Currere

The infinitive form of the noun currere emphasizes curriculum as a complicated conversation among teachers and students focused on texts and the concepts they communicate in specific places at particular historical moments. Before currere, curriculum was defined exclusively in institutional terms. As currere, the point of the [Page 178]school curriculum is not necessarily to train public school students to become specialists in the academic disciplines or to produce accomplished test takers or to produce efficient and docile employees for business. As currere, the point of the school curriculum is to inculcate—through the communication and criticism of academic knowledge—a civic commitment that extends to the sustainability of the planet. As currere, the point of the school curriculum is to teach students to think and act with intelligence, sensitivity, and courage in both the public sphere—as citizens aspiring to establish a democratic society—and in the private sphere, as individuals committed to other individuals. So conceived, the curriculum becomes a historical event, changing over time as we participate in it, engage in its study, and act in response to it toward the realization of our civic ideals and private dreams. Curriculum ceases to be a thing, and it is more than a process: it becomes a verb, an action, a social practice, a private meaning, and a public hope. Curriculum as currere is not just the site of our labor, it becomes the product of our labor, changing as we are changed by it.

The method of currere is an autobiographical means to study the lived experience of individual participants in curricular conversation. There are four steps or moments in the method of currere: the (1) regressive, (2) progressive, (3) analytical, and (4) synthetical. The regressive focuses on the past, the progressive on the future, the analytic on understanding the significance of these, and the synthetical encourages self-mobilization for action in the public sphere. In theoretical terms, these phases depict both temporal and reflective movements for the autobiographical study of educational experience and suggest the modes of cognitive relationality between knower and known that might characterize the structure of educational experience.

In the regressive step or moment, one's apparently past existential experience is conceived as data source. The point here is not to recall the past from the point of view of the present, but to re-experience the past so that the pool of memory enlarges. In the second or progressive step one looks toward what is not yet present, a form of free association inviting fantasies of who one is not now, of what is felt to be missing, sought after, aspired to. In the analytical stage the student examines both past and present. Etymologically, ana means up, throughout; lysis means a loosening. The analysis of currere is akin to phenomeno-logical bracketing; one's distantiation from past and future functions creates a subjective space of freedom in the present in which one asks the following: What is this temporal complexity that presents itself to me as the present moment? In the synthetical step—etymologically syn means together; tithenai means to place—one re-enters the circumstance typifying the present. Listening carefully to one's own inner voice in the historical and natural world, one asks the following: What is the meaning of the present?

...