The qualitative method of phenomenology provides a theoretical tool for educational research as it allows researchers to engage in flexible activities that can describe and help to understand complex phenomena, such as various aspects of human social experience. This article explains how to apply the framework of phenomenological qualitative analysis to educational research. The discussion within this article is relevant to those researchers interested in doing cross-cultural qualitative research and in adapting phenomenological investigations to understand students’ cross-cultural lived experiences in different social educational contexts.

The power of rumours is that they can be broadly exchanged, generating a ‘public temper’ (which is everybody’s temper without being anybody’s temper in particular). This article, therefore, describes an approach to measuring the public temper, examining particularly the public temper of an Arab society, namely Saudi Arabia. It addresses the following research question: is it possible to analyse existing (scholarly) rumours to see if they can be used as informants of the public temper of the culture in which they exist? This question is answered ethnographically by analysing 579 Arabic online rumours collected by students as part of their critical engagement with educational technology. Having analysed the data, four categories emerged: theconcerns,interests,attitudesandvaluesof Saudi Arabia. According to the literature, these four categories, taken together, constitute theemotionaldomain (i.e., the public temper) of a society. Thus, a theoretical proposition (and contribution to the existing literature regarding sociology) is that rumours mirror the public temper of a culture, reflecting a range of emotions from simple to complex (from concerns, interests and attitudes to values). Simpler emotions (e.g., concerns) appear to be more easily affected by rumours than more complex emotions (e.g., values). An implication of this study is that rumours have ‘biographies’, which detail public tempers across space and time. Rumours are ‘records’ of public tempers that should be read in the same way archaeologists read landscapes and remains. Although rumours entailill-definedinformation, it is feasible towell definesociety through such ill-defined information, meaning that something can come out of its opposite. This study offers ethnographers a new method of understanding public tempers through rumours, alongside conventional meaning-making symbols (e.g., poems).

This article tackles the question: To what domains did education go when it left school buildings due to the coronavirus pandemic? To answer this question, 1184 observations of online activity, 1132 observations of face-to-face activity, 118 focus groups and 1110 individual interviews were undertaken. In addition, 1290 witticisms were collected, utilising humour to inform research. Data analysis reveals the relocation of education to three domains: the domestic, digital and political. Its relocation to the domestic domain has meant increased familial responsibility, fuelling domestic tensions and conflicting with home-based distractions. Its relocation to the digital domain has involved reduced physical interaction, rituality, social merit, mobility and student health. Its relocation to the political domain has given rise to issues of participation and reshaped the power, institutional fabrication and societal support of education. The conclusion introduces the concept of “coronian education”—a hybrid of the domestic, digital and political domains. Whereas pre-coronian education was limited to a single domain, the school, coronian education is fragmented across three domains. Although coronian education research is feasible in the digital and political domains, it is challenging to conduct such research in the domestic domain, as an enquiry into domesticity entails invading the private spaces of homes.