William Pinar

Autobiographical/biographical research starts with my experiences of being in and with the world. This study explores the relations of my life experiences with my academic interests. Conversations are complicated not only by the singularity and complexity of the individual, but also by place, conceived here as historical and biospheric. This study is inspired by distinction between “the horizon of curriculum-as-plan … and the horizon of curriculum-as-lived-experience” (Aoki, 1986/1991, p. 161) as I strive to retain Aoki’s openness to future possibilities. Engagements with the worlds of within and without, and study through and on the method of currere structures the research. My question of being adds to the basic structure of currere, what I term cosmo-currere. This is a C++ threshold highlighting the diversity that exists in both historical and natural worlds, and the basic relations that exist between the two. Within the terrain of cosmo-currere and through my breath and air, curriculum reveals itself as biospheric text. The recognition of the Earth, as the main repository of all experiences, and the source of human epistemologies, discloses curriculum as terra-didactic text. The understanding of a complex inter-connectedness existing between the historical and the natural worlds places environmental justice at the heart of curriculum.

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The reader is invited to join a journey towards kanenhstóhare (ga nunhs doe ha ray). This dissertation traces the process of making Haudenosaunee lyed corn soup, to propose that a curriculum of renewal can be conceptualized through Haudenosaunee thought. The journey is guided by the pursuit of the research question, What value can kanenhstóhare bring to a curriculum of renewal? As a contribution to the Canadian conversation of curriculum studies, this dissertation seeks to consider the complexity of Haudenosaunee thought as an invitation to renew the learner through the journey of lyed corn, as it experiences estrangement (leaving the familiar behind) and homecoming (the iterative remaking of home). The field of curriculum theory has existing calls for the renewal, disruption, and interruption of the learner’s consciousness; yet it fails to account for the risk it poses to learners in such an estrangement from self, and the need to reintroduce oneself following these transformative moments. Kanenhstóhare, drawing upon a Haudenosaunee consciousness, calls for learners to lean into such discomfort, darkness, and grief, as a journey into the unknown. Rooted in a foundation for Haudenosaunee thought, I introduce the overarching threads of Kayanerenhkó:wa (The Great Law of Peace) (ka’nikonhrì:io, ka’sathsténhsera, and skennen) as three methodological moments (autobiography, educational theory, and traditional teachings). Following the journey of corn, we move towards sowing the seeds and braiding the corn to dry, where I theorize how coloniality poisons our collective minds and limits the possibilities of a curriculum of renewal. Lyed corn is a result of vigorous and corrosive boil to transform and renew the corn. Therefore, renewal in a theory of kanenhstóhare, is sought by leaning into a boil for estrangement and is rinsed and reintroduced back into the world through a homecoming. The dissertation concludes with positing the serving of the soup, to offer a conversation for a curriculum of renewal and the future of Haudenosaunee thought in education.

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Since the 1960s, human capital theory has gained prominence by conceptualizing education as one of the central means to increase (public and private) economic output. The theory continues to be relevant in promoting certain values and practices in local and global policies. In the face of growing reliance on technological systems to drive economic growth there is a pressing need to re-examine the value of human learning. The present undertaking is an historical assessment of underlying ideas in schooling humans as economic resources: capital. Ideas pertaining to property and machine as well as freedom and control have contributed to the modern notion of human capital theory. By tracing, contextualizing, and examining an economy applied to human life, the thesis offers an opportunity to deliberate on the verdicts, values and ethics of education, particularly those envisaging human persons as economic resources.

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William Pinar proposed that Dwayne Huebner may well be judged by future historians of the field as the most important mind in curriculum. Since his retirement from curriculum studies, Huebner has long been associated with theorizing curriculum theologically. Yet I believe that this articulation and engagement of his legacy needs further nuance and understanding. Using the biographical research method, this dissertation seeks to reframe Huebner’s theological legacy by contextualizing it through his lived experience and his significant ideas. This dissertation is divided into four parts. Part 1 examines the biographical method, focusing specifically on intellectual biography. Part 2 contextualizes his interest in theology by narrating the lived experience of Dwayne Huebner through interviews conducted with him as well as reviewing official professional documents. Moreover, I contextualize his engagement with theology in comparison with significant themes found in his scholarship in Part 3. This includes his educational creed, his ontology, and his understanding of knowledge and its forms. Part 4 reframes Huebner’s legacy for those seeking to theorize the curriculum theologically.

