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In:Reflexive and Reflective Research Approaches in Applied Linguistics
Edited by Pejman Habibie and Richard D. Sawyer
[Research Methods in Applied Linguistics 8] 2025
► pp. 61–79

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Chapter 4
Toward an understanding of currere as a research method

 | St. John’s University
Published online: 3 March 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/rmal.8.04wan
Abstract
This chapter introduces and explicates currere as a research method as well as a key concept in curriculum, which was first invoked by William Pinar during the 1970s to understand how one’s educational experience can contribute to academic study and vice versa. The method of currere emphasizes the lived experience of curriculum — to run the course — but also includes the social, political, and cultural enactment of experience through conversation. Employing psychoanalytical technique, currere allows one to turn inward. As argued by Pinar (2019), the understanding of lived experience involves working from within as one encounters self, others, and world. The method of currere renders self knowledge that is never still, self-identical, making oneself a subject in a recursive process between self and the world, past and future. Pinar delineates four steps (regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis) to engage the individual in both temporal and reflective movements, thus enabling one’s understanding of what operatives have been at work in an individual’s educational experience. Eventually, through understanding oneself, the whole world unfolds in front of us (Wang, 2020).
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Central tenets of currere
    • Currere as complicated conversation
    • Currere as temporality — past, present, and future
    • Currere as lived experience
    • Currere as working from within
  • Practice and pedagogy of currere
  • Currere and curriculum studies
  • Currere and other methods
  • Difficulties and challenges — is currere solipsistic?
  • Ethical issues in currere
  • Conclusion
  • References
References (48)
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