Living our subjective presence: An interview with William F. Pinar

Abstract

This paper is a narrative account of the conversation that took place at Pinar’s house, on April 4, 2023, focusing on a few themes that emerge from his 2023 book A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory: Advancing Currere Against Cultural Crises in Education as well as the dialogue between us, including “subjective presence,” “study,” and “knowledge of most worth”. This paper hopes to experience Pinar’s calling not only in reverberating textual conversations but also in the author’s embodied lived experiences in the interview. This paper invokes several lived moments the author shared with Pinar and gives a glimpse of the person behind his text, in other words, to humanize the text. This would echo the humanist emphasis embedded in the reconceptualization of curriculum studies. This interwoven feeling, reading, thinking, and writing, I believe, are in itself a very pedagogical attempt to “concretize” the abstract and go beyond and behind the text. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of embracing the subjective presence for teachers’ pedagogical praxis.