Keyword: «hermeneutic phenomenology»

The modern standardization of education, the strengthening of managerial control, and the growing substantive heterogeneity of educational practices increase the need for methodologies that allow for the reconstruction of how the learning situation is presented to the subject of learning in the forms of experience and meaning self-determination. This article presents a theoretical and methodological desk study and is based on an analysis of published methodological works devoted to the phenomenological study of educational and life experience. The study was conducted in the period September–December 2025 by a research group consisting of L. S. Unatlokova (Kabardino-Balkarian State University named after Kh. M. Berbekov, Department of Kabardino-Circassian Language and Literature, Nalchik), Z. A. Nasurova (A. A. Kadyrov Chechen State University, Department of Pedagogy and Psychology, Grozny), and N. A. Danilova (V. N. Tatishchev Astrakhan State University, Department of Mathematics, Astrakhan). It was implemented in the format of analytical work with texts without involving respondents and empirical data collection. The aim of the study is a theoretical and methodological reconstruction and comparison of the phenomenological analysis procedures in the works of A. van Kaam, A. Giorgi, P. Colaizzi, K. Moustakas and M. van Manen and the identification of their potential and limitations in humanitarian and pedagogical research. Monographs and articles by the above-mentioned authors describing the logic and steps of phenomenological analysis served as the material for the study. The methodological foundation comprises phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches; the researchers used conceptual reconstruction, theoretical and comparative analysis, eidetic variation, and thematization analysis of the authors' descriptions of the procedures. The course of the study included the following successive stages: (1) selection and systematization of sources; (2) reconstruction of the analysis procedures in each approach; (3) construction of a comparative matrix of key parameters (unit of analysis, type of reduction, thematization mode, methods of verification and forms of the result presentation); (4) identification of the procedural invariant and lines of divergence; (5) formulation of criteria of humanitarian validity and risks of methodological reduction. It is shown that despite differences in philosophical emphases, all the approaches considered share a common procedural invariant: adoption of a phenomenological stance, holistic reading of descriptions of experience, identification of semantic units, their analytical transformation, thematization and essential synthesis. Two complementary lines are distinguished – descriptive-reductive (van Kaam, Giorgi, Colaizzi) and hermeneutic-practical (Moustakas, van Manen), which put, respectively, an emphasis on identifying invariants of experience and on revealing pedagogical meaning as eventfulness. The criteria for the humanitarian validity of phenomenological analysis (phenomenal adequacy, procedural traceability, variability, intersubjective verifiability, reflexive responsibility) have been clarified, and typical risks of methodological reduction (psychologization, naturalistic reduction, normative-moralizing substitution) have been systematized. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the explication of phenomenological methodology as a discipline of accurate qualitative analysis of pedagogical experience; the practical significance lies in setting guidelines for the design of phenomenologically grounded studies of educational everyday life, professional development, and the microdynamics of educational subjectivity within the logic of humanities-based assessment of the education quality.