For some people, life goes on without much happening, while for others, major life-changing events occur during their lifetime. Having an extensive visual impairment or becoming blind as an adult is an example of an event that often changes the fundamentals of life. Based on lifeworld phenomenological theory and philosophy, this new life situation can be said to mean that the world changes if the body changes, since the world is experienced via our lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). Visual perception is central to our perceptual relationship with the world and it is essential to develop in-depth knowledge of how other senses can come into play. This is also about learning to deal with a new life situation. The question is therefore central to educational theory.
The purpose of this study is to use lifeworld phenomenological theory to understand what it means to have a severe visual impairment or become blind and how people learn to deal with this new life-situation. In addition, the study aims to develop a practice-based theory of changed life-situation and learning. It is about fundamentally understanding the existential situation of experiencing and learning to live in a changed lifeworld.
The empirical material on which the theory development is based consists of an empirical study where the aim was to study and clarify pedagogical processes with a focus on the learning of people with visual impairment. The theoretical work is also based on a previously conducted study (Berndtsson, 2001). As a theoretical basis, lifeworld phenomenological theory is used, focusing on human existence. The concept of lifeworld as developed by Heidegger (2013), Merleau-Ponty (2012) and Schutz (1962) is central as it offers an openness to the fact that the world can be experienced differently for different people and differently from time to time. The lifeworld here offers an openness to studying changes in life and thereby focusing on central pedagogical issues. As the study concerns changing relationships between life and the world, the lived body (Merleau-Ponty, 1912) is also a central starting point, not least because of how perception links the body and the world. Other theoretical starting points are lived space and lived time, intersubjectivity and social world, and horizon as both openness and limitation (van Peursen, 1977). The main focus of the study is the everyday lifeworld (Schütz, 1962), a world where people, through their actions and behaviors, shape a world together with others. Everyday activities are also central as the body, according to Schütz, can be seen as the tool that changes the world. In vision rehabilitation, other tools also come into play, such as the white cane, which needs to be learned to be used in order to get around in the new, changed world, which in itself includes existence, identity and the social world (Berndtsson, 2018). The study has also developed its own concepts such as existential body, perceptual body, social body and the body of activity.
The focus of this presentation is the developed practice-based theory. The starting point is the lifeworld changed by visual impairment and how this situation appears to the participants in the study. In many cases, the change can be described as a break in life as it is no longer possible to engage and act in the world in the same way as before. In accordance with the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (2012), the break can also be seen as a gap between life and the world. In this context, learning is seen as that which through experience and action is able to reconnect life and the world in its different dimensions (Bengtsson & Berndtsson, 2015).