Table Of ContentA PRAXIS OF PRESENCE IN
CURRICULUM THEORY
Building on his seminal methodological contribution to the field – currere – here
William F. Pinar posits a praxis of presence as a unique form of individual engage-
ment against current cultural crises in education.
Bringing together a series of updated essays, articles, and new writings to
form this comprehensive volume, Pinar first demonstrates how a praxis of presence
furthers the study of curriculum as lived experience to overcome self-e nclosure,
restart lived and historical time, and understand technology through a process of
regression, progression, analysis, and synthesis. Pinar then further illustrates how
this practice can inform curricular responses to countering presentism, narcis-
sism, and techno- utopianism in educators’ work with “digital natives.”
Ultimately, this book offers researchers, scholars, and teacher educators in the
fields of curriculum theory, the sociology of education, and educational policy
more broadly the analytical and methodological tools by which to advance their
understanding of currere, and in doing so, allows them to tackle the main cultural
issues that educators face today.
William F. Pinar is the Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies at the
University of British Columbia, Canada. Pinar is former Canada Research Chair
in curriculum studies, is past President of the International Association for the
Advancement of Curriculum Studies, and is Editor of the International Handbook
of Curriculum Research.
Studies in Curriculum Theory Series
Series Editor: William F. Pinar, University of British Columbia,
Canada
In this age of multimedia information overload, scholars and students may not be
able to keep up with the proliferation of different topical, trendy book series in
the field of curriculum theory. It will be a relief to know that one publisher offers
a balanced, solid, forward-looking series devoted to significant and enduring
scholarship, as opposed to a narrow range of topics or a single approach or point
of view. This series is conceived as the series busy scholars and students can trust
and depend on to deliver important scholarship in the various “discourses” that
comprise the increasingly complex field of curriculum theory.
The range of the series is both broad (all of curriculum theory) and limited
(only important, lasting scholarship) – including but not confined to historical,
philosophical, critical, multicultural, feminist, comparative, international, aes-
thetic, and spiritual topics and approaches. Books in this series are intended for
scholars and for students at the doctoral and, in some cases, master’s levels.
Curriculum Work and Social Justice Leadership in a
Post-Reconceptualist Era
Attaining Critical Consciousness and Learning to Become
Allan Michel Jales Coutinho
Dialogical Engagement with the Mythopoetics of Currere
Extending the Work of Mary Aswell Doll across Theory, Literature, and
Autobiography
Edited by Brian Casemore
A Praxis of Presence in Curriculum Theory
Advancing Currere against Cultural Crises in Education
William F. Pinar
The Nordic Education Model in Context
Historical Developments and Current Renegotiations
Edited by Daniel Tröhler, Bernadette Hörmann, Sverre Tveit, Inga Bostadt
Parental Experiences of Unschooling
Navigating Curriculum as Learning-through-Living
Khara Schonfeld-Karan
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
com/Studies-in-Curriculum-Theory-Series/book-series/LEASCTS
A PRAXIS OF PRESENCE
IN CURRICULUM
THEORY
Advancing Currere against Cultural
Crises in Education
William F. Pinar
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 William F. Pinar
The right of William F. Pinar to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pinar, William F., author.
Title: A praxis of presence in curriculum theory : advancing currere
against cultural crises in education / William F. Pinar.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Studies in
curriculum theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022006570 | ISBN 9781032079776 (hardback) | ISBN
9781032079769 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003212348 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Education--Curricula--Philosophy. | Multicultural
education. | Curriculum change.
Classification: LCC LB1570 .P551556 2022 | DDC 375/.006--dc23/
eng/20220510
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006570
ISBN: 978-1-032-07977-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-07976-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21234-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003212348
Typeset in Bembo
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
For Madeleine R. Grumet
“Look at the lake.”
CONTENTS
Preface ix
About the Author xix
Other Recent Writings xxi
1 Currere 1
2 Presence 13
3 Study 35
4 Individuality 54
5 Authority 73
6 Authorship 87
7 Sadism 106
8 Technologization 123
9 Teaching 138
10 Experience 157
11 Nineteen Seventy-Two 173
viii Contents
12 Reconceptualization 185
13 Reactivation 194
14 Absence 211
Appendix 228
Index 231
PREFACE
“Presence,” John Kaag suggests, “connotes a particular place and time where
something, perhaps something significant or singular, could be done.”1 Like many
progressive ideas, this sense of possibility, this call to “change the world,” has been
“co- opted by the rich and powerful.”2 Consider McKinsey & Company’s recruit-
ing materials: “Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new.” The
host of the Davos Conference – the World Economics Forum – tweets “change
the world.” A Morgan Stanley ad admonished: “Let’s raise the capital that builds
the things that change the world.” In the software engineers it recruits Wal-
Mart expects an “eagerness to change the world.” Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg
advises: “the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a
company.”3 Capitalism incorporates everything: its genius and its curse.
One hundred years ago progressivism was also coopted in an effort to incor-
porate everything. In Italy, in 1919, as Ramsey McGlazer reminds, the educa-
tional reformer Giovanni Gentile gave several talks to teachers in Trieste; they
were published in the next year as The Reform of Education.4 Gentile distinguished
authentic education from mere “instruction,” a term which, for Gentile, repre-
sented out- of-d ate instructional practices associated especially with the teaching
of Latin, a set of practices that “intrude with violence into the life of the spirit,
instruction generates the monstrous culture that we call material, mechanical,
and spiritually worthless.”5 Such a culture, Gentile complained, is “fragmentary
and inorganic,” and yet “it can grow to infinity without transforming students’
minds or merging with the process of the personality, to which it adheres extrin-
sically.”6 To breathe life into such culture what was needed, Gentile argued, was
“education that was inward as well as integrative” – in a word, “progressive.”7
The “secret” of effective education, Gentile felt sure, is “that the book that is
read, or the word of the teacher that is heard, must set our mind in motion and
