Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Document Type

Dissertation

Abstract

Drawing on Yalom’s framework of existential givens, this study explores how Vietnamese teachers experience existential freedom, existential isolation, and life meaningfulness. The notion of experience serves as the conceptual and interpretive foundation through which participants articulate these existential dimensions. Three participants were selected, and data were collected from online journal entries, vignette responses, and semi-structured interviews. Methodologically, it adopts intuitive inquiry as both conceptual lens and analytic process, integrating multiple modes of knowing and embodied understanding to explore how teachers imagine, experience, and interpret their work. To deepen interpretation, narrative structuring was incorporated to reveal the emotional and relational textures of lived experience.

Findings align with Yalom’s view that the three existential givens of freedom, meaning, and isolation are universal aspects of human life. Each participant encountered these dimensions with distinctive poignancy, shaped by personal, familial, cultural, and professional contexts. Across narratives, these dimensions intertwined: freedom affirmed meaning; meaning sustained freedom; and both unfolded within the teachers’ experience of existential isolation, tracing back to the core of their being.

The study concludes by proposing an existentially attuned vision of education, one that honors life as it is lived: complex, uncertain, and profoundly meaningful. Teaching, in this view, is not a linear career but a lifelong act of self-formation in dialogue with others. Attending to teachers’ existential realities, therefore, is not only a means of improving education but also a contribution to the ongoing human conversation about being, one that unfolds in every classroom, every act of teaching, and every teacher’s lived story.

Date

10-31-2025

Committee Chair

Skinner, Kim

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