ABSTRACT. Heidegger provides us with a unique view of learning within the context of our meaningful dealings with the use and breakdown of “equipment” and the subsequent revelatory ontological disclosure of “world” and Dasein’s Being-in-the-world. I attempt to show that Heidegger’s notion of breakdown-and-revelation within our practical modes of learning might be related to a philosophical understanding of the way in which educators understand learning in the reading curriculum, specifically in terms of the reading instruction and view to literacy that we find in Goodman’s Whole Language Philosophy of reading. Goodman describes the reader in terms of her Being-in-the-world-of-reading, which, I suggest, shares certain similarities with Heidegger’s phenomenology of “absorbed coping,” or “circumspective seeing,” which might be understood as a whole-parts-whole philosophy of learning. pp. 25–46

Keywords: Heidegger, phenomenology, absorbed coping, whole language, reading, curriculum