Building on his seminal methodological contribution to the field – currere – here William F. Pinar posits a praxis of presence as a unique form of individual engagement against current cultural crises in education. Bringing together a series of updated essays, articles, and new writings to form this comprehensive volume, Pinar first demonstrates how a praxis of presence furthers the study of curriculum as lived experience to overcome self-enclosure, restart lived and historical time, and understand technology through a process of regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Pinar then further illustrates how this practice can inform curricular responses to countering presentism, narcissism, and techno-utopianism in educators’ work with "digital natives." Ultimately, this book offers researchers, scholars, and teacher educators in the fields of curriculum theory, the sociology of education, and educational policy more broadly the analytical and methodological tools by which to advance their understanding of currere, and in doing so, allows them to tackle the main cultural issues that educators face today.

This book situates the Curriculum Theory Project at Louisiana State University within a larger historical framework of curriculum work, examining the practices which have sustained this type of curricular vitality over the lifetime of the field’s existence. Divided into seven parts, the authors illuminate seven practices which have sustained the scholarship, graduate programs, mentorship, and networking that have been critical to maintaining a web of international relationships. This exploration and coming together of intergenerational stories reveals a more complete and nuanced narrative of the development of curriculum theory over the last 60 years. Crucially, the project exemplifies the continuing resilience of curriculum theory despite ongoing neo-liberal aspirations to reframe education as a business. Reflecting upon the lived experiences and articulated memories of those who have participated in the project and analysis of documents collected over its 25-year history, it considers curriculum history(ies) writ large through and from this lens of practice. As such, it opens up fresh insights for cultivating the vitality and vigor of curriculum theory more broadly on an international scale and with a view to future directions for the field. It will appeal to both new and experienced scholars working across education foundations, urban education, philosophy of education, and higher education, and researchers from across history, sociology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and gender studies.

Tracing historical and cultural factors which gave rise to the Nordic Education Model, this volume explores why Northern European education policy has become an international benchmark for schooling. The text explains the historical connection between a Nordic ideal of democracy and schooling, and indicates how values of equality, welfare, justice, and individualism might be successfully integrated in national school systems and curricula around the world. The volume also highlights recent debates around the longevity of the Nordic model and explores the risks and challenges posed by international policy and assessment agendas. Exploring how Nordic education polices successfully merge social equity with academic excellence, the book combines cultural, historical, sociological and philosophical analysis with a deep exploration of curriculum and teaching. This book will be of great interest to researchers, scholars, and postgraduates working across the fields of curriculum, comparative education, cultural studies and history and philosophy of education and education policy.

By employing the autobiographical method of currere and bifocalization, this book sheds light on the significance of love and the ethics of caregiving as means to transform curriculum studies into a post-reconceptualist and collective endeavor. Advancing an understanding of curriculum as a "collective public moral enterprise," it critically asks whether we can build a world where love is not negotiated, but only proliferated. Through the creation of short and interconnected autobiographical narratives about the meanings of love, the author provides pivotal insights for curricularists who labor in conflicting and paradoxical contexts. As such, the book seeks to demonstrate how the labor of "love fortification" may be accomplished in a world of agonistic, antagonistic, and competitive becoming(s). Highlighting the role of caregiving, this book questions the role of evaluations in post-reconceptualization and provides insights for educators and policymakers on how to promote "actualization" and reconciliation in schools in contexts across the global-north and -south. Engaging with a long scholarly tradition that ultimately seeks to understand the meanings of love in our lives and in our work, supporting the "historization" of the field of curriculum, and with an international focus, this book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in curriculum studies and curriculum theory.

This volume showcases a series of chapters that elaborate on Mary Aswell Doll’s contributions to the field of curriculum theory through her examination of currere as a mythopoetics. By bringing Doll’s Jungian, autobiographical, and literary perspectives into conversation with emergent forms of subjective inquiry—including aesthetic concepts, ecological questions, and spiritual themes—the volume foregrounds the originality and significance of Doll’s book The Mythopoetics of Currere in particular, while simultaneously extending it and demonstrating its applications in various scholarly conversations. Leading scholars in the field of curriculum studies such as William F. Pinar and Molly Quinn demonstrate how they use Doll’s ideas as pedagogy, as theoretical framing for their work, and as the basis of their own study and self-exploration. A response essay from Doll herself concludes the text, bringing further thought and insight to the mythopoetic dimensions of currere. This text will benefit scholars, academics, and students in the fields of curriculum studies, curriculum theory, and the foundations of education more broadly. Teachers and teacher educators interested in the conceptualization of curriculum in humanities education will also benefit from this volume.

This book is a genealogical inquiry into the present problem of violence, in the US and internationally, through the lens of curriculum theory. It explores a constellation of problems including war, authoritarianism, post-truth, social disparities, and increasingly onerous surveillance technologies. Arguing that the current problem of violence is neither new, nor aberrant, the author historicises the conditions of possibility that have produced the violence that presently confronts our world. Seemingly disparate issues such as ethnonationalism, authoritarian populism, Christian nationalism, neoliberalism, the proliferation of sophisticated surveillance technologies, and military Keynesianism are traced to historical features such as ‘Ur-Fascism,’ white supremacy, corporate capitalism, religious extremism, propaganda and public relations, institutional power, and the biopolitical ‘death function’ endemic in modern societies. Through a sweeping, powerful, and in-depth analysis of violence in its genealogical trajectories in global setting, it promises to re-examine curriculum in a different light and open up new possibilities. As such, the book is an important curriculum study which supports curricular ethics as articulated by Bill Pinar, such as the situation of the self socially and historically, the reconstruction of one’s understanding of the self and the world, and the potential reconstruction of the social world as more peaceful and just. Significantly, the book contributes to a retheorisation of Foucault’s biopolitics as affirmative biopower imbued with ethics of truth-seeking as a technology of the self. It will appeal to scholars and students of curriculum studies with interests in curriculum theory, authoritarianism, non-violence studies, justice studies, ethnonationalism and technologies of the self.

This book explores Aristotelian and Confucian wisdom traditions to understand education and what counts as a good teacher in an embodied dialogic approach. The book creates a dialogue between ancient ideas and the author’s lived experiences as a teacher in cross-cultural landscapes today to ruminate on the important themes of educational purpose, teacher excellence, teacher-student relationships, and teaching skill. It asks fundamental educational questions including "Why Do We Educate? Eudaimonia and Dao"; "What Do We Educate? Phronesis, Philia and Ren"; and "How Do We Educate? Techne and Liuyi". Moving beyond the dominant epistemological concerns such as how to teach more effectively to help students gain better marks in schools, it constitutes an ethical inquiry that illuminates the values, purposes, concerns, and hopes that animate genuinely educational work. Using a comparative approach to wisdom traditions from both the East and the West, it addresses parochialism and challenges Eurocentric research paradigms. Embedded in the messy ground of teaching in intergenerational and cross-cultural narratives, the author’s own experiences as a student/teacher/daughter of a teacher/mother of a student crucially unpacks and concretizes ancient concepts and reactivates them in concrete situations. A sense of a whole without completeness, a conception of the good without closure, and an aspiration without achievement continue to haunt the search for an ultimate answer to the question "what counts as a good teacher?". It will appeal to scholars, teachers, and teacher educators with an interest in narrative inquiry and educational research, as well as those in the field of curriculum studies and the philosophy of education.