Lifeworlds 3rd draft
Lifeworlds
Lifeworlds have great significance in a place to study. Lifeworlds mediate the who-what-how-where/when-and-why in studying. Let's consider the fit that lifeworlds have in a place to study carefully for it forms and shapes what can and should happen in the course of study.
Consider a statement that most every parent will have spoken when their child reaches 6 or so, "Come September Samantha begins school." This statement signals a major change in Samantha's life experience, and that of her parents, and the outward features of much of it are givens, for the school becomes not only a major feature in the lifeworld of every pupil, but a largely predictable one, for "school" signifies a well-worked out, thoroughly established program that each will follow with limited variations. A deeply distinctive feature of digital communications, a powerful affordance if we can make it work, arises with the way it provides access to cultural resources without encasing it in predetermined, given programs for their use. A Place to Study seeks to make this feature work.
A Place to Study does not itself constitute a lifeworld.[1] One does not go to it as one does to a school, college, or university. Persons will interact with A Place to Study, preoccupied with the flux of experience that constitutes their lives. This solves a significant educational problem and gives rise to another.
Educational institutions as we know them almost invariably offer programs of instruction that aspirants seek to follow. These programs have embedded in them lifeworld assumptions that in myriad ways can lead to disjunctions with the lifeworlds of those trying to follow the programs. Wasted talent and effort result.
- ↑ Of course, those who devote a considerable portion of their lives and work to creating and maintaining A Place to Study will say that that is a big part of their lifeworlds, but that will condition and enable the uses of A Place to Study but not form a program for their use.