Currere as Poetic Inquiry

Abstract

Ng-A-Fook (2015) addresses an important gap in contemporary curriculum studies―understanding scholars as poets and acknowledging the potential of the poetic in education, which offers a framework for doing curriculum work at the intersection of the arts, social theory, and curriculum studies. Associating being poetic with the unconscious, Doll (2017) argues that this poetic reality can be illuminated through myth, literary text and dreams, pointing to psychic reality, hidden in the unconscious. The unconscious is, more, a poetic rather than a scientific reality. Informed by Gulick’s (1981) idea of archetypal experience, I argue that currere reveals “poetic reality” – the unconscious dimension in one’s experience, orienting toward one’s interiority—the intrinsic felt value (Gulick, 1981. p. 252). This article consists of two sections. In the first, I argue that the poetic reality—the unconscious—can be revealed through archetypes such as images or motifs in myth, literary text, even through “daily experience.” And in the second, I explain how my autobiography guided by currere validates this poetic reality in two ways: first, autobiography captures the archetypal experience from which one attends to “the felt intrinsic value” (Gulick, 1981); second, autobiography expresses the archetypal pattern and motif I used my autobiography as an example to illustrate how my experience is structured by the two key concepts in Chinese culture yin and yang—an inherited Chinese cultural pattern and theme. Therefore, currere, I posit, reveals the unconscious dimension of one’s experience – a poetic reality.