Researching Lived Experience ─ Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy

Bestselling author Max van Manen’s Researching Lived Experience introduces a human science approach to research methodology in education and related fields. The book takes as its starting point the "everyday lived experience" of human beings in educational situations. Rather than rely on abstract generalizations and theories in the traditional sense, the author offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation. First published in 1990, this book is a classic of social science methodology and phenomenological research, selling tens of thousands of copies over the past quarter century. Left Coast is making available the second edition of this work, never before released outside Canada.

Researching Lived Experience offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material which forms the basis for textual reflections. The author:

-Discusses the part played by language in educational research
-Pays special attention to the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in research
-Offers approaches to structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied

Max van Manen is emeritus Professor in Research Methods, Pedagogy and Curriculum Studies in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta and Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria. He is the leading proponent of the practice and meaning of phenomenological inquiry in pedagogy, psychology, health science, and the human sciences. He is author of numerous books on phenomenology and on pedagogy, including Phenomenology of Practice (2014), The Tact of Teaching (1991), and The Tone of Teaching (2002) and has had his books translated into nine languages. He has also authored over 100 articles and chapters on pedagogy, health science, qualitative research methods, and phenomenology. He founded the journal Phenomenology and Pedagogy and developed the website PhenomenologyOnline. He is recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Curriculum Division of the American Educational Research Association among numerous other awards and distinctions.