Experience of an Elementary School Teacher’s Inner Journey in Implementing a School as a Learning Community through Hermeneutic Phenomenology

Abstract

This study examines the challenges and experiences an elementary school teacher encountered while implementing the concept of school as a learning community. In this study, teaching scenes and the inner journey were analyzed and inspected with the approach of hermeneutic phenomenology. The teacher’s inner journey unfolded through several phases: “Self-awareness: Silence before dawn, prelude to the transformation of teachingˮ, “Awareness: The first light of morning, deciding the path towards the school as learning communityˮ, “Awareness: The first light of dawn, ‘experiencing’ the school as school as learning communityˮ, “Awakening: The morning glow filling the sky, the change of the teacher’s beliefs”, and “Enlightenment: The sunrise in the east, implementing theories related to school as a learning community.ˮ Throughout this study, the researcher shows how she became acquainted with the concept of school as a learning community, observed teaching scenes in Japan, and integrated the key events into her own teaching practice. The process of adopting the school as a learning community concept was documented through self-narration from a holistic to a detailed content perspective. The composition of categories and content, along with reflection on pivotal events, was achieved through the analyzation of hermeneutic phenomenology. The researcher’s goal was to leverage narrative accounts of stories and experiences from teacher-student interactions to guide elementary school teachers toward becoming listeners during teacher-student co-learning, bridges for student-teacher collaborative learning, learners through self-reflection, and organizers of cooperative learning among students. This approach aims to provide elementary school teachers with effective suggestions for future student-teacher interactions in the classroom.

Keywords

• hermeneutic phenomenology
• narrative inquiry
• school as learning community