PRESENTING SUPERB RESEARCH THAT ADVANCES THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

Culinary Canvas: A Series on Integrating the Arts and Food into Higher Education Series Read Description

Tasting Education

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

Paperback
April 2026
9781975508241
More details
  • Publisher
    Myers Education Press
  • Published
    22nd April
  • ISBN 9781975508241
  • Language English
  • Pages 225 pp.
  • Size 6" x 9"
  •    Request Exam Copy
$41.95
E-Book

E-books are now distributed via VitalSource

VitalSource offer a more seamless way to access the ebook, and add some great new features including text-to-voice. You own your ebook for life, it is simply hosted on the vendor website, working much like Kindle and Nook. Click here to see more detailed information on this process.

May 2026
9781975508265
More details
$41.95

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.

“Laura Jewett and Zulitazhira Hinojosa have assembled and edited a most remarkable volume that should appeal to the tastes of many, especially those interested in supplementing sensory critiques and commentaries that focus on ocularcentrism (moi-même in my anti-racist tracts on lynching and reparation) and the significance of the auditory for hearing curriculum in a new key (Aoki). But the participants in this volume taste more than a more complex menu of conceptual options in understanding education; they insist there is also a political subtext to reimagining - re-experiencing - education through cooking and food. The book amounts to a gumbo as delicious as any served in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, a mélange of ingredients and tastes like no other. Substitute coffee or tea for that aperitif and begin tasting.”

William F. Pinar, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning, and Educational Research Through the Sense of Taste delves into the multiplicities of taste/ing/ed by exploring notions of resistance, resilience, and refusal as a kind of sensual curriculum located with/in taste. This book is more than simply an exploration of the senses and how they become socioculturally and politically located. It is an engagement with questions of equity, access, and community. Contributors to this volume ask readers to consider how one becomes, and what futurities emerge as they intra-act with the complexities of taste.”

Boni Wozolek, PhD, Pennsylvania State University, Abington College

“I read Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Learning and Educational Research through the Sense of Taste as a skeptic—Could this really be relevant to curriculum and pedagogy? My conclusion: Most definitely. Tasting Education provides a refreshing new lens that challenges epistemological boundaries of what we have traditionally defined as educational research. Relying on taste as a visceral form of knowing and the theorizing of taste as sense, method, and justice-oriented practice, the collection invites us to think about the ways in which we have thought and think about food, relations, place, and identity, and to re-imagine what is needed to sustain and pleasure us through difficult times. Richly theoretical yet grounded in pedagogical possibility, this volume invites scholars and practitioners to engage in 'theoretical tasting' as a serious, necessary, and transformative curricular practice.”

Nichole Guillory, Ph.D., Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, Kennesaw State University

“In Tasting Education: Viewing Curriculum, Pedagogy, Learning and Educational Research through the Sense of Taste, co-editors and Laura Jewett and Zulitazhira Hinojosa have assembled a strong, thought-provoking volume that performatively answers the question: what might it mean to taste education? Addressing an important gap across educational literatures, contributors mix contemporary flavors with textural foundations, reimagining critical approaches to theory, method, and practice. From questions of equity and justice to discussions of affect and their effects, Tasting Education deftly underscores what tasting inquiries can do and the significance of the senses.”

Walter S Gershon, Rowan University

“This book calls us to reconfigure relationships with memory and embodiment. Offering an intimate look at how taste opens up prevailing onto-epistemological assumptions to afford an expanded view of pedagogical praxis, the authors explore taste as agentic inquiry in education. Taste, is no longer merely an action one takes, but an invitation to co-create educational experiences as a deeply relational endeavor.”

