Currere and Praxis

Read and resonate: Welcome to this, the inaugural issue of Currere and Praxis

William F. Pinar — 2024-09-30

My thanks to Professors Sümer Aktan and Ünal Deniz for inviting me to serve as Editor-in-Chief of Currere and Praxis. My thanks, too, to Teresa Strong-Wilson and Wanying Wang for consenting to serve as Associate Editor and Managing Editor, respectively. My thanks also to those who agreed to serve on the Editorial Board. Thanks as well to those who submitted their manuscripts and, especially, to those whose scholarship and art appear in this inaugural issue. Thanks, finally, to those anonymous reviewers whose invaluable critiques of submitted manuscripts ensure the academic quality of the essays we publish. Thanks all around.

Becoming ethically preoccupied through Currere: W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka and narrative self-representation

Teresa Strong-Wilson — 2024-09-30

Within education, we can learn a great deal from others’ uses of narrative as a site of praxis from which to work through difficult psychic processes. The narratives published by W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka—as well as what we know about these authors’ narrative processes—hold important insights for the kind of narrative writing that can happen in currere. Born in Germany near the end of WWII and inheriting the heavy burden of the Holocaust, Sebald was concerned with the social implications of writing as a form of witness, even as he was persuaded that a narrative approach was more powerful than discursive prose. Sebald saw in the writing of narrative an attempt at restitution. For Franz Kafka, the writing of literary texts offered the only space in which he experienced some redemption from (as he called it) “murderers’ row.” Despite their stature, both considered themselves as periphereal writers; writing came from a felt sense of precarity and vulnerability. Both relied on unreliable narrators. By exploring the relations between Sebald’s and Kafka’s writing lives and their melancholy, I inquire into how both were driven by a sense of urgency in writing narratively (one form of which is literature) and look at how such writing embodied an ethical probing of unsettling preoccupations, in ways of compelling interest to projects of subjective/social reconstruction.

Displacing curriculum normativity through teachers’ autobiographical processes: A case study from Brazil

Clarissa Craveiro — 2024-09-30

This text engages with discussions on curricular normativity and autobiographical processes, challenging prescriptive discourses and subject-centered perspectives. The objective is to underscore both the fallibility of normative processes and the dynamics at play when curricular practices intersect with life stories, thereby displacing essentialist and efficiency-driven propositions. It presents a brief experiential analysis of currere with undergraduate Pedagogy students in the context of Educational Management and Supervised Internship in Brazil. The contributions of autobiography are viewed not as a panacea but as a potent proposal to disrupt rigid, expected, and quantifiable outcomes. The focus on autobiography stems from a preference for theoretical production within the field, representing a commitment to understanding the interactions that bridge universities and schools. Curricular thinking, through an autobiographical and post-structural approach, can broaden studies, contributing to a more profound understanding of the school environment and the support of teachers and their experiences.

Currere as Punctuated Manifestions

Wanying Wang — 2024-09-30

Currere emphasizes individual experience and how one can learn from these experiences (Pinar, 2011). This paper explores how one’s individual experience (currere writing) affords “punctuated manifestations” in which one who is spatially and temporally embodied and entangled engages in a recursive helictical motion of transformation while wandering through various thresholds of understanding toward infinity and traversing between/across the imagined and unimaginable and beyond. In associating with ancient Chinese novels and certain ideas in Chinese Taoism, this paper illuminates the construction and reconstruction of layers of experience, which may contribute to an alternative way of understanding currere by highlighting currere as a method that embraces the endless fluidity of one’s experiences creating an infinite, yet subliminal myriad of intersectionalities, crossings, and synthesis. Such a currere of punctuated manifestations describes emanating intersectionalities of particularity and universality, lived crossings of subjectivity and contingency, entangled convergences of past, present, and future, orienting us toward our “interiority” (Doll, 2017, p. 96). Then, currere becomes a thriving centerpiece from which to extend, to punctuate, to attune. Unfolding through contingency, the punctuated manifestations of currere stress endlessly approaching one’s “interiority” while embedding oneself within expanding encounters with self and others.

The method of currere in M. R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts

Patrick Chi Kai Lam — 2024-09-30

The Girl With All the Gifts depicts the struggle of a group of humans who embark on a journey of survival with a gifted girl named Melanie. Although the narrative is not set in the context of education, the military and scientists in the story set up a carceral classroom to investigate the infected children’s abilities, including Melanie. In the classroom, the learning initiates Melanie’s self-realization as the next person during the outbreak of the hungries plague, demonstrating Pinar’s method of currere. This paper examines how Melanie’s self-realization embodies the four steps in the method of currere and discusses the educational experience within two confrontational views on education presented in this narrative.

Continuous curriculum updating: An alternative approach to periodical reformulation in university

Rita Guadalupe Angulo Villanueva — 2024-09-30

Research on curriculum continuous updating is reported (CCU); the objective was to test a methodology and its technological database device. The hypothesis considers that CCU allows the professor’s creativity and brings closer the prescribed curriculum with the curriculum-in-use. A CCU methodology and its database (BDW 2.0) were designed. They were tested with 22 professors from three universities (2 Mexican and 1 Chilean), and they produced 85 records. The prescribed curriculum is a power and exclusion dispositive that provokes an anti-democratic education and diminishes the professors’ pedagogical freedom. The results show the types of modifications used in daily classroom work. These modifications are not usually recorded, and the valuable experience of professors is lost. The proposed methodology allows the systematic recording of this as it provides an informative and historical archive for the CCU. The conclusions account for the relevance of teachers’ curriculum practices in the curriculum in use and imply bringing teachers’ voices into the prescribed curriculum. That is, the currere occupies the hegemonic place instead of the mandated curriculum.

Navigating the complexities of academic pathways in Turkey: A currere-based exploration

Ünal Deniz — 2024-09-30

This autobiographical study explores the author’s academic journey in Turkey, highlighting the dynamic and complex nature of this path within a challenging socio-economic context. Using Pinar’s concept of currere, the study employs a multidimensional autobiographical approach—encompassing regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical moments—to explore the author’s academic journey and preparation for a career in academia within Turkey’s unique educational landscape. By analyzing the author’s experiences through these phases, the study uncovers key factors influencing his academic development in Turkey, including the challenges of navigating the academic system and the strategies I used to overcome them. The research highlights the critical role of self-reflection and personal narratives in understanding and navigating the complexities of academic life in Turkey, particularly for graduate students and emerging researchers. From employing the method of currere, I learned much about my journey through Turkey’s academic career processes, emphasizing the interaction between personal experiences and systemic factors in shaping academic success and career progression. This study contributes to the broader currere literature by offering a detailed personal examination of academic career preparation and development in Turkey, providing perspectives that may resonate with or inform experiences in very different settings.

Currere as contemporary art: Weaving creative research, purposeful vulnerability, and poetic expression to nurture teacher self-knowledge

Kimberley D’Adamo — 2024-09-30

We Teach as We Are Taught, 2024

Currere Stage 4, Synthetic:

Connections between past, practice, and who I am now

Speculative design for life-sized installation, draft 3

Digital collage print & shredded dissertation