Picturing Currere : envisioning-experiences within learning

Currere reconceptualises curriculum as understanding learning experiences. This paper outlines potentials for pictures in re-envisioning currere for a world growing in complexity.Vision, as the privileged sense for acquiring knowledge, is often regarded deterministically - seeing is believing. But, as sophisticated technology becomes more significant in the control of knowledge systems - as \u27reality\u27 becomes more virtual - personal visual experiences are becoming harder to generate, interpret and authenticate. Knowledge technology is increasing exposure to \u27mediated messages\u27 and diminishing the ability to validate them. I see this as problematic for the authenticity of learning within a world that is intensifying in its complexity.My work reaches beyond determinist/technological views of learning to explore envisioning-experiences within learning. I am particularly interested in ways that enacting with pictures embodies individuals, communities, and the world within understandings of complexity and authenticity. In practical terms, this involves interactively and reflexively \u27doing pictures\u27 as a personal process in learning for deeper understanding.The paper explores three issues: * Text and pictures: learning, thinking, and knowing, as textual dominions that marginalise pictures. * Enactivism and learning: an approach to learning for complex communities that embodies mindful thinking within haptic experiences. * Enactive picturing: laying a personal processual path with learning that complexifies understandings for authenticating experiences - doing-walking-talking - with pictures.<br /

“Course” Work: Pinar's Currere as an Initiation into Curriculum Studies

In this article, four new doctoral students reflect on Pinar’s currere process as an initiation into the discipline of curriculum studies. Currere involves examining one’s experiences as curricula that shape understandings: each of us undertook the steps of currere individually and then shared our reflections through collaborative autobiography. This collaboration expanded our self-reflexivity in relation to curriculum and to discursive contexts and, unexpectedly, created an authentic learning community. The currere process has not only written us into curriculum studies, but also compelled us to “participate in the constitution and transformation of ourselves” (Pinar, 1994, p. 74) that is so vital to our work in education. The following article—which consists of collaborative and personal writing—describes a valuable practice for bringing graduate students into curriculum studies. It also considers whether the self-reflexivity encouraged by currere might still be relevant for contemporary scholars and educators almost four decades after its inception

Hacking Education in a Digital Age: teacher education, curriculum and literacies

n this collection, the authors put forth different philosophical conceptions of "hacking education" in response to the educational, societal, and technological demands of the 21st century. Teacher Educators are encouraged to draw on the collection to rethink how "hacking education" can be understood simultaneously as a "praxis" informed by desires for malice, as well as a creative site for us to reconsider the possibilities and limitations of teaching and learning in a digital era. How do we hack beyond the limits of circumscribed experiences, regulated subjective encounters with knowledge and the limits imposed by an ever constrained 21st century schooling system in the hopes of imagining better and more meaningful futures? How do we foster ingenuity and learning as the end itself (and not learning as economic imperative) in a world where technology, in part, positions individuals as zombie-like and as an economic end in itself? Can we "hack" education in such a way that helps to mitigate the black hat hacking that increasingly lays ruin to individual lives, government agencies, and places of work? How can we, as educators, facilitate the curricular and pedagogical processes of reclaiming the term hacking so as to remember and remind ourselves that hacking's humble roots are ultimately pedagogical in its very essence? As a collection of theoretical and pedagogical pieces, the chapters in the collection are of value to both scholars and practitioners who share the same passion and commitment to changing, challenging and reimagining the script that all too often constrains and prescribes particular visions of education. Those who seek to question the nature of teaching and learning and who seek to develop a richer theoretical vocabulary will benefit from the insightful and rich collection of essays presented in this collection. In this regard, the collection offers something for all who might wish to rethink the fundamental dynamics of education or, as Morpheus asks of Neo in The Matrix, bend the rules of conventional ways of knowing and being

\u3cem\u3eCurrere\u3c/em\u3e as a Method for Critical Reflection in the Profession of Academic Librarianship

