Hermeneutic phenomenology is a combination of theory, reflection and practice that interweaves vivid descriptions of lived experience (phenomenology) together with reflective interpretations of their meanings (hermeneutics). This method is popular among researchers in education, nursing and other caring and nurturing practices and professions. Practical and adaptable, it can be at the same time poetic and evocative. As this collection shows, hermeneutic phenomenology gives voice to everyday aspects of educational practice –particularly emotional, embodied and empathic moments– that may be all too easily overlooked in other research approaches. By explicating, illustrating and demonstrating hermeneutic phenomenology as a method for research in education specifically, this book offers an excellent resource for beginning as well as more advanced researchers.

Since empathy first emerged as an object of inquiry within British history education in the early 1970s, teachers, scholars and policymakers have debated the concept's role in the teaching and learning of history. Yet over the years this discussion has been confined to specialized education outlets, while empathy's broader significance for history and philosophy has too often gone unnoticed. Empathy and History is the first comprehensive account of empathy's place in the practice, teaching, and philosophy of history. Beginning with the concept's roots in nineteenth-century German historicism, the book follows its historical development, transformation, and deployment while revealing its relevance for practitioners today.

A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education: The Play of the In-Between explores the ways in which both play and poetry orient us toward what surpasses us. Catherine Homan develops an original account of poetic education that builds on Friedrich Hölderlin’s idea of poetry as a teacher of humanity. Whereas aesthetic education emphasizes judgments of taste and rational autonomy, poetic education foregrounds self-formation and openness to the other. Critically engaging the works of Eugen Fink, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Celan, this book argues that poetry and play call for a particular stance in the world and with others. Open toward the infinite while simultaneously reaching toward its own finitude, the poetic work addresses us and invites our response. Poetry reveals the human condition as “in-between” and dialogical, even at the limits of language. Although many philosophers mistakenly view play as frivolous, Homan takes play seriously. Play--spontaneous and creative--resists mastery and instead requires an active attunement to the to-and-fro movement of the world, of others, and ourselves. A Hermeneutics of Poetic Education demonstrates that poetic education, as learning to listen, provides vital resources for responding to alterity in meaningful ways that resist totalization.

Considering the role of compulsory mass education and schooling in a democratic society, this book introduces an alternative vision for K-12 education as an "adventurous endeavour." Grounded in a strong theoretical framework, Yosef-Hassidim reveals the negative impact of instrumentalization of schools: when education is considered a social and political instrument, it serves dominant social forces’ interests rather than students’ or humanity as a whole. Offering conceptual and pragmatic frameworks to limit political influence on schooling, the author proposes a new hermeneutical structure that restores education’s agency and separates it from external social forces, and provides the foundation for regarding K-12 education as a sovereign social sphere in its own right.