Samuel D. Rocha

School Lunch Is Not a Meal: Posthuman Eating as Folk Phenomenology.

School lunch is one of the least critiqued aspects of compulsory schooling. As a result, there may be a tendency to think of school lunch as part of the hidden curriculum, but what and how students eat are evident and ubiquitous parts of the schooling experience. In demarcating the school lunch as an overt educational event, this article attempts to tell a story behind the centerpiece of that event: meat. We hope to add to the small yet growing body of literature in social foundations of education addressing the multiple meanings and theoretical complexities of school food, as we consider the cafeterias potential in cultivating posthuman eating through the lens of folk phenomenology. We ask: What are the implications of a site—the school cafeteria—where eating animals is routine and normal, yet still ignored and forgotten? This question extends well beyond the cafeteria itself. Thus, our analysis seeks to make overt a phenomenological reversal that returns to the things themselves—animals (human and nonhuman) and their lives and deaths—as a way to recognize foods posthuman and folk significance. We conclude by linking our analysis to the challenges faced by educators and scholars critiquing the neoliberal school that routinely acts as a training ground for docile bodies and technocratically controlled human and nonhuman subjects. Posthuman eating as folk phenomenology is an opportunity to recover what has been lost in the neoliberal effort to (re)produce students as acquiescent consumers.

The Blue Soul of Jazz: Lessons on Waves of Anguish

This chapter is about the literal jazz of teaching and the literal teachings of jazz, separate and as a whole. It is performative, imagining the soul that has—and sangs—the blues. Pablo Neruda, Willie Nelson, William James, Toni Morrison, Miles Davis. We live in a time and place where the teacher is expected to either succeed or fail, but these expectations miss the most obvious lesson: the teacher must be present, a companion, even when companionship is hard, impossible, and require that one must suffer on waves of anguish. This essay tries to show the jazz, teacher, and teaching that is always already there and what is lost when they are tossed to and fro between rigorists and sentimentalists.

Tears at the Eye Doctor

This abstract will not tell you what is actually in the chapter. That would be too concrete for a true “abstract.” In the short chapter to follow, Rocha presents a phenomenology of tears. A phenomenology of tears is a study of the appearance of tears, beginning with Rocha’s tears, moving from those tears of his natural attitude to the general phenomena of tears and the act of weeping itself. This movement from the particular experience of tears to the general phenomena of tears is a phenomenological reduction, and this particular reduction happens as Rocha’s sight is itself being reduced from clear sight aided by prescription lenses to clouded sight through prescription eye drops. We move from immediacy to a true notion, as Rocha’s concrete sense of sight and perception is simultaneously made abstract and blurry.

Third wheel thoughts on method and the shitty curriculum

ABSTRACT In this article, I interrupt in the exchange between Hugo Letiche and Nathan Snaza published in this same issue. What concerns me are a series of unsophisticated questions about method, including the repudiation of curriculum as method and syllabus, which I will initially refer to, and later endorse, as “the shitty curriculum.”

Folk phenomenology and the offering of teaching

ABSTRACT This article will move in five parts. It begins with some priming notes on the relationship between philosophy of education and curriculum theory. Then it rehearses a collage of selected passages from a recent book, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person (Rocha, 2015a). Then the author works in a more speculative fashion to extend the authors version of phenomenology—folk phenomenology—into a description of teaching, by showing through direct association with the teaching of jazz, how teaching can itself be understood as an offering. The final section shares lyrical verse from the authors most recent composition of music. To repeat: first, philosophy of education and curriculum theory; then selections from the book; then “the offering” in two ways; then teaching as offering, the offering of teaching; finally, musical verse.

Untimely Phenomenological Research: Introduction to Heidegger and Education

The articles in this special issue have been composed over a period of almost seven years. They arrive, then, at a time when a special issue on Heidegger and Education may seem well past its time. Thankfully, ideas do not always come with an expiration date, as more empirical work often does. However, there are still legitimate concerns related to the timing of this special issue. Most notorious among the questions of timing is the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, casting an anti-Semitic shadow over the entire Heideggarian oeuvre. For many, these new revelations drive too damning a nail into the coffin and at least imply a moratorium on Heideggarian research. This is certainly worth addressing from the outset. There is no question that Heidegger’s Nazism places him on the wrong side of history and there is no reason for a sophisticated apologia to guard this special issue from that dark light. The Black Notebooks are what they are and Heidegger was who he was. The unsophisticated fact, however, still remains: Heidegger’s thought has infected such a large portion of intellectual territory, well beyond the reaches of phenomenology, that it cannot be arbitrarily dismissed or ignored out of hand. Indeed, however untimely it may be to seriously study Heidegger today may be outweighed by the simultaneous need to avoid the sterile fantasy that Heideggarian thought—warts and all—can be avoided by simply averting one’s eyes and ears. For those of us working within a particular tradition and epoch of ideas, we are all to some degree Heideggarians—for better and for the worst. One will surely notice that the most radical option of a complete Heideggarian censure and even book burning have not been widely discussed as an option, but the implications of such an experiment are worth considering in full. Imagine the volumes of books and schools of thought that would burn if proximity to Heidegger were the criteria? Who would survive? Not Sartre, Derrida, nor Rorty, and obviously not Arendt, nor countless others. This experiment would surely delight many analytic philosophers, but for less interesting reasons. The point is that the untimeliness of Heidegger’s thought today may conceal a more prescient reason to study Heidegger in an untimely fashion. And, of course, the theme of this special issue is not only Heidegger. It is also about education.

Education as Mystery: The enchanting hope of desire

Abstract In this article, Samuel D. Rocha uses Martin Heidegger’s later writings to compose a philosophical meditation on the phenomenology of education. Three key distinctions emerge: the difference between philosophy and philosophers, being and meaning, and education and the Gospel of Schoolvation.

Kinship, Analogy, and Experiment: A Collage.

Through this article the author presents an experimental collage about the experiment of writing and its relation to the analogies of kinship—an enactment of folk phenomenology.