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Poetter (2024) Curriculum Fragments

Poetter, T. S. (2024). Curriculum Fragments: A Currere Journey through Life Processes. Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/Curriculum-Fragments-A-Currere-Journey-through-Life-Processes/Poetter/p/book/9781032595771

Foreword [BP]

  • curriculum fragments are “small bits of memories of life and educational experience that continue to stick to me,” that “persistently influence my thinking and actions in my personal and professional lives.”
  • reflection and generation through autobiographical work may even help us reclaim lost ground, understand where we have been and where we are going, and also maybe open doors that we may have thought of previously as leading nowhere.
    • KF: revisiting the sands at Nome
  • He knows, as does Hongyu Wang (2024, p. 118), that “transformation has to happen from within.”
    • KF: “change is an inside job”

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” (William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun)

  • “there’s absolutely no clear beginning”
    • KF: Mobius
  • “they constitute the curriculum of our educational lives.”
1. My Educational Journey in Curriculum Fragments
  • build on the question that Pinar (1994) asks in his 1975 essay on currere: “What has been and what is now the nature of my educational experience?” (p. 20).
  • “Reflective Interlude”
  • “I have written this book to understand and to be understood. Meaning, I want to be as clear as possible about what I’m saying, and I want this text to be accessible.”
    • “I’d like it to be read, because I think I have something to add to the complicated conversation that is curriculum.”
2. On Writing a Currere Journey through 7 Life Processes
  • My good friend and colleague Denise Baszile (2015) shares her insight that in doing this type of work with currere in its many forms, “…one must always be engaged in it to see the promise of it” (p. 125). That is, currere is not merely a research project, but for those who delve into it, who practice it, currere becomes a way of life.
  • “[currere] is process of self-actualization is not simply a private self-focused affair, but rather ‘an ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action – as a private-and-public intellectual – with others in the social reconstruction of the public sphere’.” (Pinar, 2004)
  • “School is the place where the ‘excesses’ of democracy are contained, this through controlling the curriculum by installing test preparation as the only raison d’être” (Pinar 2012, p. 7).”
  • Robert Frost: A Considerable Speck

  • “I’m always trying to get to the heart of the matter.”
  • “Lisa Delpit (2006, her first edition came out in 1995) and her great book Other People’s Children”
  • “as Grumet posits, that “knowledge of the world requires knowledge of the self-as-knower-of-the-world” (p. 35).”

This is our task: to be, to live, and exist by seeking Being, sensing subsistence, and seeing existence. In short, to teach by offering ourselves as we are, without expectation or despair, filled with fragile hope” (Rocha, 2015)

3. Losing
  • “the mental strain of hating others and the self, that take a tremendous toll sometimes even beyond the physical and beyond the event.”
    • KF: Shame
  • “since the universe is constantly exploding; but, no matter what, be assured that I won’t quit.”
    • KF: supernovas are his Mobius
4. Knowing [bully]
  • “wishing I could go back and change things or understand myself better back then, and wondering if I can be something other than the person I was then. Am I different now? Have I learned anything? Can I still change?”
  • “In their book Survival of the Friendliest, Hare and Woods (2020) argue that human beings outlasted and outsmarted other human-like species around 80,000 years ago by learning to cooperate.”
    • KF: What now, when we seem to have lost this ability?
  • “the paradox of human nature arises: “our kindness to the in-group and cruelty to those outside it””
    • “To initiate the cycle of dehumanization, extremists may convince their own group that they are being dehumanized by another. As the real or perceived threat level increases, even people in the middle move away from the bull’s-eye and closer to the outer circle of the target and are primed for violence against their enemies.”
  • “Is it true that in our present political, social, cultural milieus, in this moment, that we cannot under any condition tell the truth, admit guilt, without fear of losing everything, even more than we lost before at the scene of the crime?” Forgiveness
    • KF: JC; existential threats
  • “between Hamas and Israel.”
    • KF: Between the Hamas and the IDF
  • “That event had consequences in real time, and it has also stayed with me ever since, challenging my sense of any good in me and, as a result, my overall sense of self-worth at every turn.”
    • KF: Shame. Share David Whyte
5. Forgiving (on being bullied: Frank Bowser)
  • “growing up as the younger brother of my sister Anne, 9 years older, and born with Down’s Syndrome”
6. Relating: tough love from father
  • “Classic middle-class, indirect communication (Bourdieu, 1991).”
  • “Buber argues that being in relation with others, persons and things, can result from contemplation, as the world in particular is approached”
    • “To become I-You, in relation together, something exceptional happens: the thing comes into reciprocity with us, into relation, transcending our seeming distant connections in the world”
      • KF: Internalized “metaphor-tools“; a prosthetic for understanding the world
7. Hoping (“The progressive allegory of Broken Branch”)
  • “As a currere journey”
    • KF: Pilgrimage
  • “But the angle in which the deposit had formed in the rock, and the tools currently available for use, required the acquisition of this very plot of land”
    • KF: slant drilling

“The thing is that we don’t really know when or how our teaching (or our learning!) will take effect, have an impact.”

