This publication was written with Dr. Lauren Moret and Dr. Katherine Greenberg. We collaborated on a study of reflections written by students about a course that did not employ a traditional grading system. Spoiler, students hated it for a few weeks, and then they loved it.

This publication is a slice of my dissertation in which I detail the progression of changes experienced by students in a unique graduate seminar taught using a phenomenological approach. The students began the course seeing the diversity of their classmates in a superficial way. Their awareness of the differences (and similarities) deepened over time as they saw how backgrounds and other experiences affected perception. Finally, a semester of listening to each other’s stories spurred deep changes in the way they oriented to others and difference in general. For example, one third of course participants attributed their ability to listen to others in the face of disagreement to the other students in the course. I wrote a little more about it here.

This publication is a book chapter written with Dr. Sultana Shabazz that uses the context of an educational program in a women’s prison to discuss the constraints we all face when attempting to act on our critical thinking. Many thanks to Drs. Becky Noel Smith and Randy Hewitt for working with us to include this piece in their book.

My co-authors and I have a book, The Phenomenological Heart of Teaching and Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice in Higher Education. In it Kathy and Neil Greenberg, Sandra Thomas, John Smith, and I present a carefully constructed framework for teaching and learning informed by philosophical and empirical foundations of phenomenology. Based on an extensive, multi-dimensional case study focused around the ‘lived experience’ of college-level teaching preparation, classroom interaction, and students’ reflections, this book presents evidence for the claim that the worldviews of both teachers and learners affect the way that they present and receive knowledge. By taking a unique phenomenological approach to pedagogical issues in higher education, this volume demonstrates that a truly transformative learning process relies on an engagement between consciousness and the world it ‘intends’.

A piece I worked on in 2016 with Drs. Patti Dunn, Anne Skutnik, and Christie Patti was published in Action in Teacher Education and won the Editor’s Choice Award for Outstanding Article. It was titled “Disdain to acceptance: Future teachers’ conceptual change related to data driven decision making.”

In this publication, which I wrote with Drs. Sultana Shabazz, Melissa Harness, and Brittany Aronson, we touch on education, incarceration, and citizenship. We wrote it together, but my main responsibility was the section on citizenship, which examines feminist theories of citizenship, which challenge the division of public and private lives.

Phenomenology and Qualitative Data Analysis Software: A Careful Reconciliation. In this article, published in Forum: Qualitative Social Research, I stake out a middle ground between phenomenologists, who in the tradition of Heidegger consider technology dehumanizing, and software developers, who at times imply anyone who refuses to use QDAS is a luddite.

I wrote this paper with Drs. Sandra Thomas, Kathy Greenberg, and Howard Pollio: “Hearing the Voices of Students and Teachers: A Phenomenological Approach to Educational Research.” In this article we detail the methodological procedures of phenomenology as practiced at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

My conference paper: “Remembering and Un-Forgetting with Existential Phenomenological Pedagogy” Phenomenological Pedagogy AESA final was presented at the 2017 American Educational Studies Association’s annual conference in Pittsburgh, I shared elements of an existential phenomenological pedagogy that is in development with The University of Tennessee’s Phenomenology and Existentialism in Education Research (PEER) group.

A February, 2017 conference paper: Critical Thinking with Nowhere to Go.sepes-170202-clean In this short paper, presented at the Southeast Philosophy of Education Society’s 2017 annual conference, I shared an experience I had as a guest in a prison classroom and discuss the ideas it spurred about critical thinking. I have been invited to contribute this paper to a book edited by Randy Hewitt that examines applications of Jim Garrison’s concept of “eros” in education.

My dissertation: The Student Experience of Other Students. In this work I conducted a phenomenological case study focusing on an often neglected area of higher education research: how students experienced each other in a graduate seminar. Students described each other as “genuinely invested,” got “completely caught up” in activities and each other’s stories, and came to appreciate each other’s diversity. Many of the students attributed the changes they experienced in the course, like becoming a better listener, to their peers. I have written a manuscript based on this work and am sending it to The Qualitative Report.

A 2016 publication: Freedom to Connect: Insight into the Existential Dimension of Transformative Learning in a Graduate Seminar. sohn-et-al-2016 In this article we present the results of a phenomenological study of what it was like to be a learner in a graduate seminar taught by a veteran, expert instructor well known for his humor and humanity. Students described their experience as “different” from other courses and “relevant and applicable” to their lives. They found the atmosphere of the course to be “free” from institutional obligations and “open” to ideas. They were “collaborative” in exploring course content and “connected” with other students, “safe” to share perspectives and understandings, and “comfortable” to explore content in their own way.