This chapter describes how seven disciplinary bottlenecks from four diverse disciplines were
analyzed using a phenomenological perspective and includes a discussion of embodied knowing
and implications for educators.
Conscious Connections: Phenomenology and Decoding the Disciplines
Genevieve Currie
If I were to tell you where my greatest feeling… of my earthly existence has been, I
would have to confess: It has always, here and there, been in this kind of in-seeing, in the
indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of …seeing into the heart of things. (Rilke
1987)
Introduction
Decoding the Disciplines is a process to increase student learning by helping educators to unpack
complex disciplinary knowledge (Pace and Middendorf 2004). As described in Boman, Currie,
MacDonald, Miller-Young, Yeo, and Zettel (this issue), a team of researchers began as a Faculty
Learning Community (FLC) and studied the Decoding process over two years. The FLC
interviewed each other in a series of ‘Decoding the Disciplines’ interviews and eventually
opened up this opportunity for other faculty at our university. Participants were invited to
identify a bottleneck, which Pace and Middendorf (2004) describe as a phenomenon or concept
that students struggle with and are unable to successfully understand to move forward in thinking
and discovery. The interviewees and their bottlenecks are described in detail in Chapter 2
(Miller-Young and Boman, this issue), where an inductive analysis of the interviews elicited
many common themes, which were classified into ways of thinking, ways of practicing, and
ways of being. Other chapters in this issue explore the interviews from hermeneutic and identity
theory perspectives (Yeo; MacDonald this issue). After reading and reviewing the interviews I

chose the method of phenomenology as a “meaning-giving method of inquiry” (Van Manen
2014, 16) to understand the interviewees’ texts on disciplinary knowledge surrounding ways of
practicing.
Phenomenology influences a thoughtful attentive practice by revealing the meanings of
human experience and is concerned with the study of life as we experience it (Van der Zalm and
Bergum 2000). This type of inquiry makes life experience more conscious (Polkinghorne 1983).
Through reflection on the transcribed interviews, I became aware that the elements of a
phenomenological perspective shed light on ways of practicing, particularly in terms of the lived
experience of acquiring disciplinary knowledge, embodied knowing, and preflective practice.
The Decoding interviews helped participants to reveal the lived experience of acquiring
disciplinary knowledge. The method of phenomenology as a system of inquiry (Van Manen
2014) will be explored in how it can be applied to the Decoding process. I will then use this
perspective to consider lived experience, prereflective practice, and embodiment which were
uncovered during the Decoding interviews, and conclude with implications for educators.
Phenomenology as a Method of Inquiry
Phenomenology is a philosophical method of inquiry that studies the structure of experience and
consciousness experienced by individuals in everyday life (Smith 2013). Phenomenology can
reveal practical forms of behavior and actions as they appear through consciousness, and
describes and interprets these experiences to "unfold meanings" as they are lived in everyday
existence (Laverty 2003, 4). Phenomenologists believe that to be human is to be embedded and
immersed in the world, and an understanding of life experience is based on a process which is
contextual, subjective, intersubjective and evolving (Merleau-Ponty 1945). Phenomenology is
interested in getting to the descriptive heart of a particular experience, to its essence. In Van

Manen's (1990) terms, “a good phenomenological description that constitutes the essence of
something is construed so that the structure of a lived experience is revealed to us in such a
fashion that we are now able to grasp the nature and significance of this experience in a hitherto
unseen way” (39).
The phenomenological lenses of the philosophers Merleau-Ponty and Van Manen will be
used in this chapter to describe and interpret the conscious and unconscious experience within
ways of practicing surrounding learning and teaching disciplinary knowledge, and the
bottlenecks that may ensue.
The Decoding Interviews: Modeling the Process of Phenomenology
The use of the phenomenology as a lens for inquiry provides a starting point for interpretation of
disciplinary knowledge. The interviews use open ended questions to unpack and reveal a faculty
member’s own thoughts around a disciplinary bottleneck they are encountering with their
students. In our study, some bottlenecks were cognitive, but others were epistemological and
ontological (Miller-Young and Boman, this issue). The initial interview questions were taken
from the Decoding the Disciplines work by Pace and Middendorf (2004). Questions emerged
during the interview process but usually started with: “Tell me about your bottleneck?” Typically
Decoding uses cognitive probes to uncover tacit knowledge such as: "How did you know? How
did you acquire this knowledge yourself in order to teach it? How would you do that kind of
thinking? How do you know when you have got it?” We also used interview questions
surrounding pictures, models and metaphors such as: "What does this knowledge look like to
you? Can you describe it for me in a picture or metaphor?" (Pace and Middendorf 2004).
However, our interview questions evolved over time as the FLC noticed that faculty often drew
on experiences to describe their bottlenecks, particularly when they were having trouble

