On September 22nd 2017, Doctor Sean Li, Academic Registrar of City University of Macau as well as the Dean of Faculty of Education, as the  guest speaker of the 12th CityU Education Forum presented a speech, Re-search for life experience: the principles and methods of Educational Phenomenology, and conveyed students an important concept: research stems from life.

First of all, Dr. Li described about his career, works and research experiences in past decades, and pointed out the major factor drives people to research was curiosity. He proposed that students should find their research topic through exploring the phenomenon surround themselves. Afterwards, when students begin their research, there may be various problems generating from the research process. In this situation, students should give up all existing cognition, do not make any hypothesis, let curiosity dominate the whole research process and ultimately elicit the thirst for knowledge. Next, Dr. Li provided some practical examples and explained that even for the same topic, there were various research directions by thinking and analyzing from different aspects, and he listed different methods and methodologies for students for reference. At the same time, Dr. Li thought that students should be initiative to absorb knowledge apart from lecture. This will help students to enhance their vision and visibility. Besides, this also, besides helping students to revise, compare and arrange their learned theory, leads them easily research in the near future. At last, Dr. Li concluded the meaning of Education Phenomenology: it is a kind of knowledge for adults to learn how to get along with children; it is also a process for people to pursue and investigate what they are interested in, and the most important thing is to keep curiosity and focus on experience.

In the final Q&A session, Dr. Li discussed with students about the connection between Education Phenomenology and teacher identity and workshop. The whole event takes place in a good atmosphere, and students focused on the speech and discussion. Finally, Dr. Li said that the main purpose of this activity was to let student think and discover their research direction and research field as soon as possible. When students find their topic, they should immediately collect relevant information and verify the feasibility. In addition, Dr. Li hoped this activity could give a new direction to students. In spite of quantitative research, they could also do qualitative research, and even mix two methods in one research.