part of the child-teacher relationship. ‘Lived time’ concerns not clock time (van Manen, 1990) but how we experience time such as how time might seem to pass slowly or quickly in school. Likewise, ‘lived space’ relates to the way in which place is experienced such as the way in which a classroom can feel inviting or hostile. ‘Lived things’, van Manen (2014, p. 307) explains, incorporates physical objects as well as ‘thoughts, deeds, experiences, events and discoveries’ and in this study was concerned with teaching and learning episodes and experiences. The element of lived experience in focus in this study was teachers’ and children’s ‘lived relation’ with one another and whilst the five existentials, described above, unify in the form of the life-world ‘we can temporarily study the existentials in their differentiated aspects whilst realising that one existential always calls forth the other aspects’ (van Manen, p. 105). Therefore the five existentials were drawn upon during participant interviews to provide a starting point for discussing the child-teacher relationship where participants needed a concrete point of departure. Research participants included three teachers and five students from each of those teachers’ classes. Data generation featured the use of protocol writing and conversational interviews following van Manen (2014). Data were also generated, somewhat experimentally, through embodied drama methods and through using artefacts and visual methods drawing on the work of Mitchell (2011), Tinkler (2015) and Chappell and Craft (2011).

Phenomenological enquiry is gaining popularity in educational research particularly by those interested in first person experiences (Stolz, 2022) Data are almost exclusively generated using in-depth interviews. As phenomenological enquiry gains traction as a methodology in the field of educational research, where there is increasing necessity for inclusive practice, there may be a need to consider methods that move beyond dependence on oral language. The findings of this study reveal that using multi modal methods, specifically visual and embodied methods: 1. contributed to creating a more inclusive research design through affording choice in the generation of hermeneutic texts 2. enabled unexpected aspects of the life-worlds of participants to surface 3. afforded greater depth of description of the phenomenon under scrutiny (in this case the child-teacher relationship) These findings will be shared and supported with examples that will serve as a guide to others who wish to conduct phenomenological enquiry in educational research and to address a gap in the methodological literature with respect to conducting phenomenological research in education in general and with children, in particular.

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