Living the Questions: Deconstructing Interdisciplinary Higher Education and the Subject of Poverty Through a “Community of Truth”

Abstract

This manuscript recounts the experience of 10 undergraduate students at a mid-sized midwestern university engaged as members of an interdisciplinary seminar examining poverty in their community. Students' writings and reflections were deconstructed within the framework of Palmer's (1997) “community of truth” to interpret students' understandings and uncertainties. Students' direct dialogue with individuals living in poverty afforded them insight that may have eluded them through more traditional higher education pedagogy. Periods of disequilibrium, deconstruction, rebuilding of new schema, and commitment toward social action were documented and evidenced both through students' writing and emerging community activism. I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — Rainer Maria Rilke (1903, p. 27)