“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

Living large: a hermeneutic inquiry into what it means to live as an over-weight woman

Bibliography: p. 140-14

Belonging, Becoming, and the Female Body: A Phenomenological Hermeneutic Inquiry into Overweight Women's Experience of Belonging in Western Contexts

The purpose of this study, which utilized a phenomenological hermeneutic methodological framework, was to gain a deeper understanding, through the lived experience of self-proclaimed overweight women, of the sense of belonging. Five middle-aged women participants participated in group gatherings as well as one-on-one interviews with the researcher, where the experience of belonging was the central focus. The data was then analyzed via an hermeneutic framework guided by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Findings from this research revealed that overweight women face some powerful tensions as they come to terms with their growing bodies. An exploration of language and dominant discourses presented diverse and disparate meanings of specific words as well as grand ideals. Borrowing from van Manen’s work, four lived existentials (lived space, lived, time, lived body, and lived relation) are explored in a form of interpretation to gain deeper understanding of one participant’s words. Stigma and shame are explored, leading to the suggestion that living under a highly negative stigma can lead to a form of embodied shame (Bouson, 2009). Heidegger’s notions of homelessness, abiding, and homecoming are considered in coming to better understand the experience of moving between belonging and not, as the participants’ bodies became factors that cast them from their familiar lives into a form of abiding homelessness, in which each participant has had to find her own way. More conversations with and between like and different individuals, I conclude, are necessary in breaking through silences and allow for deeper understanding of self and other. Additionally, this research speaks to the need to draw attention to the grand narratives, and to explore and listen to other, non-dominant, and perhaps, more meaningful discourses