Tasting Education

Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning, and Educational Research Through the Sense of Taste

T. Jameson Brewer and Cleveland Hayes, Laura M. Jewett, Zulitazhira Hinojosa

• Publisher: Myers Education Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781975508241
• eBook ISBN:
  9781975508265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Why is the sense of taste so conspicuously absent from contemporary educational research and so severely rationed in the ways it is lived in universities and schools? After all, in the world, taste is a perceptual and epistemological powerhouse in the complicated process of staying alive as well as living a life. Taste is also a process of world making. It's a way of reading, naming, mapping, imagining, remembering, and making worlds and connecting to the worlds of others--therefore it is curricular.

In attending to how taste matters and matters of taste, chapters in Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning, and Educational Research Through the Sense of Taste invite participants to think about taste as a sense, and/or the sense of taste, as it plays out in the thinking and doing of education and its inquiry. This book takes up taste as an embodied set of meanings that are sensuous, pragmatic, and political: as a key part of the sensorium, and as engagement with the sensuosity of the olfactory, the nose, the mouth, the tongue as a way of making meaning of food, but also ways for making meaning from the food for thought and action that theory can provide. It also asks us to take into account the culture of food as it relates to education; whose palates are catered to and whose remain marginalized, deliberately destroyed, or are left-unfed? Taste, then, also becomes a way of resisting, challenging, and reimagining such modes as they play themselves out in curriculum and pedagogy and reveal collective commitments that include shared pleasure alongside political and social action (Siniscalchi, 2018). This book offers a space for deeper conversations around taste in curriculum and elsewhere, and how taste is being used to dismantle oppression in these spaces. The slow-food movement argues that "taste and pleasure" must return to the table (Siniscalchi, 2018). Tasting Education invites the mixed pleasures and problematics of taste to the table of educational research as well.

Tasting Education will appeal to faculty and students in graduate-level courses related to curriculum, instruction, social foundations and leadership studies, as well as those involved with food studies courses.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Half Title Page
• Culinary Canvas: A Series on Integrating the Arts and Food into Higher Education
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Relationalities of (More-Than) Tasting Education: An Artographic Journeying
• CHAPTER 2: Food for Thought: A Métissage of Taste, Place, Identity, and Slowness in Education
• CHAPTER 3: Tasting Our Way Out of the Classroom: Experiential Learning in Sociology of Food
• CHAPTER 4: Whatever Salt Is: Taste, Affect, and the Building of Relational Knowledge
• CHAPTER 5: Tasty Fables
• CHAPTER 6: Sweet, Bitter, Spicy, and Complex: A Taste-Centered Perspective on Teacher Education
• CHAPTER 7: Savoring Knowledge: A Feminist Critical Lens on Taste in Education and Care
• CHAPTER 8: Bitter, Sweet, and Umami: Affective Sensory Encounters in Mother–Daughter Artistic Pedagogy
• CHAPTER 9: There Ain’t No Sugar in Cornbread: Food and the Veil of Nostalgia in Southern Place
• CHAPTER 10: Taste Test: Probing Primary Tastes to Overcome a Vapid Curriculum
• CHAPTER 11: Taste as an Act of Resistance
• CHAPTER 12: Taste as Method: Gastronomy and Interdisciplinary Food Pedagogy in Chocolate:
• CHAPTER 13: A Golden Ticket to Taste: On the Current State of Cocoa Quality Education
• CHAPTER 14: Cultivating Vegetables and Taste in the Urban Food Desert
• CHAPTER 15: Taste, Identity, and Resistance in Food Justice Movements
• CHAPTER 16: The Neuroqueer Tongue: Rethinking Taste, Sensory Politics, and Inclusive Futures in Education
• CHAPTER 17: A Taste of Life and Death: Towards Curricular Palate Cleansers Against Necropolitics, Biosocial Fatalism, and Divisions of Empathy
• CHAPTER 18: Tuning into Taste
• CHAPTER 19: Tasting Education with Chopsticks: A Diasporic Hakka Cuisine
• CHAPTER 20: Eat Me: Taste, Desire, and What it Means to Want to Know
• Contributors
• Index