Hermeneutics, as an interpretive philosophical theory, is a very important research method in this paper, which helps to transcend the QCA’s limitation on specified aspects and to methodologically understand and catch the rich meanings throughout all interview transcripts. The principal advantage and contribution of QCA are not on the understanding or interpretation, but in the classification and summarization, for which QCA could provide a methodological support in a specific manner. Therefore, hermeneutics is supposed to give the understanding and interpretation a theoretical basis and grant the way of understanding and interpretation as a reliable methodology.
As it’s well known, the theoretical basis of hermeneutics comes from Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘the father of modern hermeneutics’, who made a big move from “the illumination of biblical text to the illumination of human understanding” (Paterson &
Higgs, 2005), and “offered the important view of hermeneutics as a general theory of textual interpretation and understanding” (Prasad, 2002), which was later largely developed by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer into a philosophical hermeneutics, and Wilhelm Dilthey contributed to broaden “the field of interest of hermeneutics beyond the individual to include cultural systems and organizations”
(Paterson & Higgs, 2005).
However, in the hermeneutics, “interpretation and understanding are not two separate cognitive acts performed by the subject”, rather, understanding actually is aimed to catch the meanings that emerge or occur in the interpretation, and interpretation turns itself out as an “explicit form of understanding” (Eger, 1993). Therefore, “interpretation belongs to the essential unity of understanding” (Gadamer, 1976, cited in Chau, 1984), and it not only refers to interpreting the texts in the socio-cultural and historical contexts, but more importantly means reconstructing and re-experiencing the author’s intended psychological processes by “developing an empathetic understanding” (Prasad, 2002), which begins when the texts “find expression in the interpreter's own language”, and “involves more than analysis, description and classification” (Chau, 1984).
A big reason to use hermeneutics here is that it advocates the “productive role of
‘tradition’ and ‘prejudices’ in the act of interpretation” (Prasad, 2002), because, with the experience of an English teacher in a public junior high school in China, I’ll inevitably bring my own history, culture, tradition, values, interests, and prejudices into my understanding and interpretation, about which Gadamar has also argued that all start from the tradition or historical consciousness, and “it is tradition that produces the necessary prejudices which inform and originate the subject’s interpretative act”
(Francis, 1994).
Thus, as long as I try to understand what the teachers have talked in the interviews, the interpretation comes through the colored glasses of my mind, so understanding is always subjective, which depends on my perspective and knowledge. I agree with Walker (1997) that “there is no such thing as a totally disinterested or objective researcher”, but it doesn’t mean that the research is of no value or credibility. By importing Gadamar’s opinions, prejudices are simply the conditions that I have experienced in my life, and they are undoubtedly one part of my research work and the foundation of my analytical structure, for it is prejudices “that define the limits and the potentialities of our horizon of understanding”, and that are also the indispensable
“conditions of all understanding” (Prasad, 2002).
Besides my teaching experience, my educational background on Psychology and Curriculum & Instruction expectantly facilitates the so-called ‘fusion of horizons’ in hermeneutic dialogue leading to conscious assimilation for the authentic understanding and interpretation (Prasad, 2002). Therefore, my own prejudices, as one part of me,
could become more visible and favorable to the empathetic understanding on teachers’
beliefs, and also help me to be more sensitive in understanding their teaching conditions, sometimes I could feel that I was also there in the same situation as where they are, and I could understand their struggles and why they think like that.
Of course, respecting the subjectivity of research does not mean to deny its objectivity and reliability. Johnsen and Olsen (1992) cite the statement from Schleiermacher (1986) to make it clear that, “before the art of understanding can be practiced, the interpreter must put himself both objectively and subjectively in the position of the author”. As for me, I believe that keeping the rigorous scientific attitude on doing research is first and foremost, besides, keeping teachers’ viewpoints as original as possible in the interpretation is another way to avoid the excessive subjective prejudice and judgment in this research. But, since hermeneutics developed from a general theory to a philosophical theory, it has been highlighting more and more subjectivity, which I have to respect and apply as it should be.
