Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity
In this volume, Pinar enacts his theory of curriculum, detailing the relations among knowledge, history, and alterity. The introduction is Pinar’s intellectual life history, naming the contributions he has made to understanding educational experience. Study is the center of educational experience, as he demonstrates in the opening chapter. The alterity of educational experience is evident in his conceptions of disciplinarity and internationalization, interrelated projects of historicization, dialogical encounter, and recontextualization. By reactivating the past, not by instrumentalizing the present, we can find the future, explicated in his studies of the Eight-Year Study, the Tyler Rationale, and the gendering and racialization of U.S. school reform. The interrelation of race and gender is emphasized in the chapters on Ida B. Wells and Jane Addams. The technologization of education is critiqued through analysis of the achievements of George Grant and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The educational project of subjective and social reconstruction is explored through study of Musil’s essayism, a genre that corrects the problems accompanying ethnography and created by identity politics.
William F. Pinar is Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia. Pinar has also served as the St. Bernard Parish Alumni Endowed Professor at Louisiana State University, the Frank Talbott Professor at the University of Virginia, and the A. Lindsay O'Connor Professor of American Institutions at Colgate University. The former President of the International Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and the founder of its U.S. affiliate, the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies, Pinar received, in 2000, the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Educational Research Association. In 2004 he received an American Educational Association Outstanding Book Award for What is Curriculum Theory?, the second edition of which was published in 2012 by Routledge.