Phenomenology Helps Understand Cross Cultural Learning Experiences

The Moment You Realize the Classroom Isn’t Neutral

I remember my first day in a graduate seminar where the professor asked everyone to raise their hands if they had ever felt “out of place” in a classroom. Almost every international student’s hand went up. The domestic students looked confused. That gap in understanding is not just awkward. It is a research problem.

For decades, educators and psychologists have tried to measure cross-cultural learning experiences with surveys and Likert scales. You know the type: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how welcome do you feel in this class?” The numbers come back, you run a regression, and you get a tidy p-value. But numbers cannot tell you what it feels like to navigate a classroom where the jokes land differently, where the professor expects a kind of participation you were never taught, where your own cultural logic suddenly seems foreign.

That is where phenomenology enters the room.

In a 2022 paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers Ahmed Ali Alhazmi and Angelica Kaufmann made a deceptively simple argument: if you want to understand what cross-cultural learning actually is for the person experiencing it, you need a method that takes experience seriously (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022). Not as a variable to be quantified, but as a lived reality to be described. Their paper, “Phenomenological Qualitative Methods Applied to the Analysis of Cross-Cultural Experience in Novel Educational Social Contexts,” is not a study of students. It is a study of how to study students. And it changes what we think we know about cultural adaptation in classrooms.

The authors argue that most cross-cultural educational research has been built on a shaky foundation. We have been asking the wrong questions because we have been using the wrong tools. Phenomenology, they show, lets researchers see what gets lost when you reduce experience to numbers. It lets you notice the moments when a student’s world shifts, when they realize the rules of engagement are different, when learning becomes not just about content but about survival in a new social logic.

What Phenomenology Actually Does to Research

Here is the part that surprised me. Phenomenology is not just a fancy word for “talking to people.” It is a rigorous philosophical method with specific commitments.

Alhazmi and Kaufmann explain that phenomenology, as developed by thinkers like Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz, starts with a radical move: you bracket your assumptions. You set aside what you think you know about a phenomenon. You stop treating culture as a variable and start treating it as something that emerges in lived experience (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022).

The authors break this down into three practical moves for educational researchers.

First, you focus on the lifeworld. This is the everyday world of meaning that people inhabit before they start analyzing it. For a student from Saudi Arabia studying in Norway, the lifeworld includes things like how close to stand to a classmate, whether to look a professor in the eye, and what silence in a discussion actually means. These are not trivial details. They are the texture of cross-cultural experience.

Second, you practice epoché. This is the Greek term for suspension of judgment. The researcher must stop assuming that their own cultural framework is the neutral one. This is harder than it sounds. Most cross-cultural research, the authors argue, unconsciously uses Western educational norms as the baseline and then measures how much other cultures deviate from it (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022).

Third, you look for essences. Not in the mystical sense. In the phenomenological sense, an essence is the core structure of an experience that makes it what it is. What is essential to the experience of being a cross-cultural learner? It is not just “feeling confused.” It might be something like: the experience of having your taken for granted assumptions about how learning works suddenly become visible to you.

The authors are not proposing phenomenology as a replacement for quantitative methods. They are proposing it as a necessary complement. The numbers tell you how many students report feeling isolated. Phenomenology tells you what isolation is in that context.

The Study That Changed How I Think About Culture in Classrooms

Alhazmi and Kaufmann do not present their own empirical data in this paper. Instead, they walk through a detailed example of how a phenomenological study would work in practice. They use the case of international students entering a new educational system.

Here is the scenario they construct. A student from a collectivist culture enters a Western university where individual participation and speaking up are rewarded. The student’s home culture might value listening, deference to authority, and group harmony. In the new setting, these behaviors are read as passive, disengaged, or unprepared.

The phenomenological researcher does not start by asking: “How well did you adapt?” That question already assumes adaptation is the goal. Instead, the researcher asks: “What is it like to be here, right now, in this classroom, when the professor asks a question and you know the answer but something stops you from raising your hand?”

This shifts the entire frame. The researcher is not measuring a deficiency. They are describing a lived tension between two realities.

The authors explain that phenomenology allows researchers to see that cross-cultural learning is not a linear process of assimilation. It is a constant negotiation between one’s home cultural logic and the new cultural logic of the classroom. The student is not failing to adapt. They are living in the gap between two worlds (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022).

