Editor’s introduction

Abstract

In this issue we learn more about currere and praxis in Africa, America, and Mexico. While acknowledging that the Estados Unidos y México are also América - as are all the nations in the Western Hemisphere - I’ll proceed in that initial alphabetical order.

In the first article, Ünal Deniz explores the career experiences of 12 local Ivorian teachers working in international schools in Côte d’Ivoire through Pinar’s currere methodology. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 teachers working in international schools in Côte d’Ivoire - analyzed across four temporal and subjective dimensions, e.g. regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical— Ünal Deniz’s intriguing research investigates teachers’ coping with complex institutional dynamics while constructing professional identities within an international educational setting. From his interviews Professor Deniz discovered a series of barriers these teachers faced, among them (1) credential devaluation, (2) salary inequities, and (3) exclusion from leadership opportunities, each reflecting colonial legacies and localized hierarchical structures. Despite these barriers, teachers devised strategic responses, including (1) contextual behavior adaptation, (2) selective information sharing, and (3) collective organizing. Deniz documents these teachers’ “internal transformations” by means they judged success according to their students’ learning rather than their own professional advancement, all the while also engaging in community-school bridge building and policy advocacy. Far from being discouraged, Deniz discovered that these teachers acted as agents of educational improvement rather than succumbing to inequitable practices. His noteworthy research contributes to the international education literature by centering marginalized voices and demonstrating how currere method enables understanding of professional life as an ongoing negotiation between individual agency and institutional constraints. Professor Deniz’s article is a powerful testimony to these teachers’ inner strength, their commitment to the children they teach as well as to the communities wherein their school is located.

Peaches Hash describes how an instructor of undergraduate writing courses within a public university in the United States used arts-based writing assignments to enact the currere process. Throughout the semester, students were asked to complete artistic representations of writing prompts to juxtapose with their assignments, inviting them to incorporate autobiographical elements, thereby demonstrating pedagogically that the process of currere can function as a curricular method within the undergraduate writing classroom.

Also working in the United States, Jennifer L. Schneider and Hongyu Wang point to a rarely acknowledged aspect of currere studies, namely that currere and the contemplation it encourages resistance to the corporatized forces of efficiency, measurement, and control currently deforming education at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. They draw a contrast between the two traditions, currere centering autobiographical inquiry to reconstruct self and society while contemplation cultivating embodied stillness, relational awareness, and spiritual openness. They point out that scholarship has explored each tradition separately, yet little scholarship attends to what their generative interplay can bring. The authors argue that acknowledging the interrelationship between currere and contemplation can “deepen and enrich educational life.” Drawing on theory, classroom practice, and qualitative research, Schneider and Wang explore how wedding currere and contemplation can (1) unsettle instrumentalist logics, (2) contest efforts to flatten the inner world, (3) foster integrative personhood, and (4) cultivate intergenerational nonviolence, thereby provide portals to a lived experience of curriculum attuned to “emergence, ethical presence, and the transformative possibilities of lived time,” a “praxis of depth, openness, and relational compassion.”

Last but by no means least, Drs. Rita Guadalupe Angulo Villanueva aand Nehemías Moreno Martínez engaged in a two-voiced autobiographical research study, one the voice of a curriculum theorist and the second a mathematics educator with an undergraduate background in physics. The authors are currently conducting curriculum development for graduate studies in education and teaching at the Faculty of Sciences of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The two researchers examine curriculum concepts, among them (1) lived curriculum, (2) curriculum design and evaluation, (3) continuous curriculum updating, as well as (4) craft-based processes in lived curriculum and in scientific-didactic conceptual structures,. They discovered that the “central tension” throughout their curricular construction has been between the lived and prescribed curriculum, from which the authors formulated an Emergent Curriculum Code which provided the foundation for a multidisciplinary, intercultural, and hybrid curriculum currently being offered in a Mexican university graduate program.

My congratulaations to each author upon the publication of their important research.