Currere and Praxis

‘Something that wants me to find it’: Hauntology, race, and curricular disturbances in Updike’s “rabbit” tetralogy

Christopher Cruz — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This paper interrogates the epistemic and pedagogical significance of literature and philosophy within the field of curriculum theory through a reading of John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy. Following the reconceptualist turn, which foregrounds subjective and aesthetic experience over technocratic outcomes, I position the novel as a site for moral imagination and curricular disruption. Engaging Derrida’s (1993/2011) notion of hauntology, I examine the novel’s protagonist, Harry Angstrom, as haunted by crises of faith over temporal existence as well as racialized violence. Literature, I argue, is a site of study for curriculum theorists to begin reimagining teacher and student subjectivity and alterity as a spectral shaping of educational experience.

Charter schools as sites of neoliberal cultural reproduction: Prestige, performance, and inequity in the International Baccalaureate era

Sepideh Yasrebi — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Set in a racially and economically marginalized South Bronx middle school during the late charter school era, and informed by a retrospective autoethnography, this study engages curriculum inquiry to examine how the International Baccalaureate (IB) program operates within the racialized governance of neoliberal education reforms, where symbolic prestige coexists with—and often obscures—racial capitalism and neoliberal racism (Lipman, 2011). Drawing on currere as a narrative and temporal mode of inquiry, this study uses narrative vignettes constructed from field notes, written reflections, institutional documents, and embodied memory to illuminate how the IB’s cosmopolitan rhetoric, embodied in the school’s “RISE” core values (Responsibility, Integrity, Scholarship, Excellence) circulates across the manifest and latent curriculum. While the prescribed curriculum and accountability structures promise rigor and global citizenship, the latent curriculum enforces neoliberal disciplinary norms and conceals structural inequities, including segregated facilities, underinvestment, and the erasure of students’ lived experiences. Framed through theories of cultural capital and social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1973, 1986), in dialogue with intersectional and decolonial frameworks (Fregoso Bailón, 2025; Kumashiro, 2012; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995), the study advances narrative as a method of ideological critique and argues for decolonial approaches to teacher preparation and policy grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical reflexivity, and material redistribution.

Finding a friend in currere

Tamara Wiehe — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

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.

Editor’s introduction

William F. Pinar — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This small issue – just three essays – makes a very large impression, as the publications within demonstrate the wide range of currere studies, from the alluringly literary and provocatively philosophical to the powerfully political, as well as to the profoundly personal dimensions of studying one’s experience of what one undergoes in educational institutions, especially in courses of study and let’s say their collateral effects, not only damage – the noun ordinarily following the use of adjective “collateral” – but also associated opportunities and even epiphanies that educational experience can afford. Let’s take these dimensions in that order, arbitrary that order admittedly is.The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this paper