articulating their thinking process. This led intuitively to asking more phenomenological
questions of inquiry which involved the sensory perception of experiencing the phenomena:
“How did you get the sense that you know this? How have you personally experienced this
knowledge? What is it about this lived experience that speaks to you? What does it feel like
when you have got it?" It is interesting to note that with non-cognitive bottlenecks identified by
faculty, interviewers began to use a line of questioning involving more experiences of the body,
but even in very cognitive bottlenecks (such as the engineering example I will describe later) an
embodied sense of the concept was revealed.
Initially the Decoding questions could be baffling and overwhelming to answer. Faculty
described a sense of frustration of having to explain themselves in explicit terms. As Bonnie
stated when asked how she knew which story idea to pursue for a journalism story: “Yeah, ...like
how is it that I just know?? I just KNOW…” She goes on to describe that the disciplinary
knowledge is part of the journalism profession and has been passed down to others, but remains
as tacit knowledge as it is not verbalized or written down explicitly but comes through exposure
to experiencing the disciplinary phenomena first hand.
During the interviews, faculty also described when they personally became more
conscious of disciplinary phenomena, which is aligned with phenomenology. Colin a professor
of drama, became more conscious of his discipline when he described helping his students learn
the art of conveying human emotions on the stage, and realized: "That is one of the biggest
things I do [with my students], I expand the attention.” This is inherently phenomenological. As
Smith (2013) writes,
…much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but may become
conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or

think about something. We should allow, then, that the domain of phenomenology — our
own experience — spreads out from conscious experience into semi-conscious and even
unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly
invoked in our experience (3).
The phenomenological perspective enabled me to see how the Decoding questions evolved over
time as interviewers and faculty became more conscious of phenomena and the sensory
experiences that were revealed during the interviews.
Ways of Practicing and Disciplinary Knowledge
As the FLC conducted the Decoding interviews we heard faculty addressing the question of how
they came to know their discipline and what it meant to them. We categorized these responses as
'ways of practicing' (Entwistle 2005) which is how we acquire knowledge about our disciplines
as we work within them, and describes a dynamic relationship between the self and the discipline
through practice. Van Manen (2014) describes a phenomenology of practice as the "....practice of
living, as opening up possibilities for creative formative relations between being and acting,
between who we are and how we act, between thoughtfulness and tact" (69-70). Within the
Decoding interviews and in thinking about disciplinary knowledge, faculty members described
living the experience of the discipline as practitioners or people within the practice and not
thinking about what they were learning while in the moment experiencing the phenomena.
Through the interviews faculty began to describe how their experience helped them understand
disciplinary knowledge. This understanding is reflected in Louisa’s comments as she described
how she has come to know nursing, “... I have seen it and I learned from experience, I learned
from practice and, I guess, you know, you learn from examples, either from your own practice or
from watching others and how they have dealt with things.” This idea aligns with

phenomenology as knowledge is achieved through the nature of consciousness and increased
awareness, or an ontological or subjective perspective (Smith 2013). The inquiry into this
conscious experience entails description and interpretation of the living sense of the experience.
It is through interpretation (visible in the Decoding interviews) that we give expression to this
experience. As the lived experience is deconstructed and unpacked, phenomenology tries to
make explicit the structures of meaning in the lived experience (Van Manen 2014, 11). Lived
experience becomes the starting point for understanding the phenomenon of interest. As
Merleau- Ponty writes: “The world is not what I think, but what I live through….” (1945, xvixvii).
The faculty members were able to recount what they had learned from their ways of
practicing over time in their disciplines. Their experiences are congruent with phenomenological
inquiry where new meanings may emerge about phenomena that draws "something forgotten
into visibility" (Harman 2007, 92). Juan Carlos a journalism professor stated how he has come
to know journalism and his place within it: “....I am conscious of voice in journalism...I am
conscious of the machinery and the process by which the journalism is produced, and I have
seen it all from the inside and so I know what it is, and that is where a true critique of any piece
of writing, I think, has to start, with an understanding of the conditions of production of it – of
that piece.” Wendy a nursing professor discussed how nursing was a science and an art, and she
expressed how she now had the perspective that the art of nursing was learned while doing
nursing. It became part of her lived experience of being a nurse and was now part of her way of
practicing:
I developed that myself; I had some of it but I had to develop it, and I continue to develop
it. So maybe that is part of the art of conversation, or the art of asking those bigger

