The audacity of building community: a teacher looks at the end of every fork

In this article, I theorize a specific pedagogical moment as a teacher educator by taking up a particular aspect of phenomenological philosophy – the phenomenological reduction – and a particular conception of pedagogy informed by Bourdieu’s philosophies – nomos and habitus – in order to put them in closer dialog with one another. I also bring the theoretical and conceptual work of other critical and poststructural thinkers – hooks and Boler – to bear on a nagging pedagogical concern I experienced as a teacher educator when one of my students made me painfully aware of something I had missed, creating a landscape for how each may be imagined as not only exercises of teaching but as larger commitments to practice and theory, relationship with learners, as well as relationship with self. This concern became a phenomenological pedagogical moment of self-discovery and defined possibility in the classroom where I learned to shift and suspend pedagogical practices and step back to take a moment to see what had ...