Pinar’s addendum

I wanted to thank Teresa Strong-Wilson for editing this special issue of Currere and Praxis in honor of the publication of the 50^th year anniversary edition of Toward a Poor Curriculum. I wanted to, and I still do: thank you, Teresa!

Rereading her analytically arresting, breathtakingly beautiful introduction I decided a simple “thank you” wouldn’t do, although I feared then, and fear now, that adding my words will only muck up what Teresa has done. As long as my addendum doesn’t distract from what Teresa has achieved—you’ll be the judge of that—I guess I can live with my compulsion to say something in addition to “thank you.” In addition to being loquacious, my other challenge is to avoid being effusive. Probably I fail both challenges.

First of all, allow me to acknowledge this is an ongoing “thank you,” initiated when I met Teresa thirty years ago, spurred by her quiet oh so sensitive intelligence—the concept of “discernment” might convey the delicacy of her thought and judgment, her epiphanies and insight - these qualities evident in the books, among them Bringing Memory Forward (2008) and Teachers’ Ethical Self Encounters with Counter-Stories in the Classroom (2021), as well as provocative edited volumes, among those her co-edited Provoking Curriculum Encounters Across Educational Experience: New Engagements with the Curriculum Theory (2019) and Curricular and Architectural Encounters with W.G. Sebald: Unsettling Complacency, Reconstructing Subjectivity (2022). There are others. If you haven’t read them yet, I encourage you to work your way through them, in slow time, as they invite you to contemplation as well as to takeaways.