1.1 Curriculum as Complicated Conversation
If curriculum is conceived as complicated conversation, currere —in Latin, the running of the course—points us to the experience of its participants. Hence, how participants experience curriculum becomes the focus of research. Research in this sense becomes a site of attentiveness and contemplation to what is (and is not: the so-called hidden curriculum) studied. In this book, I study my lived experience as a Chinese woman studying in Canada, juxtaposing this reflection with elements of the philosophical past in China and the understanding of the concept of spirituality.
Associating ancient Chinese philosophical concepts with currere , suggesting its spiritual meaning and potential, embedded in a single life, this research articulates my life (academic, social, cultural, etc.) as an international student grappling with my own life history, my present preoccupations, my dreams of a future, both continuous and unprecedented. My subjectivity has been reconstructed through autobiography and academic study.
During the process of writing autobiographically, I have evolved intellectually and emotionally and allowed my viewpoints to be transformed. That I describe these developments autobiographically becomes one instance of a theory of education in the first-person singular. That theory suggests that learning occurs not only in and out of classrooms but also within the context of a person’s life. In such a theory of education learning becomes situated not only in school-subject-specific prior knowledge but also in one’s subjective sense of intellectual labor. I term this particular form of study attunement. Its occurrence includes but also goes beyond classroom or formal study. In this theory, intellectual, more broadly, academic, labor is also emotional labor. This intellectual pursuit is also emotionally engaged, since, as noted by Grumet (1976), one cannot isolate emotional responses from intellectual ones, especially when, for example, one struggles to understand what is not readily comprehensible, when one (dis)likes the subject matter and/or the teacher, or when one feels distracted by more compelling interests. By engaging oneself autobiographically, one can become an observer to oneself; one can become a teacher to and with oneself, encouraging self-questioning and sustained academic study. Autobiographically speaking, this self-self pedagogical relation becomes one instance—later reconstructed—of classroom teaching. It resembles classroom teaching in terms of its conversational character, no matter how loudly or silently in solitude that dialogue is conducted. In this sense, I am a teacher first to myself, then to others, although it may not be sequenced in a linear way. My students teach me, too, if I am open to being influenced, as I have asked myself to be in relation to myself as well as others. In contrast to educational theories that focus on the relations among school, society, and the state, or those that emphasize “best practices” of teaching, or those that explore the neurological bases of learning, this autobiographical educational theory starts from the human subject encountered as a subjective and social presence, acknowledging the complex roles that institutional structures, political and policy agendas, teaching protocols, and learning theories play in the process of education but embodying them in the subject’s lived experience. In this educational theory, these influences, pressures, and directives are threaded through the subjective experience of the individual person and articulated autobiographically. These can be expressed allegorically, as lessons to be learned from experience. Educational theory is, then, contextualized and concretized in myself. Studying this construction of “I” theory can contribute to the understanding of currere .
1.2 Is Autobiography Research?
I begin this section with two stories. The first story happened very recently in a class in China. Feng (2015) describes this story in his study of children’s autobiography. Students were listening to the teacher very carefully in a Math class. A girl sitting at the back of the classroom tried to poke a boy in front of her. The boy felt irritated. When he turned around and told her not to touch him again, he was caught by the teacher on the platform. The teacher threatened the boy that if he talked again in class he would be kicked out and not allowed to take the class. The boy tried to explain, but the teacher did not listen to him. The boy was furious and swore that he would no longer listen to the teacher in his class! That was his “promise!”
The second one occurred about 100 years ago and relates the experience of Ping-ti Ho, a famous Chinese historian. In his autobiography, Ho (2005) recalled his experience of attending a private school. He was in Grade 3 and his teacher was a scholar of the Qing dynasty. He had a round face, dark skin; always had a smile on his face, as Ho remembered. Ho could always answer his questions in class about historical events because his grandfather taught him a lot of history when he was at home. Ho (2005) depicts:
These two stories happened at different times. What is evident is that students have very different experiences when attending school. What can teachers learn from these two stories?One day, when we were learning the Analect, the teacher said that Confucius says that there are three kinds of worthy friends: honest friends, understanding friends and learned friends. He suddenly asked: “Who is the learned friend?” All the boys in the class answered: “Ping-ti Ho!” It was me. I felt shy. It was already 60 years ago! But I still have a fresh memory of the experience, moved by these kids’ innocence and teacher’s recognition. The warmth remains in my heart, and it brings a smile to my face whenever I think about it. (p. 105)
There have been numerous efforts to understand curriculum—and educational experience more broadly—autobiographically. Morris (2015) argues that autobiography is more than someone simply telling his or her story; she explains, “The story of the self is always webbed inside of an historical context. Stories of the self are also stories of history. The self does not live in a vacuum. Self is always in relation to the larger world” (p. 211). The story of self is, then, one manifestation of a world where one resides. Susan Edgerton (1991) also affirms that autobiography does not exist in isolation; it is connected to many pressing issues:
Autobiographical writing enables students to study themselves. Such study links self to place, and place is simultaneously historical, cultural, and racial. … Via another’s life one understands more fully one’s own, as well as social and historical ties that link both lives to a particular place. (p. 112)
Writing autobiographically helps students understand how they are linked to the historical and cultural aspects of life. Simultaneously, autobiography is also useful for teachers to understand students. Grumet (1976) contends that autobiography is a form of self-revelation with a focus on “a transfer of our attention from these forms of themselves to the ways in which a student uses them and moves through them” (p. 68). Autobiography directs our attention to how students experience a curriculum instead of focusing on its forms such as its objective. Grumet seems to show what teachers can focus on while working autobiographically. As students or teachers engage in writing autobiographically, they may enter a “space” or “zone” in which they can reconsider, reconnect, and reconfigure elements embedded in their experience while they are culturally, socially, and historically situating in the world. This process may foster a new understanding or perspective, during which one recreates oneself. As a result, the autobiographical lens can be an act of self-creation and can be potentially self-transformative (Ayers, 1990, p. 274).
Graham (1991) reveals the rationale for using autobiography either for school programs or for university students reflecting on their educational experience. He associates autobiography with the seven forms of knowledge proposed by Hirst (1974): the empirical, the moral, the aesthetic, the mathematical, the philosophical, the religious, and the historical/sociological. Hirst (1974) argues that irreducibility criteria can be applied to any of the seven forms: any of them cannot be reduced to any other. Some subjects such as language arts embody the moral, aesthetic, and historical forms, but they are not identical with any of them. According to Graham (1991), autobiography embodies a distinct form of knowledge. Thus, he suggests: “Autobiography can stand as the exemplar of another equally valuable and irreducible way of thinking and knowing” (Graham, 1991, p. 11). In this regard, it is akin to narrative mode of thought proposed by Bruner (1986), a mode “whose truth is discovered in verisimilitude and not in appeals to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof” (Graham, 1991, p. 11). Narrative mode of thought, as a particular way of thinking and knowing, is not to seek for empirical proof, but rather to seek for verisimilitude.
Graham (1991) also tries to understand autobiography from a constructive approach. For him, writing autobiographically is a process of self-construction:
For many students, perha...