ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that biology, particularly the integrative biology of ethology, is a valuable complement to phenomenology that can be brought to bear in understanding teaching and learning in the classroom. It also shows that efforts to create an empowering lifeworld in the classroom are facilitated by an understanding of ethology, an approach to the biology of behavior that integrates several key sibling disciplines within biology. These are developmental biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and physiology. The chapter focuses on the ideas of the transformative learning experience and the teachable moment. Like the transformative learning experience, the teachable moment is at the end of a continuum of experiences and evokes unmistakable signs of phenomenological meaning. Phenomenology emphasizes the perceptions of the individual and the description rather than the explanation of experience. The distances between philosophy and science are significant and often contentious. For example, the claim in phenomenology that every experience is irreducible is difficult to reconcile with the scientific paradigm.
