Finding a friend in currere

Abstract

In this article, I recount finding a friend in currere —a method that reconceptualizes curriculum as lived (Pinar, 1994)—during my master’s degree in education, and how, like any meaningful friendship, we expanded each other’s horizons. Enthralled by its goal to humanize curriculum, I began by exploring the relevance of currere in relation to my lived experiences of self-estrangement. Similarities emerged as I learned about currere’s origins: we are both outliers in our contexts, and we are both rooted in clinical psychology. Finding common ground enabled our friendship to grow; I synthesized a novel association between currere and the psychological framework, Internal Family Systems (IFS; Schwartz, 1995), due to their shared desire to bring the many parts of our identities together. However, a key difference was revealed: where IFS struggled to ground the fragmented parts of me due to the impact of self-estrangement, currere remedied this by contextualizing my experiences within education to form an attachment. Currere challenged my perceptions of attachment theory—the inevitability of poor life outcomes due to failures in early bonding (Ainsworth, 1978; Bowlby, 1979)—through its potential for self-renewal in adulthood. In response, I proposed currere as a method of self-synthesis—an empowering approach in which the self-estranged can piece the parts of themselves together for the first time. Insights from this paper informed my master’s thesis and may prove useful for those seeking a framework for self-synthesis within their educational landscape.

Keywords

References

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