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Why study the traumatic past? This research question was a response to the CMEC commitment (July 2014) to require study of Indian residential school history in Canadian schools. Educators would need to justify engaging with difficult knowledge in the classroom, so in support of their efforts I set out to explore justifications for studying our traumatic past.First, I identified six groupings of justifications (rationale) based on literature from curriculum studies, Holocaust education literature and from the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Reports, Indigenous writing, contemporary political, social and artistic commentary, case law and legal analysis. Six Rationale or "Lens" Were Identified:1) Historical Understanding;2) Citizenship Education;3) Existential Study;4) Remembrance and Hearing the Voices of Survivors;5) Call to Witness and Bearing Witness to the Traumatic Past;6) Taking Steps Toward Reconciliation. Rationales #3-#6 were based on the TRC approach to historical trauma, grounded in Indigenous legal protocols and Indigenous wisdom traditions, requiring listening, bearing witness and only then moving toward reconciliation. The first two rationales (#1-#2) fit within existing curriculum parameters of historical consciousness and citizenship education. However, the third rationale, existential understanding, is not typically a justification for educational endeavours, although arguably it is essential when studying the traumatic past. The purpose in exploring these rationales is to enable educators to make better choices in response to this mandated curriculum and to further education discourse.My research approach is founded upon the concept of curriculum as a complicated conversation (Pinar, 2019) and the query: What might this national mandate to include the history of Indian residential schools mean in the complicated conversation that is Canadian curriculum studies? To this end, I explored each rationale using a research frame of verticality (historical antecedents of concepts and events) and horizontality (contemporary context) as connected to the CMEC commitment. A praxis of métissage was used to weave the threads of diverse voices into this curriculum conversation. Thus, both the research approach and content are a unique contribution to education with the hope educators make informed choices in addressing the CMEC mandate and further reconciliatory efforts in Canada.

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My study bridges self-education, dialogue, and teacher professional development using the method of currere. I explore in what sense self-reflective writing and Gadamerian dialogue can contribute to teacher personal and professional development and foster student wellbeing. I argue that autobiography can help teachers to render their relationship with their lived experience and that hermeneutic reflexivity embedded in Gadamerian dialogue can encourage teacher professional development and increase student wellbeing in a democratic society of today. I begin with my Secondary School experience using regressive, progressive, analytic, and synthetic dimensions of currere to recollect, envision, analyse, and synthesize my schooling experience in order to engage more creatively as well as critically with my learning experience. Intended for teacher mobilization, social, and political enactment, I explore teacher life-world as curriculum to provide a personalized understanding of teacher development as transformative, creative, humanistic, holistic, and emancipatory. I embark on the power of dialogue as a reflective and intersubjective practice in teacher professional development using which teachers can engage with the humanity and selfhood of themselves, other teachers and students through open and genuine conversations to encourage highest-quality teaching for students. I argue that Gadamerian dialogue can enhance teacher knowledge by overcoming fore-understanding and pressure of opinion which contributes to teacher personal and professional development. I discuss Gadamerian dialogue can nourish students’ voice by rendering the ways in which open-minded teachers can approve of students’ mistakes, errors, and half-formed arguments to provide a free space for students to feel more comfortable to move from the familiar to the strange. Finally, I summarize my study, return to research questions, discuss research contributions and limitations of my research. I conclude that currere facilitates self-education, connects self to social and political spheres, and encourages a hermeneutical understanding of lifeworld embedded in its analytic and synthetic phases for teacher personal and professional development. Such autobiographical understanding of self is complemented by Gadamerian hermeneutical interpretation of being rooted in history, text, and ethics as Gadamer invokes a historical, textual, and ethical understanding of teacher existential experience using self-reflective and interpretive dialogue. No specific professional development activities follow from this research.

