Pre-conditions of Universal Transformation in Education from a Sense-related Approach
Abstract
The contribution introduces a new scientific approach building up a research work on sense. This presentation will outline the prerequisites for shifts in meaning and structure aiming at transformational development in education from a universal perspective. Until now, educational research has focused on social action within existing meanings as socially given meanings. The significant aspect of a) socially non-given meanings and b) its relevance for transformational processes has not received any fundamental consideration yet.
The study examines empirical data on pedagogical interactions in classrooms within the context of the relationship between socially given and socially ungiven meanings. Socially ungiven meanings are non-established meanings emerging from new sense. Socially given meanings are established, obviously fixed meanings of everyday language in a cultivated system of social interactions.
The analysis of the empirical data presented takes its starting point from a method(ology) called ‘Objective Hermeneutics’. By this means socially given meanings are reconstructed through a procedure known as sequential analysis which traces the linear sequence of words from which a social text emerges. The linear line of emergence sets up a condition of substantiating meaning. Its specific emergence reveals a particular given structure of sense arrangement or sense selection within a specific interaction-based language arrangement connecting sense-selected specific meaning to human (inter)action. It operates between conscious (given) meanings and yet unconscious (ungiven) meanings which enter consciousness within the process of reconstruction.
The research issue encompasses the following question: How can reconstruction processes inherent in a qualitative research design yield a scientific understanding of (un)conscious and new progressive meanings derived from given meaning-structural dispositions? How can a method called ‚Objective Hermeneutics‘ prepare such sense-related understanding along basic ‚objective‘ structural meaning conditions in yet (un)given human interaction?
Connecting to a certain meaning through language arrangements in human (inter)action expresses a selected form of communication which embodies a disconnection to other possible meanings at the same time in order to focus this meaning and not the other. This form of meaning selection or sense selection is analyzed on a deeper and more complex level in terms of transformation to demonstrate how changing (dis)connections to meanings generate fundamentals for conscious transformation in cultural communication processes within educational meaning contexts.
The research work exemplifies how educational transformation may arise from a changing awareness in processes of sense selection cultivating new sense in new forms of communication. Gaining a higher empirically based scientific awareness of sense selection offers an insight into possible evolvement of human interaction through higher complexity in human-determined processes of sense selection as culturally-based concepts in educational interaction.
Meaning is structured within the context of an analytical understanding of how transformation occurs (or does not occur) in meaning-making processes or sense development. These processes are embedded in the pedagogical communication practice of interaction between students and teachers. The analysis takes a higher sense-related complexity into account focusing different ways and rhythms of human-made negations that work themselves out in processes of sense selection. This sense-related approach touches the development of meaning that arises from new sense.