questions, and the art of seeing that as the role of the nurse…So not just conceptually we
talk about it, but also how are you going to do this with, your patients or the family so
they get more comfortable with that?
Louisa highlighted how she cannot turn off the disciplinary knowledge of performing a nursing
assessment and continues her ways of practicing in everyday activities of daily living: "I walk
down the street and I see people with large abdomens and I am thinking, 'You have heart failure
or liver failure,' right? ... I see people with grey skin and I am thinking, 'You need to stop
drinking. You need to stop smoking.' Like these are things... you are always assessing." As we
explored the ‘ways of practicing’, faculty members intuitively described the process of what
phenomenologists call the “prereflective.” This idea will be described next.
Prereflective Practice
Phenomenologists discuss that to be aware of what is around us, we must bring things into our
consciousness (Van Manen 1990). This act of becoming conscious is part of what Heidegger
framed as ‘Being- in- the- world’ or human everyday existence (Annells 1996, 706). When we
become more conscious of phenomena, we become more embodied in the world and according
to Van Manen (1990), our bodies become more infused with consciousness. We relate more to
the world as we wonder and interpret things, processes, and activities.
We must distinguish the prephenomenal being of experience, their being before we have
turned toward them in reflection, and their being as phenomena. As Husserl (1991) said,
When we turn toward the experience attentively and grasp it, it takes on a new
mode of being: it becomes "differentiated," "singled out." And this differentiating
is precisely nothing other than the grasping; and the differentiatedness is beinggrasped, being the object of our turning-towards (132).

Phenomenological inquiry helps us to gain insights to how we experience the world
prereflectively in how we view and interact with our everydayness. Prereflection is about seeing
phenomena in a new light, not relying on our previous ways of categorizing experience. ". ...in
order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of
it...."(Merleau-Ponty 1945, xiv).
This idea of being preflective and not categorizing phenomena when they are experienced
emerged in one of the journalism interviews. Bonnie spoke about the idea of allowing herself to
fully experience her story ideas with a fresh perspective. She stated: “I am really friendly with all
my story ideas, like I just really respect them and think ‘yeah, this could be, this could be...so I
am very friendly with them… things don’t pop into my head that I immediately reject as stupid or
not worth pursuing.”
A phenomenological inquiry explores what is given in moments of prereflective,
prepredicative experience- experiences as we live through them (Van Manen 2014, 27). The
Decoding interviews provided insights into the experience of “knowing the discipline” in this
kind of prereflective way, in a way that intertwines reflection and experience in an immediate
sense. Colin, the drama professor, highlighted that he reads a play upward of 60 times in order to
make the nuances and complexities of the work more conscious and as a way to rediscover first
experience. He asked himself 6 questions which I align with prereflective practice and the art of
turning towards an experience to single it out:
… there are … five questions, yeah – that you have to use to sort of explore and give
them circumstance around, like ‘Who am I? Where am I? When am I?’ and ‘Why am I?”
meaning what is the context of events and histories that have lead me to this exact
moment. ‘For what purpose am I?” so for what am I trying to achieve and what is my

purpose within this? And then there is a sixth question that you start doing around the
end, ‘What am I doing?
In this sense he draws himself back to the present moment of practice.
The Decoding interviews revealed how faculty described and interpreted how they came to
know their disciplines in deeply experiential ways. This experiential knowing was often an
'embodied knowing' which will be discussed next.
Embodied Knowing
The interviews demonstrated how each faculty member’s disciplinary knowledge was
experienced first-hand. Merleau-Ponty (1945), in The Phenomenology of Perception, explores
experiencing phenomena with the body. The spatiality of the body is understood as the role of
environment and space in which one lives and works, and the connectedness of the body to the
world is recognized within the concept of temporality, as opposed to linear time. The lived body
is seen as a physical being within the concept of corporality, and the body as it exists in relation
to others is relationality (Annells 1996; Smith 2013; Van Manen 1990). Merleau-Ponty captures
his embodied, existential form of phenomenology, with the following:
When I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and
that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely
one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the
subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.
(1945, 475).
For Merleau-Ponty, the body is considered the primary site of knowing the world and the body
and what it perceives cannot be separated from each other (Havi 2008). This perceptual
experience of becoming aware of something through the senses can take the tangible form of an