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The intellectual odyssey of a scholar can be complex and dynamic, especially when such an odyssey was lived within the juxtapositions of linguistics, cultural dynamics and intellectual traditions. Ted Tetsuo Aoki was a cadet in the Canadian Officer Training Corps, but was forced into exile in his Canadian homeland during the Second World War. He was an important Canadian curriculum theorist and a dear, lifelong, mentor to many students. He was a strong critic of the division between theory and practice, and of the binary between East and West. Who was this man who lived and provoked these contrasting dynamics? What were the main concepts explored in his works? In what ways were these concepts significant in the field of education and curriculum studies? What was the uniqueness that surged from and through his thinking and writings over time? While keeping these questions in the periphery of this Aoki focused study, I first attend to the question of the historical present that juxtaposes history, society and subjectivity, specifically within contemporary Canadian curriculum studies, to situate Aoki’s intellectual life. Further in responding to the specificity of Aoki’s scholarship, I attend to the interwoven, dynamic and poetic essence of Aoki’s intellectual formation and life history and especially the prominent influence of phenomenology and Martin Heidegger’s writings. By contextualizing Aoki’s narrations on his momentous life events, I engage with Aoki’s critical reflective and unique style of theorizing, and I suggest that understanding, for Aoki, is a mode of being-in-the-world, which reveals pedagogical significance. By delving into Aoki’s main concepts and selected writings from Heidegger, I find, Aoki, in his writings, reflects Heidegger’s critical position of constantly pointing out the conceptual assumptions and philosophical blind spots in the wor(l)d of instrumentalism. By returning to the ontological ground of humanness, articulating the particularity in phenomenon and dwelling poetically in the hermeneutic imagination that calls for the self-identified subjectivity, theorizing for Aoki, I suggest, is poetic dwelling as human being-in-the-world.

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In a time when the very thought of education is pervaded by the language and practices of standardization and efficiency, our subjectivity–the inner space of human experience that makes up who we are as singular beings–gets lost. As such, the very existence of the subject and its possibilities of reconstruction are at stake. Working from a reconceptualized field of curriculum, this study takes up the question of formation and asks in what ways subjectivity might get constituted through educational experience. The German notion of Bildung–which posits education as a process of formation or “becoming oneself”–offers crucial insights to the rethinking of educational experience today, in the effort to reclaim subjectivity, along with its sense of existential significance. Studying the process from a psychoanalytic perspective, I wish to shift the discussion of educational experience from psychological, behavioral, and other pragmatic connotations, and return it to a speculative philosophical investigation of what it means to become who we are, and what that entails in terms of desire and the unconscious. Exploring the phenomenon of subjective formation in relation to aspects such as philosophical anthropology, psychic dynamics, technology, and Eros, I come to conclude that an education that is inattentive to the inner life of the subject cannot be properly called education. The free associations I establish between curricular and psychoanalytic theory leads me to a basic and yet fundamental understanding of the process of becoming: the idea that subjectivity gets reconstructed in educational experience through an ongoing dialectic of struggle and reconciliation. While this dialectic exposes the drama of the split condition of the subject, with its failures and frustrations, it also offers the promise of the possibility of subjective reconstruction and change. It is an invitation to take risks, to learn to let go, and to imagine what might be.

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No abstract available.

In this dissertation, grief is explored as a path to enlivening and enacting a curriculumof cosmopolitanism. Grief in this research is understood as that which presses heavily uponus, that is, grief is not understood solely as bereavement, but as those experiences that weighheavily on our lives. This research contends that it is through attending to the heaviness ofpeople’s experiences that the relationship between self and other – the foundation ofcosmopolitanism – can become central to curriculum.This research suggests that the traditional canon of knowledge that schools andcurriculum developers rely on is primarily exclusionary to epistemologies and ontologies ofthe nonwhite and female world. As a result, the curriculum reflects only certain studentpopulations while others are cast aside as ghosts haunting the curriculum. The undervaluingof certain epistemologies and ontologies in curriculum and society creates space for bigotryand the caricaturizing of the ghosts of the curriculum. Exploring cosmopolitanism whilecasting aside certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing perpetuates non-cosmopolitanrealities. For cosmopolitanism to be enacted, it needs to be explored and understood beyondthe traditional canon. This dissertation makes use of autobiography to disrupt thecosmopolitan canon.Grief is inherently the endurance of violence, and it is through the Intimate Dialogue,a method of attending to grief inter-subjectively, that violence can be undone. This is a formof pacifism that sheds the notion of passivity and becomes an active response to violence.

