Education has institutionalized a process that reifies cultures, ecological communities, and ultimately evolution itself. This enclosure has lessened our sensitivity to the pedagogical (eteragogical) nature of our lived relations with other people and with other living beings. By acknowledging that learning and teaching go on between species, humans can regain an eteragogical sense of the interspecies curricula within which they exist. This article explores interspecies lived curricula through a selection of ideas from ecopragmatist Anthony Weston, and cybernetician Gregory Bateson, and through lived experiences with shorebirds of Lake Ontario. Some gulls and a tern teach the author to enrich and diversify, rather than constrict, the potentiality of life. In so doing, being ecological and being educative become unified concepts. Relevance: The publication is concerned with the relational implications between humans and other species of Bateson’s cybernetic theory of learning.

Open peer commentary on the article “From Problem Solving to Problem Posing, and from Strategies to Laying Down a Path in Solving: Taking Varela’s Ideas to Mathematics Education Research” by Jérôme Proulx & Jean-François Maheux. Upshot: Proulx and Maheux’s view of problem-posing|solving compels insights about roles and lived experiences of teachers. Living and reporting co-emergence of teaching activity and mathematical activity are discussed.

This study explores Grade Seven students’ experiences of doubt and certainty in mathematics. During nine months of (bi-monthly) sessions, students engaged with several mathematical prompts; their interactions with each other and with the teacher-researcher were video-taped, transcribed, and coded for learners’ evolving perceptions of what was (a) sufficient to define certainty (including what was experienced as intuitive or counter-intuitive and ways such certainty was interrupted), (b) relevant to the tasks (including understandings that initially dwelled on the periphery of awareness), and (c) mathematically connected. The study is conceptualized within an enactivist view of cognition that emphasizes autonomous, co-emergent, and embodied knowing. It became clear that doubt and certainty emerge from a broader, holistic, understanding that is largely beneath ordinary awareness. An important aspect of the study was to bring more of this understanding to awareness. Here, Francisco Varela’s notion of researcher as empathic coach and Eugene Gendlin’s notions of “felt sense” and “implicit intricacy” assumed importance. By attending to the holistic sense that points to implicit understanding, it was possible to broaden the scope of what was deemed relevant in selected contexts. It was found that previously subconscious understandings nonetheless influenced learning. Once named (even broadly), implicit understanding co-evolved with language in developing mathematical understanding. By attending to external indicators of felt meaning, learners interacted with each others’ implicit understanding, thereby bringing it closer to consciousness and into conversation. Prematurely insisting on clarity and logic precluded awareness of the implicit. Relevance: It introduces Varela’s notion of the “empathic second person coach” as an approach to studying the lived experiences of mathematics learners.

Excerpt: Regrettably, phenomenologists who concentrate narrowly on the early Husserl of the Logical Investigations (1900–1901; Husserl 2001a) and Ideas I (Husserl 1977a) often overemphasize his focus on the individual life of intentional consciousness as reconstructed from within (and even on the structure of individual, atomistic lived experiences [Erlebnisse]) and tend to overlook Husserl’s original, radical, and fundamentally groundbreaking explorations of intersubjectivity, sociality, and the constitution of historical cultural life (which would later influence Heidegger and Schütz, among others). In respect of this individualist misinterpretation, Husserl is often his own worst enemy, since he repeatedly and very publicly, for example, in his Cartesian Meditations (Husserl 1950, 1967; hereafter CM), compared his phenomenological breakthrough to subjectivity with Descartes’s discovery of the ego cogito and modeled his phenomenological epoché, albeit with important changes of emphasis, on Descartes’s radical doubt. As a result, Husserl’s phenomenology has too often been designated a methodological solipsism that proceeds through individualistic introspection of conscious experiences, and Husserl’s wider explorations of social and cultural life have been passed over (and many of his original discoveries have been attributed to others, e.g., Heidegger and Gadamer). It is worth reminding ourselves, therefore, of the originality of Husserl’s meditations on the nature of the self, its embodiment, and its intercorporeal, intersubjective communal relations with others. In this chapter, then, I want to focus on Husserl’s mature reflections (i.e., as specifically found in his writings of the 1920s and 1930s) on the intentional constitution of culture, particularly as he understood it to relate to lived embodiment and, especially, the specific relations that hold between lived bodies, their Ineinandersein, Füreinandersein, or what Husserl calls in Cartesian Meditations “a mutual being-for-one-another” (ein Wechselseitig-füreinander-sein; CM, 129; Hua I, 157). As he puts it elsewhere, in the Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl 1970, 1962), Husserl approaches human subjects not only as having “subject being for the world” (Subjektsein für die Welt) but also as possessing “object being in the world” (Objektsein in der Welt; Crisis, 178; Hua VI, 182). How humans can be both in the world and for the world is, for him, the riddle of transcendental subjectivity.

In this article the authors challenge contemporary epistemological research within educational settings. After a reconciliation of the current models which treat epistemological beliefs as static and mechanical, the authors present a teaching experience to illustrate their enactivist view that epistemological beliefs should be conceptualized as fluid and dynamic constructs, emerging in web-like configurations. Answers to epistemological questions unfold within the interstices and mutual interactions between people and their environment. Boundaries between student – teacher, individual – community, cognition – bodily experience are becoming blurred. From this enactivist perspective the researcher’s role changes considerably. Instead of determining teachers’ personal traits and epistemological make-up, the researcher should sensitize teachers to the subtle ways epistemological beliefs are enmeshed within their day-to-day professional lives, focusing on the complex fabric of the teaching practice.

Key words: contemporary epistemological research, education, enactivism, lived experiences, personal epistemology

Open peer commentary on the article “Varela’s Radical Proposal: How to Embody and Open Up Cognitive Science” by Kristian Moltke Martiny. Upshot: Varela’s description of how first-, second- and third-person positions are inserted in a network of social exchange forms a central ground for using a second-person position as a mediator in a phenomenological exploration of lived experiences. Based on Martiny’s arguments that we should expand the notion of the lab, I suggest that the fundamental circularity of the scientist and the first-person experiences investigated needs to be considered in an extended form when involving a second-person method taking place in the conditions of the world of everyday life.

The main objective of this article is to capitalise on many years of research, and of practice, relating to the use of introspection in a research context, and thus to provide an initial outline description of introspection, while developing an introspection of introspection. After a description of the context of this research, I define the institutional conditions which would enable the renewal of introspection as a research methodology. Then I describe three aspects of introspective practice: 1) introspection as a process of becoming aware, theorized through Husserl’s model of consciousness modes; 2) introspection as recollection, through the model of retention and awakening in Husserl’s theory of memory; 3) the use of universal descriptive categories for the description of all lived experiences, as a guide for skilled practice of introspection in research. Finally I examine the question of the validation of introspective data, suggesting a strong distinction between the ethical criterion and the epistemic criterion of truth.

Key words: Consciousness, Husserl, descriptive categories, explicitation interview, introspection, lived experience, phenomenology, pre-reflective