Meanwhile, ‘understanding circle’ is another important concept for philosophical hermeneutics, that is, understanding must take turns constantly between the parts and the entire text, which means the understanding of a part is dependent on the understanding on the whole text, and the understanding on the whole text also counts on the understanding of each part. As Duke (1977) also mentioned, “interpretation involves constant movement back and forth, for it is always open to revision and supplementation” (cited in Smith, 2007). Therefore, “hermeneutical understanding is a process, is not an end in itself, and is never complete” (Francis, 1994). That’s why
“perfect understanding is an ideal which is ever approximated but never attained”
(Duke, 1977, cited in Smith, 2007).
I prefer hermeneutics also because “methodologically, hermeneutics is also a deeply self-reflexive and self-critical process” (Prasad, 2002). As a researcher, it’s very important to be aware of his/her own finitude or prejudice which is also called as pre-judgment, or pre-understanding, or pre-suppositions, or fore-sight, or fore-having, etc.
(Francis, 1994; Smith, 2007), and which is a preconceived notion emanating from the past experience and the process of socialization (Byrne, 1998). It is important to be critically self-reflective no matter from an alien culture or from his/her own culture, especially in a qualitative research where the researcher is not someone standing only
outside, but also a participator in the interactive conversation with interviewees and in the interpretive dialogue with the data of transcripts.
It must be underlined that, for the hermeneutics, education “is a never-ending process of openness and a perpetual fusion of horizons, arising through dialogue, in which the ideal is never to stop learning” (Blacker, 1993), and is “the product of a socially and historically conditioned agreement” by means of ‘meaning-bounded interpretations’
that “can be undertaken only within a context of values, interests, and purposes” (Smith
& Blasé, 1991). So, understanding and interpretation on teachers’ beliefs in this research are contextual largely based on teachers’ opinions and experiences, which can be seen through the context description that always comes along with every opinion of individual teacher, in order to explain and understand them properly in every concrete situation.
It’s true that the “interpretation must be contextual”, and the “text cannot be considered in isolation but in light of relevant cultural traditions and values as well as related historical events and ideas” (Walker, 1997). From that perspective, hermeneutics provides an extended platform for the understanding in an intercultural research, for hermeneutics itself is also historical or socio-historical. Interpretation can be meaningful and reasonable when it happens in a real life context with some specific cultural tradition. From that sense, to understand is also “to participate in an event of time and tradition in which common meaning comes to be realized in the ‘to-and-fro’ of language and dialogue” (Kerdeman, 1998).
It’s believed that open-ended interviews are narratives on some particular phenomena in the world of human activities, and the “hermeneutic approach is used to interpret and understand these narratives” involving different events of discourse and the possibility to look at things in different ways (Wiklund et al., 2002). Gadamer (1975) has asserted that “the meaning of a text always goes beyond its author”, so the “interpreter must understand more than the author, and interpretation, accordingly, is not merely a reproductive activity, but always a productive one” (cited in Prasad, 2002). Rather than to say a text, I would like to see those transcripts as narratives, and each transcript is essentially a story with its own meaning and background, and the most important is the story has life, which should be appreciated, respected, understood, and heard.
So my goal of this intercultural research is to let all stories speak in their own voices, to talk what teachers talked and to see the education systems through their eyes, which I believe could be possible only through the hermeneutical narrative that goes through the whole thesis. Another important element in hermeneutical understanding is the idea of dialogue, the “term ‘dialogue’ is metaphoric and conveys the conversational style of hermeneutics, of ‘listening’ to texts and letting them ‘speak’ to us” (Francis, 1994). In this study, the dialogue is not just between one teacher and me, but multi-subjective that can be seen that one teacher talks to the others, or many teachers talk about the same topic in different ways, which is essentially an interesting comparison applied in this research, so as to narrate broadly the life’s richness, vividness and concreteness.
Stories of teachers
Before jumping into the comparison directly, it’s very necessary at first to take a short time to get to know each teacher, the main characters of our stories, to know who they are and what they have experienced in their teaching life. It helps to learn some background information for understanding the reasons that they have different beliefs in successful education.