8. Growing (lying about Dan – basketball competitor; shouting at a server; Exit door lady)
  • “Liam Neeson Said What?”
    • “No one like Neeson or anyone else should ever say anything like that or write anything like that. There are certain things you just can’t say. Nothing can justify thinking that or doing that or saying that. It’s just wrong.”
      • KF: “There are certain things you just can’t say.” I disagree. Who decides? What did we, and Liam, learn from what he shared? He was confessing!
  • “To be even clearer, I don’t expect anything but criticism for writing them. I especially anticipate your skepticism that they have anything to do with the life process, the curriculum of growing. I am not looking for nor do I deserve anyone’s forgiveness for the past rights or wrongs I depicted here or for what I’m about to say.”
    • KF: You deserve forgiveness. Almost all of us do. Carrying malignant shame, after recognizing it as such, is a sop to the ego – it can become performative and is unbecoming. Let it go; it does not help anyone.

“people of color have to navigate, move, risk, and tangle themselves in the world in ways that I don’t have to, just to survive, let alone grow and thrive, and fly.”

“I can create fewer barriers, even in places where the interactions are mostly transactional (Buber, 1996) and live purposefully through communication and action toward more a substantive relationality with others. I can be less hungry, upset, and harried. I can be kinder, more helpful, more loving. I can see other people, where they are coming from, what they are experiencing, and value them. And I can make way for them when they are traveling at high speed and get out of the way without resignation. I can be a better human being, granularly.”

  • “I can still grow, and become, and be better, more alive, more humane, more caring, more loving.”
    • KF: Caution– As adj as I should be: not adj+er / more adj) – the goal is adequate, sufficient, right-sized NOT “more”
9. Loving
  • “in her chapter on Loving in New Priorities in the Curriculum (1968), building on Hora (1962), that thinking about and conceptualizing love aren’t love, and perhaps the exact opposite of it… “The opposite of love is calculative thinking…The opposite of thinking is non-thinking, it is paying attention to understand” (p. 304; original emphasis).”
  • “I realize with Pinar and Grumet (1976) that …autobiography barely recaptures the past or even records it. It records the present perspective of the story teller and presents the past within that structure. It employs the past to reveal the present assumptions and future intentions of the story teller, an elaborate detour that travels through once upon a time in order to reach now. Its truth is provided in its fictions. (p. 73)”
  • “In Fromm’s (1956) classic book on love, he discusses different types of love, depending on the object intended for loving acts.”
    • “What I want to stress is that love is at the root of all that we do.”
    • “loving resides at the center of education, in some form, somehow.”
  • “Loving students had to do, and still does, with compassion, care, and respect. I wanted students to feel like and count on the fact that I would go to nearly any lengths to help them, extend second chances, and/or be there without fail if things got rough, especially if they got in trouble. That I would be for them the last adult standing to extend a hand if they were abandoned, left for naught.”
    • KF: Amen!
“A Final Look: Norm Overly = Love”
  • “Norm created a community of co-learners in that class. He brought intellect to bear on every point, but he never pressed his point of view. He asked brilliant questions that made us be more introspective, critical, aware of ourselves and the world around us as educators and researchers. And he expressed concern and care and respect and love for every single student, every person working with us in the field, all of the students before and after us and with us in our classrooms all through the seminar and far beyond that.”
10 My Synthetical Epilogue
  • “Grumet (1976), in her chapter on psychoanalytic theory in her classic book with Pinar Toward a Poor Curriculum says, “I am comparing the theory and practice of psychoanalysis to the autobiographical process of currere so that I can further define ways in which reflection can be employed to enhance the ability of the student to make use of educational experience” (p. 112)”
  • “And further, she notes that out of her study of Olney and Jung and Montaigne that “autobiography is both the single metaphor of what happened, the significant events of the past, and the double metaphor of what the writer does with them at the moment that they recreate them. It is to this double metaphor of autobiography that currere refers when it maintains that to describe one’s own developmental process is to generate it as well” (p. 112).”
    • KF: Mobius duality

  • “Grumet (1976) says, “Currere is a reflexive cycle in which thought bends back upon itself and thus recovers its volition” (pp. 130–131), and “Our focus is the present, the storyteller’s view of the world and the self as revealed in the story rather than the actual event” (p. 135).”
    • KF: the new perspective is revealed as we traverse the Mobius strip, were we on occasion in positions of superimposition ⬇
  • “Wozolek’s (2021) insight creates the opening to employ notions from quantum mechanics, particularly the ideas related to “superposition,”
    • KF: Quantum superimposition on Mobius

  • “I started with Dewey’s (1997/1938) definition of mis-educative experience, constituted by experiences that do not lead to moral growth, citing Dewey’s classic example of the burglar, who may grow into an expert burglar, but those ends are always indefensible morally. After all, what good does it do to become an expert burglar? Burglars’ experiences are mis-educative, not educative.”
    • KF: Not when you’re hungry
  • “I also want to acknowledge again here that while I have faced some trauma in life and hardship, I never went hungry,”

“Elliot Eisner (1979), in my opinion, wrote the most persuasive book passages about the importance of thinking differently about the school-based curriculum and the dearth of “expressive outcomes”

  • “An expressive objective describes an educational encounter”
  • “but it does not specify what from that encounter, situation, problem, or task they are to learn.”
  • “An expressive objective is evocative rather than prescriptive.”
  • “our curriculum and pedagogy when faced with the work of curriculum and pedagogy in classrooms must be about engaging in a full-on entanglement with the practical,”
  • “But engaging all of it must start with reflection.”
    • KF: Mobius

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