SYMPHONY JOURNALS
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From colonial roots to decolonial futures: Transforming national identity and global engagement in Chilean universities
Get PDFThe paper addresses the critical challenge of decolonising universities in Chile, situating the discourse within the nation\u27s historical trajectory and its engagement with global academic pressures. It examines how Chilean universities, historically central to nation-state-building and reflective of broader Latin American patterns, are now at a crossroads, grappling with the preservation of national identity, engagement with the global knowledge economy, and the need to address epistemic injustices rooted in colonial legacies and neoliberal agendas. Drawing on decolonial theory and Escobar\u27s concept of the pluriverse, the paper reimagines Chilean universities as transformative spaces that resist colonial legacies while promoting inclusivity and equity in curriculum, research, governance, and social engagement. This idea challenges the commodification of education tied to global rankings and envisions a system where local and national identities align with global academic aspirations. The analysis offers nuanced insights into the decolonisation of higher education and proposes a transformative framework for Chilean universities to address these tensions
(Re)constructing Finland and Finnish identity in the context of education export – From the margins to the group of leading exporters?
Get PDFEducation export is a relatively new endeavour for Finnish institutions traditionally reliant on government funding. Inspired by Finland’s PISA success and globalisation imperatives, since the second half of the 2010s, Finnish education institutions have been encouraged to enter the global education market as for-profit providers of education. This article examines how Finnish national identity is (re)constructed and contested within the context of education export debates from 2010 to 2023. Using media materials, it presents nine metanarratives that characterise Finland’s role in education export, exploring motivations, and the portrayal of Finland and ‘Finnishness. This study reveals diverse roles for Finland, as a benefactor to an exploiter, and as a leading exporter to a marginal and too modest an exporter. The key referent group for the national identity consists of Western education-exporting countries. The findings offer insights into the evolving nature of Finland’s national identity and its place in the global education market, influenced by the changing political environment
Pedagogy, demagogy, and subjectness: Encounter and responsibility
Get PDFThe article delves into the nuanced relationship between pedagogy and demagogy, analyzing how they shape the educational experience. It highlights that when pedagogy loses its existential focus, it risks turning into demagogy, prioritizing control over education\u27s transformative potential. The author argues for a pedagogy that values subjectivity, intuition, and the inherent uncertainty of educational encounters. Using poetic language, the author portrays teachers as oscillating between the roles of artists and entertainers, when addressing the responsibility consequent of the subjective encounter. The piece suggests that educational encounters should be approached with the same wonder as one feels when encountering the sea and other elemental beings, recognizing the interplay between the vastness of existence and human life\u27s limitations. The astonishment consequent of these encounters engages both students and teachers in a shared journey of self-discovery, uncovering new facets of their identities through their interactions. Through autobiographical narrative and philosophical discourse, the work emphasizes the need for educators to engage deeply with the subjective dimensions of teaching, fostering spaces where both teachers and students can explore their identities and responsibilities in relation to each other and the world
Working from within: Currere, contemplation, and lived experience
Get PDFCurrere and contemplation both offer resistance to the forces of efficiency, measurement, and control in education. While currere centers autobiographical inquiry to reconstruct self and society across nonlinear time, contemplation cultivates embodied stillness, relational awareness, and spiritual openness. Scholarship has explored each separately, yet little attends to what their generative interplay can bring. This paper argues that bringing currere and contemplation together can deepen and enrich educational life: currere gains a fuller attunement to embodiment, subjective vitality, and sacred interconnectedness, while contemplation expands its temporal and narrative work by attending to curriculum as lived experience. Drawing on theory, classroom practice, and qualitative research, we explore how currere and contemplation coming together can unsettle instrumentalist logics, contest the efforts to flatten the inner world, foster integrative personhood, and cultivate intergenerational nonviolence. By refusing containment within technique or linear self-story, their blending opens a curriculum life attuned to emergence, ethical presence, and the transformative possibilities of lived time. This convergence offers educators and learners a praxis of depth, openness, and relational compassion
Editor’s introduction
Get PDFIn this issue we learn more about currere and praxis in Africa, America, and Mexico. While acknowledging that the Estados Unidos y México are also América - as are all the nations in the Western Hemisphere - I’ll proceed in that initial alphabetical order.