Academic librarianship has an intimate association with narratives and stories from their traditional role in curating, caring for, and making collections accessible. Librarians also experience the intricacies and challenges of narrative inquiry through the qualitative research they undertake, oral histories they gather, reflective teaching practices they facilitate, and oral-traditions they interact with. Despite these intersections with reflection and narratives, academic librarianship, and library sciences as a whole, have not fully incorporated their own narratives within their practices. Academic librarianship has the ability but not the spaces to critically reflect in a holistic manner. Shadiow (2013) encourages us all to “recall, retell, and then scrutinize your stories” (p. ix) through critical reflection. One potential method to accomplish this task of “scrutinizing our stories” is the reflective technique known as currere. Grumet (1976a) suggests that currere allows us to put our “essences back into existence” (p. 41). Currere provides a pathway to putting ourselves back into librarianship much as it has done with other educators. This study explores the use of currere with a group of practicing academic librarians by the application of a reflection curriculum over a twelve week period. The central research question of this study seeks to answer is: What does structured, holistic, and critical reflection, such as currere, reveal about librarianship

Proactive Retrospective Installation in Second Life: Using Currere to Explore Educational Perception, Reflection, Understanding and Development of Graduate Students Engaged in Virtual Exhibitions

This is an unprecedented study integrating of Second Life (SL) and the currere approach to develop a virtual curriculum demonstration. The overarching purposes of this study were to understand the perceptions, self-reflection, self-understanding, educational growth of graduate students in education toward teaching and learning in a virtual interdisciplinary curriculum. The three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life is a distance learning platform and multimedia combination of animations, dynamic images, embedded videos, websites, simulative worlds, slide shows and media players. The theoretical framework is based on the currere approach?a curriculum technique used to reconstruct social, intellectual, and physical systems. Data was collected in two education graduate courses in 2011 at a public university located in central Texas. After participating with SL skill trainings, the participants engaged in two virtual SL exhibitions?war and ecology?which were designed in the framework of the four currere steps?regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Data was collected via observations, SL reflective writings, individual currere writings, and voluntary interviews. The results revealed how SL exhibitions, based on the four-step currere approach, benefit the participants. In the regressive step, the virtual installations stimulated participants' emotions and vivid memories toward the presented topics. In the progressive step, the SL exhibitions awakened participants' awareness to educate the public on the global issues and integrate them into school subjects. In the analytic step, the exhibitions allowed participants to ruminate and re-exam the past, present and future, as well as to reflect on their own consciousness. In the synthetical stage, participants reflected and inflected their own perspectives toward the learning materials. Using the exhibitions' target knowledge, individuals were able to develop a self-understanding, which propelled them toward self-mobilization and educational reconstruction. Regarding SL curriculum development, the participants indicated SL innovative installation assisted them in extrapolating ideas for subject integration and interdisciplinary curriculum. In terms of technological utilization, SL changed the participants' perception about how integrating virtual technology into a classroom makes teaching and learning accommodating for distant students. In addition, this further motivates students to understand content more concretely and effectively. With regard to autobiographic emotional involvement, SL delivered the powerful images and videos to participants, which allowed them to understand why they possessed certain kinds of emotions toward specific events

Dance as a complementary pedagogic tool in architectural education

Architectural education is complex as it requires the development of both objective and subjective knowledge. While explicit knowledge that meets the trends in universities to create value by preparing students for industry, are easier to include in a curriculum, implicit knowledge based on personal experience that facilitates flexibility and creativity is more challenging. An example in the training of future architects is highlighted by the tendency to rely heavily on the visual sense in relation to buildings, which tends to objectify them, thereby ignoring their experiential components. The move towards digital applications in design further alienates the designers from this experiential aspect, as the technology leads to disembodiment and hence the sensitivity to subjective aspects of design. Design of space is influenced subconsciously by habitual patterns of behaviour embedded culturally and autobiographically in body memory. Dance as a complementary pedagogic tool can develop understanding of self and the body, bringing such habitual patterns into awareness. In addition to creating awareness, dance offers the tools to explore alternatives, creating a new meaning and relationship to space thus aiding the design skills of students. A curriculum that includes the subjective and autobiographical aspects of the student reflects the educational theory of Currere proposed by William Pinar and a pedagogic approach that reflects the theories of Georgio Agamben’s “rhythm” and Alfred Whitehead’s “cycles in learning”

Intuition and Curriculum: From Precognition to Agency

The dissertation is a speculative essay using the framework of Joseph Schwab’s (1969) commonplaces of: subject matter, student, teacher and milieu to examine how intuition can and should form part of curriculum. The overarching theme is that intuition and intuitive teaching and learning is an iterative path which leads to self-knowledge, reflection, cognition and acceptance of ‘other’ -- the Freirian (2010) notion of tolérance-- resulting in critical thinking and agency to ameliorate lives -- particularly of the oppressed. It embraces the clichéd notion of education leading to informed citizens who will make the right choices for society as a whole from the perspective of allowing teaching and learning to evolve from a less data-driven, teacher and standard imposed process to a more interest-driven evolution with an eye to critical thinking and authenticity. Intuition exists whether we choose to acknowledge or ignore it. It cannot be forced, but is rather something teachers and students can make room for – pay attention to – honor and consider in a framework of bounded anarchy (Macdonald, 1995). It is a framework that recognizes chaos as a part of life, and anarchy as a means to avoid autocratic control. Subject matter is explored via boredom, improvisation, currere, phenomenological and aesthetic inquiry. The role and relationships of the teacher are tied to self-discovery, co-creation, authenticity and love. Students within this framework are encouraged to explore, listen to, and use their voice to connect with the Joy (Liston, 2001) of learning. And, place is the physical and psychological world of the individual within which subject matter, teachers and students interreact

Picturing Currere towards c u r a : rhizo-imaginary for curriculum

This critical inquiry in curriculum studies uses poststructuralist and Deleuzian rhizomatic approaches alongside an original \u27picturing\u27 methodology. The author genealogically maps historical and contemporary curriculum theorising to deconstruct curriculum \u27development\u27 and foreground currere (curriculum reconceptualising). In performing Deleuzian philosophy, his proposed c u r a reimagines curriculum via currere to envision generatively living-learnin

Reflecting on Cross-Cultural Creativity in the College Classroom: An Investigation into GNED 113 “Creative Genius”

This Master’s project uses Greenberger’s (2020) Guide to Reflective Practice to reflect on the design and delivery of the college-level creativity course, GNED 113, “Creative Genius” taught at Centennial College in Toronto, Canada, in order to examine possibilities for the inclusion of cross-cultural creativity approaches that meet the needs of a social justice and equity theoretical framework. A proposed heuristic for postsecondary creativity educators is also offered

Contemporary curriculum theorizing: crisis and resolution

Using the ‘medical’ framework (symptoms, diagnosis and prescription) in Schwab’s the Practical 1 article, I analyze the current state of contemporary curriculum theorizing as a result of the reconceptualist movement. I argue that curriculum theorizing is in serious crisis due to the loss of the original subject of curriculum studies – practice and the inner work of schooling as a complex institution. Furthermore, I contend that the crisis has to do with the task of theorizing being mistakenly viewed as the pursuit of ‘complicated’ curriculum understanding, together with an uncritical embrace of postmodernism and related discourses. Based on Schwab’s the Practical and informed by the German Didaktik tradition, I propose a way forward to overcome the crisis and to revive curriculum theorizing that matters in practice and in the world of schooling for the twenty-first century in terms of three propositions. First, curriculum studies is a distinctive field/discipline centrally concerned with practice for the advancement of education. Second, practice and the inner work of schooling provide the essential starting point and subject matter for theorizing. Third, curriculum theorizing requires the use of theories in an eclectic, critical and creative manner