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In this study I articulate what it means to care for the self and care for others, and the association between the two. Juxtaposing self-understanding through the method of currere and studying the historical character of hakbeolism, I articulate how self-understanding in conjunction with historical study, together allegorically, can be a transformative possibility that may contribute to subjective reconstruction which can be a way of self-care.After discussing how Korean schooling exercises coercive care, disconfirmation, and the “whip of love” for the students’ own good, I ponder how having one’s own standards can be a way of making one’s life a work of art without entirely conforming to externally imposed standards. My special emphasis is on the internalization of external standards in students and on teachers’ and parents’ culpability in practicing and reproducing them. Focusing on Nel Noddings’ ethic of care and analyzing The King’s Speech, I discuss how care-for-others can contribute to self-understanding, indeed to building an authentic self-self relationship.What might an education with self-care and care-for-others look like? I imagine that it may be one that allows and encourages students to come up with their own standards, perhaps with the help of or in relationship with others. However, there are structural and relational challenges in exercising self-care and care-for-others and keeping a balance between them. I suggest breaking the unnecessary linkage between our ethic and the constraining structures, teaching and learning, and our preference and reality, and that by doing so it is possible to build linkages between our knowledge and ethics, which requires our courage, and ethicality to make professional judgment. Arguing that self-care and care-for-others are intrinsically intertwined, I suggest that we may be able to keep a balance between them using discernment, surrendering to reality, and that in the discernment we may be able to make better decisions for the well-being of the self, others, and the society.

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While this dissertation responds to and builds upon various iterations of why cosmopolitanism?, I also articulate the meaning of a cosmopolitan education in ways that are different from previous arguments and descriptions: as actually existing global phenomena and as an ethical response to such phenomena. Drawing upon Ulrich Beck’s writings on world risk theory and cosmopolitan realism, I discuss the Fukushima nuclear disaster as a case of actually existing cosmopolitanism, or world risk turned catastrophe. At once a local and global environmental disaster that has consequences for a “non-excludable plurality,” the irresponsibility that contributed to and continues to be at play regarding fallout from Fukushima summons a transnational, planetary ethic of responsibility. Whereas nuclear meltdowns and warfare, pandemics, and global financial crises are world risks turned catastrophes whose consequences can be validated empirically, I also consider world risks that are intangible, impossible to ascertain with evidence-based research. By way of the faculty of the imagination, I draw a link between Chernobyl heart deform and United States “school deform”; I also read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, specifically Raskolnikov’s dream of a worldwide plague as an allegory for the breakdown of the faculty of judgment across time and place. What might an ethic of responsibility in response to world risks look like? Drawing upon theoretical writings on cosmopolitanism and empirical realities that solicit responsible actions, I contend that acting with the faculty of judgment and a compassionate heart are vital to re/creating the world. In writing upon judgment, I turn to Hannah Arendt whose style of writing about totalitarianism and its antithesis, freedom, is just as important for understanding what it means to judge and to act responsibly as is the content of what she writes. I question if judgment is the only faculty needed to live an ethical life, to act ethically toward others in an increasingly interconnected, codependent world. While Arendt is critical, even dismissive of the role that compassion has played in politics, I contend that a both/and rather than either/or ethic which includes judgment and compassion ought to work together to re/fashion a world habitable for all.