idea, quality or feeling. As Merleau-Ponty said, "In perception we do not think the object and we
do not think ourselves thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body
which is better informed than we are about the world” (1945, 277).
The Decoding interviews uncovered how faculty came to know and understand disciplinary
knowledge. In many cases, the experience of coming to know these phenomena was similar to
Merleau-Ponty's (1945) expression of embodiment. Faculty described experiencing these
disciplinary concepts as not being separate from themselves, but a part of their bodily
experience. This idea is particularly evident in how Patricia responded to the question about
whether she gets cues from the physical relationship to the world in which she is moving:
Yeah, I guess, I know it without thinking about it, probably … as a car is accelerating
forward we talk about the forces between the wheels and the ground, and usually we
compare it to walking. If you are trying to accelerate forwards then you have to push
backwards on the ground to move, and it is the ground that is pushing back and pushing
you forwards, so it is the same thing for a car’s wheels.
Patricia described the bodily experience of the ground pushing back on her within the process of
walking in order to describe for students the forces at work in physics. This experience is an
inherently phenomenological sense of the world. As well when asked to explain her awareness
of her body feeling heavier or lighter in an elevator when it is accelerating or decelerating,
Patricia explained
...when you first start moving up in an elevator you feel heavier because there is that total
force underneath you which has to be higher than your weight to start moving you and
accelerating you upwards. When you start going down in the elevator you feel light for a

second when it is accelerating down because that force underneath you is actually lighter
than your weight while the elevator is accelerating.
Faculty members essentially described experiencing non-cognitive and corporeal
experiences of everyday practices when asked how they had come to know disciplinary
knowledge. Colin, the drama professor, described directing his students to feel their bodies to get
in touch with specific physical senses (corporality)." So the next time you do this I want you to
make sure you are...I want you to focus on your knees being like rubber as you move through
it,...and then seeing that happens as a result of that and letting them [students] reflect back on
what happens as a result of that....” This example illustrates experiencing knowledge through the
senses.
Van Manen (1997) goes further when discussing embodied knowing and states that
professional knowledge is often tied to pathic knowledge which is the "sense and sensuality of
the body, personal presence, relational perceptiveness, tact for knowing what to say and do in
contingent situations, thoughtful routines and practices, and other aspects of knowledge that are
in part prereflective, pre-theoretic, pre-linguistic" (20). He goes on to say that pathic knowledge
is a “felt sense of being in the world” (21). "Pathic knowledge expresses itself in the confidence
with which we do things, the way that we ‘feel’, the atmosphere of a place, the manner in which
we can "read" someone's face, and so forth" (21). Colin described perceiving just this kind of
pathic knowledge, when he feels a sense of tangible resistance in the room when students were
not in touch with the character they were portraying.“…there is resistance there, and so then I
have to discover who brought resistance and why is it there in the room with us? So it is those
sorts of cues that I look for, and part of it is that I base it on years of…so, like, I spent twenty
plus years directing professionally in Canada so there is a feeling when things are cooking and I

can point to lots of clues….” Bonnie a professor of journalism discusses the elements of a great
story and she describes her bodily response to a great idea by physically feeling a sense of
tension: “Well I guess I identify tension… by being able to recognize discourse, disharmony; … I
guess I actually identify tension by what it is I feel in response to the idea.”
Merleau-Ponty (1945) describes the sensory experience of being in the world with the
following: "We do not say that the notion of the world is inseparable from that of the subject. Or
that the subject thinks himself inseparable from the idea of his body and the idea of the world”
(474-475). Faculty members did not realize that they had internalized the concepts within their
disciplines over time and as part of their practice, and they became increasingly aware of how
they had done so through the Decoding interview process. These disciplinary concepts had
essentially become part of their being. They embodied them as they lived through the experience
of gaining this knowledge and found it difficult to understand how students struggle with coming
to know and understand this same knowledge. Van Manen (1997) describes that lived space as
‘felt’ space and that we become the space we are in (102). In other words, disciplinary experts
are not able to separate themselves from the experience; they become part of it. This then could
lead to the development of more bottlenecks which students find difficult to navigate because
they have not personally experienced the concepts in a lived way.
Analysis of the Decoding interviews using phenomenology has extended Pace and
Middendorf's work (2004) and reveals that, even for cognitive bottlenecks, expert thinking is not
just a cognitive process but involves living the experience of the discipline, bringing disciplinary
knowledge into consciousness, and bringing forth the embodied experience of knowing to help
faculty members to understand why their students may be experiencing bottlenecks.
Implications for Educators

