Re-membering into Tasty Fables, Imagining Taste-y Curriculum

• In Event: Tasting Curriculum

Abstract

This paper presents anthropomorphized accounts of tasted materials in science class, such as Cheetos sacrificed in calorimetry labs and PTC paper dissolving on students’ tongues, to reveal how these materials act within classrooms and shape what is remembered or forgotten in education. These stories challenge the dominance of ocularcentric schooling and illustrated how posthuman sensibilities can help us imagine curriculum as co-constituted through lively more-than-human entanglements. Such work demonstrates how re-membered stories, even when anthropomorphized, act as more than representations. From a new materialist perspective, stories are agents that live alongside us, shaping our thinking and acting in the world (Rosiek & Snyder, 2020). Because they are alive, like a tasty memory, they cannot be so easily forgotten. Their liveliness demands we attend to them and, through them, attend to the posthuman condition. The playfulness of anthropomorphizing, as Bennett (2010) suggests, cultivates sensitivities to matter’s vitality and the agencies of more-than-human actors. Thus, taste serves as a site for imagining taste-y curricular futures, as the act of tasting, literal or metaphorical, catalyzes new ways of knowing and relating beyond anthropocentric frameworks.
Building from these fables, which arecentered in the science curriculum and pedagogy, this paper explores taste more broadly as a curricular catalyst that reconfigures relationships among teachers, students, and materials in the futurities of all curriculums. It asks: How do tasted materials participate in shaping curriculum as a lived, more-than-human assemblage in education? Drawing on posthuman and new materialist theories (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013) and informed by my experiences as a teacher, this paper considers how intra-actions with taste open possibilities for reimagining curricula beyond human-centered traditions. Taste is examined not as a simple sensory detail but as a phenomenon where ethical, ontological, and epistemological dimensions entangle within curriculum. These tasted intra-actions, present in memory and practice, remain part of the curricular assemblages we inhabit.
This work aligns with the 2026 Division B call by engaging the politics of curriculum through attention to overlooked sensory and material dimensions of schooling. It seeks to unforget histories of matter and sensation marginalized in educational theory while imagining futures where curriculum theorizing embraces posthuman sensibilities and material justice. By reflecting on my positionality as a teacher and researcher, I consider how taste and tasted materials invite a radical rethinking of curriculum’s responsibilities to future generations. Extending Tasty Fables into a broader theoretical and empirical frame, this paper contributes to Division B’s conversation about how curriculum is lived, sensed, and ethically reimagined, showing how even small intra-actions, such as tasting in the science lab, open pathways toward just and sustainable curricular futures.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.
Rosiek, J., & Snyder, J. (2020). Narrative inquiry and new materialism: Stories as (not necessarily benign) agents. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(10), 1151–1162. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418784326

Author

• Zulitazhira Hinojosa, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley