The Audacity of Building Community: A Teacher Looks at the End of Every Fork

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding Teaching Through Teachers’ Reflection on Practice

Abstract

This theoretical paper addresses the ways in which teachers experience circumstance and how they are aware or unaware of what those circumstances can bring. This paper attempts to put a particular aspect of phenomenological philosophy—phenomenological reduction, and a particular conception of pedagogy informed by Bourdieu’s philosophies--nomos and habitus, in closer dialogue with one another and situates both within a nagging pedagogical concern experienced by the author. This concern became a phenomenological moment of self-discovery and defined possibility in the classroom where the author learned to shift and suspend pedagogical practices and step back to take a moment to see what had yet to be noticed, a time in which the author chose to eat a naked lunch.

Author

• Jennifer A. Thiel, University of Georgia