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Abstract

Based on my experiences as an educator, I believe there is more happening in the classroom than we can easily think about and put into words. Provoked by curriculum theorist Dwayne Huebner’s idea of the “moreness” of education, I use phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion’s theorizing about revelation to describe the educational event as saturated with meaning and, so, dwelling outside of the classical phenomenological understanding of experience. I argue that a “moreness” beyond current understanding, experience saturated with meaning that exceeds our ability to know it, is key to the most humane and aspirational aims of education. I ask the following questions: If we extend our understanding of experience to include revelation, how—if at all—does this change our understanding of an educational experience? If we think about the nature of educational experiences in terms of revelation, what impact might this have on how we think about curriculum as a lived, classroom experience? I also engage with the challenge of communicating and reflecting upon an experience that in its “moreness” exceeds or evades comprehension and so cannot be expressed with conventional language. What follows from asserting the possibility of a revelatory experience—an experience that originates from outside of and in excess of our intention—is a need for a way to express an experience of revelation—an experience that by definition remains beyond current conceptions. To this end, I employ poetics as not only an interpretive but also an observational method. Starting with naturalistic observations of my own and others’ classrooms, I craft poetic descriptions to sketch aspects of the “more” that is happening there. I include these poetic renderings throughout the manuscript, offering them in support of my conception of a form of educational experience that is initiated not by the subject, but by encounter with absolute otherness, an excess or moreness of meaning beyond the subject’s ability to comprehend. I call this encounter a curriculum of revelation.