Negotiating First-Person and Third-Person Perspectives in Microphenomenological Research on Diagrammatic Reasoning

• In Event: In-Sight Out: Challenges and Opportunities in Learning Mathematics Through Negotiating Egocentric and Allocentric Perspectives

Abstract

For learning scientists, the phenomena they study in students are often the same cognitive processes that constitute their own research practices. This situation prompts us to reflexively apply our theoretical constructs to our own learning as researchers (Valenzuela-Moguillansky et al., 2021). When emerging research suggests that students gain conceptual insights by negotiating complementary perspectives on a phenomenon (Benally et al., 2022), then we may reflexively ask how analogous perspectival coordinations play out in our own scientific work. Here I reflect on the generative role that coordinations of first-person and third-person perspectives have played in a recent pilot study on diagrammatic reasoning (Putz, 2023).

The study leveraged micro-phenomenology, an interview-based methodology for investigating the microdynamics of lived experience (Petitmengin, 2006; Figure 9). Volunteering graduate students (n=7) were invited to a session where they were asked to look at, and make sense of, a proof-without-words diagram (Figure 10, left) before participating in an interview about this experience. The interviewer helped the participant re-enact the experience and become aware of tacit aspects of their mental actions. The participant explored their own experiential landscape in the first-person, while the interviewer progressively built a descriptive map of this landscape from a third-person perspective. Such an ‘I-You’ perspectival coordination has been termed the second-person position in phenomenological research (Depraz et al., 2003).

One goal of the study was characterizing the experience of imaginatively moving part of a diagram (Figure 10). The analysis process (Petitmengin et al., 2019) consisted in identifying and representing, for each participant, the specific structure of such imaginative manipulations while iteratively unfolding the generic structure of this type of experience across all participants (Figure 11). While this analysis method relies on graphical displays and abstraction operations—necessitating the adoption of an allocentric perspective—the micro-phenomenologist always cycles back to the first-person perspective by staying close to the participant’s concrete descriptions; the researcher may also experientially verify an emerging generic structure through self-interviews (Vermersch, 2007). These processes allow the researcher to perceive the flat representations as signifying dynamic first-person experiences.

Once an experiential structure has been identified, it can be put into dialogue with other research methods, including those relying on neurophysiological measures. In this study, experiential data were used to front-load analysis of complementary eye-tracking data collected during the participants’ engagement with the diagram. This neurophenomenological approach (Varela, 1996; Berkovich-Ohana et al., 2020) is based on the idea that a comprehensive investigation of mental phenomena must reconcile two modes of orientation: a first-person perspective allowing for direct experiential contact with a phenomenon, and a third-person perspective facilitating the extraction of shared, stable features. Thus, for researchers, unlike for learners, perspectival coordinations are not merely tacit aspects of problem solving but can be explicitly utilized as central tools of methodological frameworks.

The perspectival coordinations presented here may be found in qualitative research more broadly. Indeed, qualitative analysis can be construed as the struggle to approach the first-person experience of participants from third-person observations and representations; learning scientists seek to “enter the child’s mind” (Ginsburg, 1997).

Author

• Julien Putz, University of California - Berkeley