Phenomenography and the representation of conceptual uncertainty: A comment on Moffitt

Abstract

Earlier on I accepted the invitation by the journal editors of Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning (STEL) to review Philip Moffitt’s paper “Engineering academics and technology enhanced learning; A phenomenographic approach to establish conceptions of scholarly interactions with theory”. My interest in this paper is multi-faceted. Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in Higher Education (HE) is an area of specialisation I have long been interested in, and now increasingly so because of my new work remit in that direction. Further to this, I am attracted to phenomenography as a research approach. In this commentary, I would like to make a few comments about representation of concepts, dealing with uncertainty, and the relevance of those topics for academic development. I came across phenomenography when enrolled in the innovative semi-structured “TEL & e-Research” doctoral programme1 at Lancaster University a decade ago. I went on to use phenomenographic methods for taking forward the doctoral thesis exploring aspects of the student experience of using networked technologies for learning (Cutajar, 2014). Past the doctorate, I did another phenomenographic study investigating the academic’s experience of networked technologies for teaching (Cutajar, 2018). What I find really useful about phenomenography is the neat ‘representation’ phenomenographic methods permit us for understanding perceptions, conceptualisations, approaches and experiencing of a phenomenon as a spectrum of variance. One such example would be Table 2 in Moffitt’s (2020) paper neatly representing variation in academics’ conceptualisation of scholarly interactions with theory in TEL, inclusive of the structural and referential aspects of this variation. Besides, phenomenography and its focus on the person-world relation (Bowden, 2005; Marton & Booth, 1997) gave me a way to work around ontological questions I find impossible to answer. For example: Is there an objective truth? Is there a reality out there, or it all a creation in my own mind? In consideration of the recursive nature of social phenomena, I found it a means for giving some logical sense to the chaos of person-phenomenon relationships I observe within me and without.