A Currere State of Mind

As I dive further into my classes preparing to be a high school social studies teacher, this is the first of a series of blog posts using Walter Pinar's Currere Method of autobiographical lived experience to explore my notions of social studies curriculum.

First in a series of posts on my currere exploration

of my notions of social studies curriculum

Above to the right is a graphical representation of the iterative currere process. And here are descriptions of each currere stage from Moore (2017, p. 13):

Stage 1 – Regression

Think back as far as you can and record your memories in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Consider teachers, experiences with education, impressions, and media— anything at all that is vivid to you as you grew up with the concepts of education and teaching.

Stage 2 – Progression

Next, project yourself into your future and record “memories” of things that are likely to happen based on this foundation of memories and ideas about teaching. (It is common to find this challenging.)

Stage 3 – Analysis

Look at the connections between your past memories and your ideas about the future. Make an objective identification of the common themes and connections between the first two stages.

Stage 4 – Synthesis

Finally, pull the whole thing together—(where you’ve been, where you’re going, and the common themes)—and write about how you will use this new self-knowledge to make conscious, informed decisions about your practice as an educator.

Initially, I am going to focus on the regressive turn separate from any readings in order to set a starting point for my journey through this process.

Regressive turn. To regress to my memories of elementary and secondary education would require me to regress a long way. I graduated from Lake Braddock Secondary School in 1987—over 37 years ago. So my memories of elementary school, middle school, high school, and even college (1991 graduate) and law school (1997 graduate) are buried pretty deep. My only formal education experience in the last 25 years is this semester at UDC. I did have a university fellowship for the 2018–2019 academic year, but that was a different experience. That said, my memories of elementary school are generally positive and marked by exposure to multiple cultures, places, and people and teachers who were flexible and creative in finding ways to challenge me and allow me to advance at my own pace. The only real obstacles I recall were imposed by schools or powers external to the classroom.

My dad was in the U.S. Army. We moved every few years, and I went to eight different schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. As a result, I was exposed to a variety of cultures by living in Arizona, Maryland, California, Kansas, West Germany, and Virginia, along with the Washington, DC metro area, Texas, and Maine where we had family. That was further supplemented by the cultures represented by the families of my friends and classmates. Off the top of my head, I can recall families from all over the United States and from Korea, China, Vietnam, Mexico, West Germany, the Philippines, and Cuba.

Until the end of high school in Northern Virginia, every school I attended from 1st grade on was much more diverse than the local population because it was serving the Army community. These schools had a much larger African American population as well as Asian/Pacific Islander than the general U.S. population. (To give a sense of the difference, in 1980 11.7% of the U.S. population was African American (Bureau of the Census, 1983, p. 12, Figure 9) and 29.7% of U.S. Army recruits were African American (Congressional Budget Office, 1989, p. 24, Table 1).)

In elementary school, I spent the majority of my time at a desk separated from other students because I would finish my work quickly and then want to talk. In that respect, I was probably frustrating at times for my teachers, but they were generally flexible and found ways to keep me engaged:

• Before 1st grade, we moved to Ft. Ord in Monterey, California. I did not know how to read or even know the sounds of most of the letters, but they were teaching reading in kindergarten. Your reading level determined which class you were in, putting me in the lowest level class, including for math. Over the year, I traversed at 5 classes as my reading improved, ending in highest level class. That wouldn't have happened without flexible teachers willing to let me advance as I was able (or at least that is how I choose to view it).

• Teachers and school librarians allowing me to spend extra time helping out in the school libraries. This gave me first dibs on new books first and access to the dial-up terminal for the local university mainframe. I could play the original text-based version of Lunar Lander, usually crashing and burning.

• Mr. Bee-ā-gus (phonetic) taught 6th grade at a DOD elementary school in Frankfurt, West Germany. He was African American and probably in his 60s. The other 6th grade classes rotated among teachers, but we did not. He marched to the beat of a different drummer, and I benefited. First, he played music while we worked, introducing me to Harry Belafonte and jazz. Second, his instruction in reading/English and math was completely individualized. Each student met with Mr. Bee-ā-gus and created an individualized contract or plan. Each contract included a variety of activities. When you finished, you would meet again and create a new contract. For example, I can recall doing the following as part of a reading/English contract: SRA Reading Laboratory modules, speed-reading machine, books, analysis of newspaper articles, writing assignments, and lists of vocabulary and spelling words. A similar approach in math allowed me to cover the first half of Algebra I, which I didn't end up taking until 9th grade.

The EDL Controlled Reader, Mr. Bee-ā-gus's speed-reading machine, used filmstrips. It would project a line of text, sweeping across and illuminating a few words of the line of text at whatever word-per-minute it was set at. I hated it; it was a torture machine. I'm still not a very fast reader, but it helped.