In the first article, Ünal Deniz explores the career experiences of 12 local Ivorian teachers working in international schools in Côte d’Ivoire through Pinar’s currere methodology. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 teachers working in international schools in Côte d’Ivoire - analyzed across four temporal and subjective dimensions, e.g. regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical— Ünal Deniz’s intriguing research investigates teachers’ coping with complex institutional dynamics while constructing professional identities within an international educational setting. From his interviews Professor Deniz discovered a series of barriers these teachers faced, among them (1) credential devaluation, (2) salary inequities, and (3) exclusion from leadership opportunities, each reflecting colonial legacies and localized hierarchical structures. Despite these barriers, teachers devised strategic responses, including (1) contextual behavior adaptation, (2) selective information sharing, and (3) collective organizing. Deniz documents these teachers’ “internal transformations” by means they judged success according to their students’ learning rather than their own professional advancement, all the while also engaging in community-school bridge building and policy advocacy. Far from being discouraged, Deniz discovered that these teachers acted as agents of educational improvement rather than succumbing to inequitable practices. His noteworthy research contributes to the international education literature by centering marginalized voices and demonstrating how currere method enables understanding of professional life as an ongoing negotiation between individual agency and institutional constraints. Professor Deniz’s article is a powerful testimony to these teachers’ inner strength, their commitment to the children they teach as well as to the communities wherein their school is located.
Peaches Hash describes how an instructor of undergraduate writing courses within a public university in the United States used arts-based writing assignments to enact the currere process. Throughout the semester, students were asked to complete artistic representations of writing prompts to juxtapose with their assignments, inviting them to incorporate autobiographical elements, thereby demonstrating pedagogically that the process of currere can function as a curricular method within the undergraduate writing classroom.
Also working in the United States, Jennifer L. Schneider and Hongyu Wang point to a rarely acknowledged aspect of currere studies, namely that currere and the contemplation it encourages resistance to the corporatized forces of efficiency, measurement, and control currently deforming education at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. They draw a contrast between the two traditions, currere centering autobiographical inquiry to reconstruct self and society while contemplation cultivating embodied stillness, relational awareness, and spiritual openness. They point out that scholarship has explored each tradition separately, yet little scholarship attends to what their generative interplay can bring. The authors argue that acknowledging the interrelationship between currere and contemplation can “deepen and enrich educational life.” Drawing on theory, classroom practice, and qualitative research, Schneider and Wang explore how wedding currere and contemplation can (1) unsettle instrumentalist logics, (2) contest efforts to flatten the inner world, (3) foster integrative personhood, and (4) cultivate intergenerational nonviolence, thereby provide portals to a lived experience of curriculum attuned to “emergence, ethical presence, and the transformative possibilities of lived time,” a “praxis of depth, openness, and relational compassion.”
Last but by no means least, Drs. Rita Guadalupe Angulo Villanueva aand Nehemías Moreno Martínez engaged in a two-voiced autobiographical research study, one the voice of a curriculum theorist and the second a mathematics educator with an undergraduate background in physics. The authors are currently conducting curriculum development for graduate studies in education and teaching at the Faculty of Sciences of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The two researchers examine curriculum concepts, among them (1) lived curriculum, (2) curriculum design and evaluation, (3) continuous curriculum updating, as well as (4) craft-based processes in lived curriculum and in scientific-didactic conceptual structures,. They discovered that the “central tension” throughout their curricular construction has been between the lived and prescribed curriculum, from which the authors formulated an Emergent Curriculum Code which provided the foundation for a multidisciplinary, intercultural, and hybrid curriculum currently being offered in a Mexican university graduate program.