How does an understanding of the Decoding the Disciplines from a phenomenological
perspective inform the teaching process? The implications for educators are significant and are
discussed below.
Living the Experience. The interviews revealed that one needs to live the experience in
order to fully embody the disciplinary concepts. This idea was a common thread throughout all
the interviews and involves taking the time of living through the experience. When Wendy was
asked about how she knew what is important in nursing, she responded with the following:
Well I think just from doing it for years, and years and years and doing it …sometimes
with a community, sometimes with a family, sometimes with a bigger population when I
have developed or worked with…I could see it firsthand when I was working with people
in their homes, right, and in the school setting. So I could see things that were influencing
their health and that they were struggling with was much bigger.
Thus, living the experience supports the importance of exposure to the everydayness of clinical
practice and working through experiences in the world in clinical practicums, simulations, and
laboratory experiences for practice disciplines. As Wendy said: "...so certainly exposure to
community and exposure to those settings helped me to understand it ..."

Interviewees said

they came away with a larger understanding of how the significant years of experience
influenced their understanding of concepts within their discipline. For an educator who sees
students struggling with a particular bottleneck, they might consider reflecting on how they came
to know what they know, what they were personally exposed to within their disciplinary
experience, and sharing these insights with students. Bonnie the journalism professor had been
reluctant to share her lived experience with her students. However near the end of the Decoding
process she came to this realization of the value of sharing her lived experience as 'story':

…and yet as I talk to you, you asked a lot about, ‘How would I do this and, ‘what would
that look like?’ and if done the right way maybe be my students could benefit from me
making those steps, a little clearer, and maybe enabling them to ask not only of me, but of
other more experienced journalists in the discipline the kind of questions that exposes the
‘how to’ part…
Developing Embodied Knowing. The interviews illustrated that faculty had often
learned the complexities and nuances within their disciplines over years and sometimes with a
sensory response from their bodies. As educators we need to help students to pay attention to the
noncognitve reactions they experience in learning our disciplines; the acquisition of embodied
knowledge and pathic knowledge. We need to call attention with our students to our bodies and
the experiential experiences in the laboratory and simulation settings and the real world.
Bourdieu, a sociologist studying the theory of practice, describes the physical sensations
experienced with simple social commands which can be shared with students as examples of the
body entangled with the world:
Nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore,
more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved
by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole
cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as
insignificant as "stand up straight" or "don't hold your knife in your left hand (1977, 94).
Within practice disciplines where we experience the world with types of knowledge related to
touch, perceptions, feelings, actions and sensations that cannot necessarily be translated or
captured in conceptualizations and theoretical representations, we need to give them expression

and importance. It is our interactions with the world and our bodies that places us in the world
(Merleau-Ponty 1945, xvi).
Implications for Decoders. The Decoding questions helped faculty members to break
down the disciplinary knowledge, to make the connections, and to make the acquisition of
knowledge more conscious. The questions pushed the faculty to have to articulate and put into
language what was difficult to articulate: ‘How do you know?’ This study has shown that asking
about sensory perceptions of phenomena should be included in the Decoding the Discipline
process. If we were to conduct this study again, we might ask interviewees “What happens to
you personally when you read the Code of Ethics? What do you feel like when you are thinking
about the dimensions of walking? What is the essence of this news story and what does that feel
like? How do you make your relationship to this story, this play dynamic for your students?"
Future Decoding work could assess how ways of thinking and practicing could be further
revealed with questioning along these lines.
Conclusion
Philosophers within the phenomenological approach look at who they are in relation to others,
considering multiple realities to understand the full context of their own experience. They
consider how they relate to this experience through the embodiment of practice and are curious
to know more about their situation in the world. Similarly, the Decoding the Disciplines process
reveals how we come to understand disciplinary knowledge. Our interview process, intuitively
developed as we struggled with decoding complex disciplinary knowledge, unpacked the
phenomena faculty have learned through “living the experience” and made it conscious. Faculty
members gave voice to how they practice and put a language to the experience. Their responses

helped us recognize the embodied, experiential sense of their ways of practicing, and opens new
avenues for exploring the use of Decoding using experiential and sensory questions.

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Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Michelle Yeo for sharing her knowledge of phenomenology and her
encouraging feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

GENEVIEVE CURRIE has been a faculty member at Mount Royal University since 2001 and
teaches within the School of Nursing and Midwifery.