What Are the Barriers and Supports to a Return to Health From Long COVID? A Qualitative Study Designed, Developed, and Conducted by Individuals With Lived Experience of Long COVID.

Over the last century, there has been a wealth of investment in pedagogical approaches—to understand how best to facilitate learning and teaching. Pedagogical approaches are grounded in educational theories, such as the constructivist approach that emphasizes active engagement, collaboration, and critical thinking (); behavioral theories that consider how external stimuli invokes behavioral change; cognitive theories that study information processes such as memory and problem-solving (); experiential learning which considers use of experience and reflection (); social learning that emphasizes the role of social influences in learning (); and the humanist approach which considers how to influence growth and self-actualization (). While all these theories have advantages and challenges—what is important is that whatever pedagogical approaches are used, they align to the learning outcomes and learner needs. While these theories have been widely applied to different education contexts, there is little understanding of pedagogical approaches to postgraduate studies. This is particularly salient for a more complex and evolving methodology such as hermeneutic phenomenology (). Hermeneutic phenomenology is a philosophical approach that combines hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation) and phenomenology (the structures of lived accounts) to explore and understand the lived experiences of individuals. This work is situated in a philosophical worldview of self and world being inexplicably connected. It draws on philosophical underpinnings to interpret the meanings of participants’ experiences situated within their broader historical and cultural context. This genre of graduate research requires approaches to learning and teaching that perhaps extend beyond what is commonly used in other methodological approaches. foregrounded postgraduates’ lived experiences of working with data when doing hermeneutic phenomenology research. They found that applying hermeneutic phenomenology understanding to a research project requires more than reading and following a process or ontic (specific, factual, concrete) aspects. Smythe and Spence contend that “There is an openness to the phenomenological hermeneutic way that is beyond a logical, step by step ‘do this and then do that’ approach” (p. 2). This echoes the work of others who have reported on how hermeneutic phenomenology demands so much more from the researcher (, ; ). The topics of investigation in hermeneutic phenomenology studies are often personal and sensitive lived experiences of phenomenon: these experiences can be dramatic, confronting, life-altering, and profoundly upsetting. Students new to this methodology often find their initial exposure to this interpretive genre of research difficult and personally demanding (). They frequently speak of their unsettledness as they grapple with the unbounded and non-formulaic nature of this form of human inquiry (; ). Singer provides an apt metaphor: