Students' Perspectives on Individual Development Dialogues

The focus of this article is to examine what students perceive as significant beyond the content of a development conversation, with a particular emphasis on communicative aspects.The empirical data comes from a completed dissertation project highlighting the importance of teachers' leadership during development conversations in primary schools. Theoretical FrameworkWe start from an understanding that the world is a social, intersubjective, and historical realm where individuals experience, act, and intertwine in both private and shared worlds.The study is inspired by phenomenology and adopts a lifeworld phenomenological perspective, analyzing data to account for people's contexts. Methodology/Research DesignThis article presents the results of an analysis of student interviews conducted as part of a project aimed at studying teachers' leadership in parent-teacher development dialogues and examining the experiences of both teachers and students regarding this leadership.The analysis was conducted using van Manen's (2014) three reading strategies: a holistic approach, which involved reading the text in its entirety; a selective approach, which focused on identifying significant statements, thematic expressions, or longer descriptions; and a detailed reading strategy to understand what in students' lived experiences stands out as particularly significant.We explain our understanding of reading using the lifeworld phenomenological concepts of intersubjectivity and intentionality.