Maria Wallace, Associate Professor of Science Education, The University of Southern Mississippi

Foreword by T. Jameson Brewer

Introduction by Zulitazhira Hinojosa and Laura M. Jewett

Chapter 1. Relationalities of (More-Than) Tasting Education: An Artographic Journeying
by Andrie Savva

Chapter 2. Food for Thought: A Métissage of Taste, Place, Identity, and Slowness in Education
by Sonam Dema, Aleksandra Dubinina, Narges Mansouri, Rui Yin, and Wanda Hurren

Chapter 3. Tasting Our Way Out of the Classroom: Experiential Learning in Sociology of Food
by Katherine Everhart

Chapter 4. Whatever Salt Is: Taste, Affect, and the Building of Relational Knowledge
by Anastasia Goodwin and Jessica Watkins

Chapter 5. Tasty Fables
by Zulitazhira Hinojosa

Chapter 6. Sweet, Bitter, Spicy, and Complex: A Taste-Centered Perspective on Teacher Education
(Re)viewing Teacher Education through Taste
by Suzanne Porath

Chapter 7. Savoring Knowledge: A Feminist Critical Lens on Taste in Education and Care
by Erin K. West

Chapter 8. Bitter, Sweet, and Umami: Affective Sensory Encounters in Mother–Daughter Artistic Pedagogy
by Hsin Fang

Chapter 9. There Ain’t No Sugar in Cornbread: Food and the Veil of Nostalgia in Southern Place
by Ugena Whitlock

Chapter 10. Taste Test: Probing Primary Tastes to Overcome a Vapid Curriculum
by Clover Johnson

Chapter 11. Taste as an Act of Resistance
by Patricia Ramirez-Biondolillo

Chapter 12. Taste as Method: Gastronomy and Interdisciplinary Food Pedagogy in Chocolate: Politics and Pleasure at Chatham University
by Sally Frey and Emily Schostack

Chapter 13. A Golden Ticket to Taste: On the Current State of Cocoa Quality Education
by Carla D. Martin and José López Ganem

Chapter 14. Cultivating Vegetables and Taste in the Urban Food Desert
by Ellen Kang

Chapter 15. Taste, Identity, and Resistance in Food Justice Movements
by Gabrielle Lenart

Chapter 16. The Neuroqueer Tongue: Rethinking Taste, Sensory Politics, and Inclusive Futures in Education
by Ginney Norton

Chapter 17. A Taste of Life and Death: Towards Curricular Palate Cleansers Against Necropolitics, Biosocial Fatalism, and Divisions of Empathy
by Patrick Phillips

Chapter 18. Tuning into Taste
by Joanne Yoo

Chapter 19. Tasting Education with Chopsticks: A Diasporic Hakka Cuisine
by Nicholas Ng-A-Fook

Chapter 20. Eat Me: Taste, Desire, and What it Means to Want to Know
by Laura M. Jewett

About the Authors

Index

Laura M. Jewett

Laura Jewett, PhD. is a Professor of Curriculum Theory and Curriculum Studies at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Research interests focus on the triptych of consciousness, culture and curriculum.

Zulitazhira Hinojosa

Zulitazhira Hinojosa is a high school biology teacher at Johnny G. Economedes High School in Edinburg, Texas. She teaches in an inclusive classroom, where she supports both exceptional and on-level learners in mastering foundational biology content and preparing for the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness end-of-course biology exam. Hinojosa holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Arts in Special Education from the University of Texas Permian Basin, and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. As a proud UTeach alumna, Hinojosa is deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of educators. She formally and informally supports pre-service , first-year and veteran teachers through roles as a UTeach mentor , ECISD INSPIRE Mentor, and district curriculum writer. Her passion for addressing the public school teacher shortage in Texas is evidenced by her sustained involvement in mentorship and teacher preparation efforts. As both a teacher and an emerging scholar, she is dedicated to bridging theory and practice by drawing from educational research to inform her instruction while allowing the realities of public schooling to shape her scholarly inquiry. Her pedagogical priorities center on inclusive, justice-oriented science education that respects all students’ diverse ways of knowing. She embraces what is known as an epistemological pluriverse which is a recognition that knowledge takes many forms and emerges through varied cultural, material, and embodied experiences.

education; taste; culture; posthuman; pedagogy; curriculum; food studies; Food Stories; Tasting Education; Taste and Education; Curriculum Studies; Curriculum Theory; Social Foundations; Food Narratives; Food and memory; Decolonizing Food