My congratulaations to each author upon the publication of their important research
Examining culturally responsive teaching and assessment in an undergraduate public speaking course
Get PDFGiven the diversified background of students in the United States, the demand for cultural responsiveness in education has increased. Previous research has explored how teachers apply culturally responsive teaching and assessment (CRTA) to reach marginalised students in kindergarten -12th grade classrooms. Higher education has received less attention. This study initiates a promising step for investigating cultural responsiveness through the lens of college students, an area that has not been fully explored in the prior research. Specifically, our research team conducted semi-structured interview with 38 undergraduate students to examine the presence and potential of CRTA in a predominantly white public speaking course. Students spoke positively about how their course instructors created a respectful, welcoming environment and demonstrated care for students’ academic success. However, richer aspects of cultural responsiveness were minimal. Similarly, students’ perceptions of the potential for CRTA in the course were mixed and largely superficial. These findings can contribute to faculty development and course design across many colleges and universities.
Currere as contemporary art: Weaving creative research, purposeful vulnerability, and poetic expression to nurture teacher self-knowledge
Get PDFWe Teach as We Are Taught, 2024
Currere Stage 4, Synthetic:
Connections between past, practice, and who I am now
Speculative design for life-sized installation, draft 3
Digital collage print & shredded dissertatio
Students speak: Academic, career, and sociocultural experiences of African American college students
Get PDFThis manuscript presents the outcomes of a qualitative research investigation centered on the experiences of African American college students in terms of their preparation for high school, college, and careers within a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) situated in rural southeastern Wisconsin. At the time of this research, the comprehensive public university had an undergraduate enrollment of 10,196 students. Among these students, 82.1% self-identified as White, 7.8% as Hispanic or Latinx, 5.4% as African American, 3.2% as Asian or Southeast Asian, and 0.9% as American Indian or Alaskan Native. Using semi-structured interviews with willing student participants, the primary objectives of this study were twofold: (1) to recognize the sociocultural and institutional elements that influence the career trajectories of African American students attending the institution and (2) to effectively capture the educational and career viewpoints and voices of these students as they navigate the complex sociocultural and institutional landscape. Key findings from the research highlight the students’ perspectives on the substantial connections between their high school experiences, particularly those in and around a major urban center in the Midwest, and their subsequent college and career paths. Additionally, the study underscores the challenges these students encounter while navigating the physical and social spaces on a rural PWI campus. Recommendations are made for creating a more welcoming space for African American students and for supporting those engaged in the work
Explaining the curriculum planning challenges at Tehran University and providing a practical guide to improving the curriculum
Get PDFA comprehensive and deep understanding of curriculum development is crucial in the field of higher education. Curriculum development, an important aspect in this field, requires a multifaceted approach. Using qualitative methodology, this study provides practical guidance for improving the curriculum of Tehran University by carefully examining the planning challenges. The research was carried out in several stages, culminating in the design of a practical guide to improve the curriculum. First, a review study was conducted on studies based on university curriculum models. Then, using the phenomenological strategy and unstructured interviews, this study investigated the concept of academic curricula and the challenges facing the higher education curricula planning system from the perspective of faculty members. In the final step, using the insights from the previous steps, a focus group was formed to develop a practical curriculum development guide. This guide covers three main dimensions: basic curriculum planning features, application-oriented features, and implementation requirements. This study used data triangulation to ensure the validity of the research findings, integrating the insights from interviews, document reviews, and academic consensus. The proposed model of the current research can serve as a suitable basis for revising the university curriculum. Diversity in the attitude and culture of the university is evident in the proposed model
Navigating the complexities of academic pathways in Turkey: A currere-based exploration
Get PDFThis autobiographical study explores the author’s academic journey in Turkey, highlighting the dynamic and complex nature of this path within a challenging socio-economic context. Using Pinar’s concept of currere, the study employs a multidimensional autobiographical approach—encompassing regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical moments—to explore the author’s academic journey and preparation for a career in academia within Turkey’s unique educational landscape. By analyzing the author’s experiences through these phases, the study uncovers key factors influencing his academic development in Turkey, including the challenges of navigating the academic system and the strategies I used to overcome them. The research highlights the critical role of self-reflection and personal narratives in understanding and navigating the complexities of academic life in Turkey, particularly for graduate students and emerging researchers. From employing the method of currere, I learned much about my journey through Turkey’s academic career processes, emphasizing the interaction between personal experiences and systemic factors in shaping academic success and career progression. This study contributes to the broader currere literature by offering a detailed personal examination of academic career preparation and development in Turkey, providing perspectives that may resonate with or inform experiences in very different settings