University of British Columbia
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
S. Petrina (2010)
Currere: Curriculum as Method or Process
What is (a) curriculum?
o Cur•ric´u•lum, n., pl., curriculums or curricula, [l. a race, course, career, from
currere, to run; figurative use.] a specific course of study or, collectively, all the
courses of a study in a university, college, or school. From Webster’s New Universal
Unabridged Dictionary (1979).
o This infinitive, which Bill first explored in the mid 1970s, is extremely important, as
it enables us to think of curriculum as method, as process.
In many ways, currere reiterates Dewey’s (1916) analysis of experience in Democracy and
Education.
[I]n its contrast with the ideas both of unfolding of latent powers from within, and of
formation from without, whether by physical nature or by the cultural products of the past,
the ideal of growth results in the conception that education is a constant reorganizing of
experience. It has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches
that end- the direct transformation of the quality of experience. . . . [education] is that
reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience, and
which increases ability to direct the course of subsequent experience. (Dewey, 1916, pp. 89-
90)
This turn to experience also helped underwrite the reconceptualization of curriculum studies:
“questions of design, development, instruction, and evaluation— the perennial foci of the
curriculum field— are no longer useful or interesting,” Bill wrote thirty years ago (Pinar,
1975, p. 397).1
Currere was then introduced as “a method that will allow us to ‘bracket’ the educational
aspects of our taken-for-granted world. That is, we must attend to the contents of
consciousness as they appear” (p. 406).
o “the problem initially is to get under one’s exteriorized horizontal thinking, to begin
to sink toward the transcendental place, where the lower-level psychic workings,
those psychic realms determined by conditioning and genetic code, are visible” (p.
407).
o “When sufficient data has accumulated (and the question of when may well be left to
the investigator) the analysis begins” (p. 408)
o “This process of turning inward to examine one’s currere will lead to a generalized
inner-centeredness and hopefully initiate or further the process of individuation,
leading to a gradual formation of the transcendental ego” (p. 410).
In Curriculum Theorizing, chapters titled "The Analysis of Educational Experience" and
"Search for a Method," Bill describes the method of currere (pp. 384-395, 415-424).
"So finally," he says in 1975, "we can characterize the method. It is (a) regressive, because it
involves description and analysis of one's intellectual biography or, if you prefer, educational
past; (b) progressive, because it involves a description of one's imagined future; (c) analytic,
because it calls for a psychoanalysis of one's phenomenologically described educational
present, past, and future; and (d) synthetic, because it totalizes the fragments of educational
experience (that is to say the response and context of the subject) and places this integrated
understanding of individual experience into the larger political and cultural web, explaining
the dialectical relation between the two" (Figure 1) (p. 424).
1
Pinar, William (Ed.) (1975). Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists. Berkeley,
CA: McCutchan.
University of British Columbia
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
S. Petrina (2010)
In Toward a Poor Curriculum, published with Madeleine Grumet in 1976, Bill simply states
that “The Method of Currere” “is regressive— progressive— analytical— synthetical.” “It is
therefore temporal and conceptual in nature, and it aims for the cultivation of a
developmental point of view that is transtemporal and transconceptual. From another
perspective, the method is the self-conscious coneptualization of the temporal, and from
another, it is the viewing of what is conceptualized through time. So it is that we hope to
explore the complex relation between the temporal and the conceptual. In doing so we
disclose their relation to the Self in its evolution and education” (p. 51).2
The method is brilliantly rendered in one of his most recent (2004) books, What is
Curriculum Theory?
The method of currere—the infinitive form of curriculum—promises no quick fixes. On the
contrary, this autobiographical method asks us to slow down, to remember even re-enter the
past, and to meditatively imagine the future. Then, slowly and in one’s own terms, one
analyzes one’s experience of the past and fantasies of the future in order to understand more
fully, with more complexity and subtlety, one’s submergence in the present. The method of
currere is not a matter of psychic survival, but one of subjective risk and social
reconstruction, the achievement of selfhood and society in the age to come (Pinar, 2004, p.
4).
The method of currere is an autobiographical means to study the lived experience of
individual participants in curricular conversation. There are four steps or moments in the
method of currere: the (1) regressive, (2) progressive, (3) analytical, and (4) synthetical….
The consequence of currere is an intensified subjective engagement with the world.3
2
Pinar, William F. & Grumet, Madeleine (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Dubuque,
IA: Kendall/Hunt.
3
Pinar, W. (2010). Currere. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of curriculum studies (pp. 177-178).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
University of British Columbia
Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy
S. Petrina (2010)
Regressive turn
to autobiographical
and educational
past
Synthetic turn
to fragments of
experience and Currere Progressive turn
larger political and
cultural context toward imagined
future
Analytical turn
toward oneʼs
educational
past, present
and future
Figure 1. Method of currere. Adapted from Pinar, 1975, p. 424.
