Bracketing and Phenomenology

Dan Lukiv

In my hermeneutic phenomenological study (2020) about what school experiences encouraged one person (pseudonym: Arthur) to become a poet, I followed the tradition of bracketing my biases in order to focus objectively on Arthur’s lived experiences and my research question. People being what we are, we find our hearts and minds great farms for cultivating how we think something might be, or, on particularly cloudless days, how we think something should be.

If I translate cloudless days into days--or weeks, or even months--the researcher feels cocky, then he or she could drive the study’s conclusions rather than the research question driving the research design driving a systematic, bias-reducing methodology driving the conclusions. In a nutshell, then, a foundation of bias can lead to an invalid study with faulty conclusions (Scientists, 2020); likewise, sand (Matthew 7:26, New World Translation) makes a poor foundation for a building.

Aptekar (2020), no doubt, would relate to my last paragraph. He questions the validity of his own ethnographic study about Colombian street children. Why? He regrets, in that study, that he didn't consider his own childhood experiences and how they might have influenced his views of the children he studied, especially in view of the emotional trauma he, at six, and his mother had suffered when his father had died of cancer. Given that statement, bracketing his views of how he might view the independence, vulnerability, strengths, and weaknesses of the street children would have added weight to his study’s validity, or in strictly qualitative language, trustworthiness (Guba & Lincoln, 2020).

Looking those views, or biases, in the eye, so to speak, addresses objectivity, helping the researcher focus on the interview guide’s questions and the experiences of the participants, rather than on his own bias-generating experiences. Researchers call this bracketing. Mathematicians keep symbols, numbers, and operations within brackets; researchers attempt to keep biases inside brackets in the mind, thereby increasing the possibility for objectivity. Barritt (2020) refers to the objectivity of historians, which helps them write neutral histories, but are those histories really neutral if the writers of those texts have not addressed--bracketed--their biases with regard to peoples, cultures, causes and effects, and all the -isms and -ologies and -archies and -cracies that inhabit their minds?

I explicitly listed my biases in my study (2020), a practice that I see other researchers do not necessarily engage (see, e.g., Barritt, Beekman, Bleeker, & Mulderij, 2020). My motive: concreteness and validity. Our biases in the public domain might at times embarrass us, but they make us as researchers real people, concrete individuals, with flesh-and-blood points of view, albeit points of view we need to bracket by placing them mentally in a corner to mind their own business. As for validity: Wouldn't you find explicit descriptions of bracketing, revealing the researcher's concentrated attempts to "see" his or her own biases, far more faith inspiring, far more valid, than a blanket, implicit statement such as "the researcher bracketed his biases"? Do you find that too impersonal and too general? I know I do.

I helped my biases mind their own business. Many experiences in school had encouraged me to become a creative writer. These experiences define highlights in my education (Lukiv, 2020b, Chapter Seven; Lukiv, 2020c; Lukiv, 2020b), but, simply put, they could have influenced me to ask biased questions. Through my use of free imaginative variation (van Manen, 2020), I expressed those experiences in terms of one essential, broad theme: Events in school that promoted my looking at the world through “different” eyes, through other points of view; that promoted the wonder of creativity; that promoted the joy of my ideas being appreciated; that promoted the excitement of entertaining, or emotionally moving, others; that promoted the excitement of focussed thinking; and that promoted the joy of understanding how to write have encouraged me to become an adult creative writer (Lukiv, 2020b). That said, my peer debriefers looked for biases in my interview questions, in my analysis, and in my interpretations that spoke of me rather than of Arthur.

With regard to bracketing, however, I did not stop there. I went much further. If bracketing is a process for “suspending one’s various beliefs” (van Manen, 2020, p. 175) or biases, then bracketing in possibilities, a term I coined, is a process--which, in this case, drew on literature related to the teaching of creative writing--that addresses possible participant responses based on various readings. The great length of references in this article testifies to the great volume of literature that could have biased my questions, analysis, and interpretation.

And yet, bracketing in possibilities could also include thoughts the researcher comes up with through conversations with colleagues, through deductive reasoning, through epiphanies, and through lateral-thinking ecstasy (Lukiv, 2020b, Chapter Seven; Lukiv, 2020). Perhaps new, although, in the long run, not necessarily ingenious, thoughts have smacked you in the psyche while you have spent a little time on the pot, or while you have sat bolt upright in bed at 2:00 a.m., saying "Aha!" Explicitly listing those thoughts--that relate to the research question--could help a researcher bracket them.