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This dissertation is an inquiry into the future of queer theory after the death of Eve Sedgwick. A founding scholar of the field, Sedgwick radically changed thinking about sexuality in history in ways that have critically defined queerness not only in relation to but also as temporality. Commenting on the brevity of a future that sees, too frequently, "the brutal foreshortening of so many queer life spans" (2003, p. 148), Sedgwick anticipated an end not of queer theory but rather of her own life. This dissertation argues that Sedgwick's death, far from signalling that queer theory is over, marks an occasion for re-evaluating the field that can be at once a return and a movement toward a future. In mourning and memorializing her, queer scholars enact a return to the politics that gave rise to Sedgwick's theorizing. At the same time we turn the focus inward, narrating in various forms of personal voice what her loss has meant. This dissertation continues and begins again the queer work forged by Sedgwick by drawing connections between the personal and the collective. Intervening into theories of negativity that have become pervasive in the field, it turns to her reparative mode of reading while still acknowledging the damage and aggression that are at the heart of psychic life. Weaving memoir and critical essay in a way that methodologically reference Sedgwick's innovative use of form, this dissertation queerly disrupts medicalized and pathologized accounts of illness, sexuality, and trauma. It brings into public view and connects to other histories accounts of my personal experiences of anorexia and self-harm in ways that mark a continuation of and, critically, are permitted by an engagement with Sedgwick's work. In this sense the question emerges: Might the future of queer theory be found in a reading of Sedgwick after Sedgwick?

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This dissertation investigates the ways in which literary practices can be used to generate learning. It is guided by the following research questions:• How can the processes of writing memoir change our perceptions of the past?• How can these writing processes be theorized and understood as educational events?Data are provided by two research groups, one composed of seven older lesbians and one composed of 26 older LGBT individuals known as the Queer Imaging & Riting Kollective for Elders (Quirk-e), an arts-engaged community group with whom I have worked for the last five years. In the first case, practices of close reading, memoir writing, and discussion were conducted, and discussions were digitally recorded and transcribed. In the second, data are provided by the artwork produced by the members of Quirk-e and by my reflections upon my practices as their writer-in-residence. Data are also provided by my own creative compositions, which serve as interludes between the standalone papers that comprise the body of the dissertation. Data are analyzed through critical and literary interpretations, autobiographical and narrative methods, and conceptual inquiry. I conclude that unpacking memories and life experiences by writing memoir can lead to more nuanced understandings of the self and the culture in which it has developed. I also conclude that such learning can be assisted by paying close attention to specific memories, using processes of association, and then by considering the emergent genres and structures that frame the work as it is revised. Finally, I consider my practices as a public pedagogue in the light of these reflections, to begin to consider how teaching might be usefully considered as a form of artistic composition, with its own emergent genres.

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In Understanding Curriculum As Meditative Inquiry: A Study of the Ideas of JidduKrishnamurti and James Macdonald, I study the relationship among consciousness,meditative inquiry, and curriculum. I argue that human consciousness, which is the basis ofour thinking, feeling, and action, is common to all humanity and is in crisis. This crisis ofconsciousness—which is characterized by fear, conditioning, becoming, and fragmentation—affects and is deeply affected by the nature of contemporary educational institutions.Contemporary educational institutions create in children fear of authority, exams, andpunishment. They also condition their minds with state-controlled and market-drivenknowledge. In addition, modern educational institutions alienate children from their bodies,emotions, and spirits due to their overemphasis on cognitive learning.The crisis of consciousness is an existential problem and, therefore, in order tounderstand its depth and complexities we require an existential approach. Meditative inquiry,which is to be aware of the movement of consciousness without analysis or judgment, is anexistential approach to understanding and transforming consciousness to create a peacefulworld. On the one hand, meditative inquiry underscores the limitations of thinking andanalysis and, on the other hand, it emphasizes meditative listening and observation.Because of the existential nature of our consciousness and the significance of meditativeinquiry to comprehending the former, I propose viewing curriculum as a space for meditativeinquiry. Curriculum as meditative inquiry is a transformative approach to educationalexperience that aspires to undermine and possibly dissolve the conflicted nature of ourconsciousness by cultivating a deeper sense of awareness. Specifically, curriculum asmeditative inquiry emphasizes the arts of listening and seeing to have a deeper perceptioninto one’s own consciousness and one’s relationships. It encourages the cultivation of thequalities of openness, aesthetics, and freedom in educational experience. Viewed from theperspective of meditative inquiry, education no more remains a problem of informationtransmission or means-end learning. On the contrary, it emerges as a space of freedom wherethe main focus is to learn about oneself and one’s relationships to people, nature, and ideas.

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