(Photo Credits: Worthpoint)

• In 7th grade, the powers that be at Osterholz-Scharmbeck Secondary School in Osterholz-Scharmbeck, West Germany couldn't see putting a 7th grader in algebra, so I spent a semester in 8th grade math before being pulled out of it. Luckily, a high school math teacher let a 7th grader enroll in his new computer science class which otherwise only had high school students, mostly juniors and seniors. So after learning to create paper flowcharts of computer algorithms, I then learned to code on Atari 800 computers.

Specific to social studies, my memories of learning are mostly linked to field trips and personal travel. For example, we learned about Romanesque, gothic, baroque, and rococo architecture in 6th grade. Then we went on a one-day fieldtrip and visited examples of Romanesque, gothic, baroque, and rococo churches and castles. That same year, we learned about Johannes Gutenberg and his invention of the printing press and then visited the Gutenberg Museum with its Gutenberg bible. These experiences beyond the classroom made these lessons more engaging and I can still identify the different types of architecture.

In 4th grade, my family went to San Francisco to see the traveling exhibit of the treasures from the tomb of King Tutankhamen. Our tickets were for 3 o'clock in the morning. That museum exhibit fueled a fascination with ancient Eqypt that lasted for years. (Photo credit: National Geographic)

Travel to Vienna, London, and Paris and their related culture and history made them real, especially learning to navigate Paris at age 12 to take my visiting grandparents from East Texas to see the sights they had always dreamed about. Multiple visits to a divided Berlin, along with being stationed in Northern West Germany, so that my father's Army unit could stop any Soviet attack through the Fulda gap made the Cold War real in way that never would have happened from afar.

In-person experiences as an adult have created similar moments of meaningful learning . I walked the Waterloo battlefield with my father, who had studied the battle as an Army officer. While I had learned about the battle and why Napoleon lost, it wasn't until I was standing on the actual ground with my father as guide that I truly understood how the lay of the land limited what Napoleon's forces could observe, hiding the opposing forces and leading to Napoleon's defeat. My father and I also visited the barrier islands along the East Coast where a relative from Maine had been posted during the Civil War, following his wartime experience through his letters home. Afterwards, I better understood how the Union Navy could enforce an embargo of the Confederate States effectively enough to make a difference in the war.

The only lasting social studies experience in the classroom that I recall, beyond countless tests requiring the matching of states/countries with their capitals and playing a text-based version of Oregon Trail to simulate Westward Expansion, came in 10th grade world history. In the first week of class, Mr. Hills wrote the prompt for the unit test on the chalkboard. It was something like "The reasons for the rise/fall of the Roman Empire were . . . ." The only uncertainty was whether the test would be on the rise or fall of the Roman Empire. He then took us through the rise and fall of the Roman Empire where we discussed why different facts led to its rise and fall. I don't recall specific lessons, but I know that I felt comfortable going into the test. And over the course of that year, I learned to write an essay that argues a position and supported it with facts. That class probably had more to do with my success in college (and later law school) than any of my other high school classes because as a history and government major the vast majority of my exams were timed essay tests, just like those in Mr. Hills' class.

In college, I had two experiences worth a brief mention. First, I took a government class on U.S. foreign policy. It was taught by a well-lived professor that many students idolized. I couldn't stand his class. He'd authored well-written and engaging seminal works on U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century, and he could stand in front of a lecture hall and hold the students in rapt attention. But his lectures added nothing to what you learned by reading his book, which was the text for the class. At times, his lectures almost seemed to be word-for-word excerpts from his book. I enjoyed his book, but he was not a teacher, unlike my other example.

David McCullough was a visiting professor and most of the texts for his history class were his well-regarded books, but the experience was entirely different. His enthusiasm and excitement about the narratives you could discover in history was contagious. For example, we spent a few lectures on art and how it represented the changing United States from Thomas Eakins and James McNeill Whistler to N.C. Wyeth and Edward Hopper. He also painted a narrative pulling together Willa Cather's My Antonia and the art of Grant Wood and Grandma Moses. This class forever changed how I looked at history—focus on the narrative and look beyond written sources and famous political figures.

References

Bureau of the Census. (1983, May). 1980 census of population: General population characteristics, United States summary (PC80-1-B1). U.S. Department of Commerce. https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1980/1980censusofpopu8011u_bw.pdf

Congressional Budget Office. (1989, October). Social representation in the U.S. military (CBO Publication #499). Congress of the United States. [Page numbers have a prefix of "1".] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/101st-congress-1989-1990/reports/89-cbo-044.pdf

Moore, L. (2017). Starting the conversation: Using the currere process to make the teaching internship experience more positive and encourage collaborative reflection in internship site schools. Currere Exchange Journal, 1(1), 11–17.