In my study (2020), I referred to creative writing Web sites, which contain essentially the same sorts of activities as do print materials (see, e.g., About Teens, n.d.; Horner & Khan, n.d.; Love, n.d.a; and Shiney & Shiney, n.d.). In my experience, many teachers look to the myriad number of excellent Web site activities for teaching creative writing. With regard to bracketing in possibilities, I wondered if Arthur would refer to the kinds of activities found on Web sites.

Some print materials provide very specific examples of creative writing activities (see, e.g., Strom, Ingraham, & Dunnett, 2020). I wondered if Arthur would describe any creative writing activities that were very, very specific as ones that had encouraged him to take up creative writing.

I, like many others, have written a creative writing course available in print (Lukiv, 2020) that presents many assignments that show students how to develop various creative writing skills. Would Arthur refer to assignments similar to the ones in my course?

Many books for students of creative writing provide excellent suggestions about how to make characters in poetry or fiction seem “alive” (see, e.g., Leavitt, 2020, p. 15). Others present how-to-use-point-of-view exercises (see, e.g., Leavitt & Sohn, 2020). Some books create programs that work so well that many of the students "have consistently won prizes in top writing competitions and been published in national magazines and books" (Thornley, 2020, back cover). Other texts provide a wealth of excellent how-to direction for creative writing students and teachers of creative writing (see, e.g., Bickham, 2020; Block, 2020; Bryant, 2020; Bugeja, 2020; Cassil, 2020; Clark, Brohaugh, Woods, Strickland, & Blocksom, 2020; Dessner, 2020; Dickson & Smythe, 2020; Drury, 2020; Fredette, 2020; Hall, 2020; Irwin & Eyerly, 2020; Jones, 2020; Powell, 2020; Roberts, 2020; Seuling, 2020; Wakan, 2020; and Wyndham, 2020). Would Arthur mention excellent how-to direction about how to write as an example of an activity that had encouraged him to continue learning the art and craft of writing?

Jerome (2020) and Birney’s (2020) rich and deep analyses of what poetry is has kept me rereading their texts. Would Arthur describe rich and deep analyses of creative writing in school as examples of experiences that encouraged him? Hodgins (2020) describes a school experience of being read to by a teacher who encouraged him to become a writer of fiction. I relate to that experience because I had similar ones (Lukiv, 2020b). Would Arthur describe similar ones too?

Birney (2020), however, suggests school discourages some potential creative writers. In some cases they feel forced, he says, to drop out of high school to learn elsewhere the art and craft of creative writing. Is it not ironic that language arts curriculums that are supposed to teach creative writing might frustrate potential creative writers? With that question in mind, would Arthur say that no school had experiences encouraged him to take up creative writing later in life? I did not think that would be the case. I had already separately approached two creative writers to ask, "Did any experiences in elementary and high school encourage you to become a creative writer?" Both immediately said, "Yes!"

Still, I wondered what lived school experiences might have discouraged people from becoming creative writers. I wondered if The British Columbia Ministry of Education's approved resources for senior high school students that mechanistically chop up stories into bits of escapism, interpretation, plot, theme, character, point of view, symbolism, and irony (see, e.g., Perrine, 2020; and Ball, 2020) or into bits of subject, verb, verbal, adverb, adjective, noun, pronoun, conjunction, preposition, phrase, clause, antecedent, sentence fragment, object, infinitive, and punctuation (see, e.g., Hart & Heim, 2020; and Shaw, 2020) discourage students from becoming poets, fiction writers, and dramatists. But my wondering did not preclude Arthur from saying that chopping up stories and language the way these books do was just the sort of activity that had encouraged him to take up creative writing.

Knott (2020) discusses how to submit writing to an editor (see, also, Adamec, 2020; Cool, 2020). I used Knott's excellent book as a text in 2020 and 2020 to teach two creative writing courses through the Quesnel (BC, Canada) School District's Continuing Education Department. I wondered if Arthur would mention school activities that had taught him how to go about sending submissions to editors.