How to Actually Do This Kind of Research

If you are a researcher or an educator who wants to use phenomenology, the authors lay out a clear process. It is not mysterious. It is disciplined.

You start with a small number of participants. Phenomenology does not need hundreds of people. It needs people who can describe their experience richly. Alhazmi and Kaufmann suggest 5 to 25 participants, depending on the depth of data you need (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022).

You conduct in depth interviews. But not just any interviews. You ask open ended questions that invite description, not analysis. Instead of “How did you feel about the group project?” you ask “Can you walk me through what happened during the group project, moment by moment, as you experienced it?”

You then analyze the transcripts using a method called thematic analysis within a phenomenological framework. This means you read and reread the interviews, looking for patterns that reveal the structure of the experience. You do not impose categories from outside. You let the categories emerge from what people actually said.

The authors emphasize that validity in phenomenology does not come from statistical significance. It comes from trustworthiness. Can the reader see the evidence? Does the description of the experience ring true? Would someone who had that experience recognize themselves in the analysis?

What This Research Does Not Prove

Let me be clear about what Alhazmi and Kaufmann are not claiming.

They are not saying that quantitative research on cross-cultural learning is useless. They are not saying that every classroom problem is cultural. They are not saying that phenomenology is the only valid method.

What they are saying is more subtle and more important. They are saying that the way we have been studying cross-cultural experience has a blind spot. We have been so focused on measuring outcomes that we have neglected to describe the experience itself. And that matters because if you do not know what the experience actually is, you cannot design interventions that address it.

The authors also acknowledge a limitation. Phenomenology requires researchers who are trained in the method and who are willing to reflect on their own biases. This is not a quick fix. It takes time, discipline, and a willingness to sit with ambiguity (Alhazmi & Kaufmann, 2022).

There is an open question that the paper raises but does not fully answer. How do you combine phenomenological findings with quantitative data in a way that respects both methods? The authors suggest that phenomenology can generate hypotheses that quantitative studies then test. But the integration is still being worked out.

Why This Matters Right Now

Here is the thing. We are in a moment where international student enrollment is rising globally. Universities are marketing themselves as global institutions. But the actual experience of those students often involves isolation, confusion, and a sense that they do not belong.

Most universities respond by offering cultural orientation programs. These programs assume that the problem is a lack of information. If the student just learns the rules, they will adapt. But phenomenology suggests something different. The problem is not just not knowing the rules. The problem is that the student’s entire way of being in a learning environment is suddenly invalidated.

Alhazmi and Kaufmann’s work implies that we need to stop asking students to adapt and start asking what the classroom looks like from their perspective. That shift alone could change how we design courses, how we train faculty, and how we evaluate student success.

What This Actually Means

Here is the bottom line. This paper is not just for researchers. It is for anyone who works with people from different cultural backgrounds. Here is what the research actually suggests for practice.

• ▸Stop measuring adaptation as if it is a personality trait. Adaptation is a relationship between a person and a context. Change the context and the adaptation changes. Phenomenology helps you see the context, not just the person.

• ▸Train faculty to recognize their own cultural assumptions about learning. Most professors think their classroom is neutral. It is not. It is built on specific cultural norms about participation, authority, and knowledge. Phenomenology makes those norms visible.

• ▸Design orientation programs that focus on describing the experience, not just teaching the rules. Instead of a handbook that says “in this country, students are expected to speak up,” create a space where international students can describe what that expectation feels like and how it conflicts with their home culture.

• ▸Use small group discussions as research. You do not need a formal study to practice phenomenology. You can ask your students: “What was the moment today when you felt most confused about what was expected of you?” Their answers will tell you more than any survey.

• ▸Accept that some tension is not a problem to be solved. Phenomenology reveals that cross-cultural learning is inherently uncomfortable. The goal is not to eliminate the discomfort. The goal is to make it navigable and to ensure that the student does not carry the burden alone.

Alhazmi and Kaufmann have given us a method for seeing what we have been missing. The classroom is not a neutral space. It is a meeting of worlds. And if we want to understand what happens when those worlds collide, we need to stop counting and start listening.