This poster presentation presents the research design of a multi-perspective, national grant-funded research project at the newly established Center for Learning Research at the University of Innsbruck, in which a team of 12 doctoral candidates and one post-doc researcher set out to investigate phenomena of personal learning and development of 10-year-olds in their first year at pilot schools in Austria’s highly political reform project “Neue Mittelschule” (NMS). This reform project suspends tracking in lower secondary schools with the emphatic policy goal of raising academic achievement and thereby increasing access to higher education. Rather than to prove the success of the reform project, this study firmly places research in the reality of everyday school life with the aim of understanding the human experience of learning, its beginning and dramaturgy which can only disclose itself upon closure (Meyer-Drawe 2008). By taking a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, researchers capture the prereflexive, pretheoretical “lived experiences” of learners in the diverse classroom communities of the research sites to reveal learning and related phenomena. Data collection methods include shadowing, observation, focus groups as well as conversations with students, teachers and their guardians. Researchers capture the experiences of the learners in so-called “anecdotes” which are hermeneutically analysed. The focus of the poster is to address the ethical challenges regarding the researcher’s access to and their role in relation to the students, their teachers and their guardians. The dilemma of designing a “deep” study versus a broad sample of students in the context of diversity will also be highlighted, as well the particular challenge of openness: To what degree should students themselves be “involved in working out what constitutes the most fertile ground for developing insights” into their learning, as formulated by one reviewer.

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