Teachers have motivated students to write in school through publishing adventures (see, e.g., Lamb, 2020; Love, n.d.b; Lukiv, 2020a; and Lukiv, 2020a). Would Arthur say that classroom publication had motivated him to write and that that experience had encouraged him to further study creative writing?

I developed "Story Day: A Theoretical Model for Teaching Creative Writing in the Elementary Grades" (Lukiv, 2020a) over twenty years ago, basing it on intuitions I have recently come to learn are elements of social constructivism (McCarthy & Raphael, 2020; and Ruddell & Unrau, 2020) and Vygotskian theory (Berk & Winsler, 2020; Hicks, 2020; and Vygotsky, 2020). My primary students knew that I was a published creative writer, and although I know that, as Jobe (2020) says, "classroom teachers can have more influence on their students’ reading habits by showing that they themselves are active readers," I could not say with conviction, while at the proposal stage of my study, that the same applies to writing. But then I learned from Spandel and Stiggins (2020) that “research shows that teachers of writing, if they wish to be effective, must write themselves” (p. 170). Was Arthur encouraged through contact with a teacher who was himself or herself a creative writer?

In addition to “Story Day: A Theoretical Model for Teaching Creative Writing in the Elementary Grades” (Lukiv, 2020a), much literature attempts to motivate students to write poetry, fiction, and drama (see, e.g., Cleveland Public Schools, 2020; Dyson, 2020; Matthews, 2020; Pennsylvania State Department of Education, 2020; and Potter, McCormick, & Busching, 2020). Amabile (2020) found poetry written through extrinsic motivation is much less creative than poetry written through intrinsic motivation. I wondered, would Arthur mention activities that had addressed intrinsic motivation (Stipek, 2020) as examples that had encouraged him to take up creative writing?

That question, and other questions and thoughts I refer to in this article, helped me bracket in possibilities. They focused attention on the topic of teaching creative writing, and they helped to highlight my research question: What, if any, lived school experiences encouraged the participant to become a creative writer? They also helped my peer debriefers, again, to look for biases in my questions, in my analysis, and in my interpretations that spoke of me rather than of Arthur.

Now, I'm immersing myself in a new study that uses the identical methodology of my 2020 research. I call this new one Study II. I'm exploring the lived experiences of another successful poet through the same research question. Therefore, I have needed to bracket Arthur's themes, so that they don't bias Study II. I plan to conduct a Study III, IV, V, and VI, to be compiled in a few years into a PhD dissertation. I will need to bracket the thematic results of previous studies as I move towards Study VI.

For example, before starting Study Two, I addressed Arthur's eight themes: 1) events in school that promoted the joy and wonder of silent reading of poetry and fiction encouraged Arthur to become a creative writer; 2) events that promoted the joy and wonder of listening to poetry and fiction fluently read aloud and of listening to songs encouraged him; 3) events that promoted the wonder of uninterrupted language experiences and 4) that promoted the intrigue and wonder of flights of imagination fuelled by the connotative and imagistic value of words encouraged him; 5) events that promoted the excitement of verbally punning and joking and of informing others about what he had read and learned encouraged him; 6) events that promoted the joy and exhilarating freedom of writing down his thoughts and feelings based on poetry and fiction read and having those thoughts and feelings valued by teachers; 7) events that promoted the exhilarating freedom of choice of reading material and 8) that promoted the satisfaction and excitement of receiving sound direction about how to write well from compassionate teachers encouraged Arthur to become a creative writer.

Bracketing, then, and bracketing in possibilities, tools to place biases aside, so that the researcher can objectively, or as objectively as possible, study research questions and interview data/lived experience in the qualitative/phenomenological arena, allow for a disciplined subjectivity. By disciplined subjectivity, I refer to the researcher’s remaining true to the meanings of the data (van Manen, 2020), made possible through the sorts of bracketing this article has described.

Whether you are a historian, ethnographer, or phenomenological researcher, this article should provide you a method for "tying up" biases. Untied biases are somewhat like untied horses that roam about trampling that new garden. Don't let biases trample a study or a history book. Aptekar (2020) feels he allowed that to happen in his study of Colombian street children, and that study, he says in different words, suffered for that trampling. In short, his untied biases destroyed some of his study's validity.