Chapter 10: Teaching Is … Other People: Existential Reflections on Coteaching Phenomenology With Undergraduate Students

In this chapter, we create an account of coteaching an upper-level philosophy course (phenomenology) that also works to illustrate what we think are existential revisions to the practice of pedagogy. We connect phenomenological concepts such as pairing, intersubjectivity, and intercorporeality found in canonical authors such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida with a rich description of student and professorial lived experience. We do so in order to argue that the classroom ought to be (and is) its own laboratory, that students teach the teacher as much as the teacher does the students, and that far from “watering down” education by means of coteaching, education is enriched and made more significant and elegant by having undergraduates take on pedagogical responsibilities. Our experience of coteaching has lead overall to increased mediation of pedagogical structures and thereby to a deeper understanding and more equitable opportunities for all involved. The point, in short, of this chapter is that coteaching allows greater room for learning to become a communally-centered continuum of reflection.