Existential Encounters: Self-Care, Curriculum, and Currere's "Cruel Scrutiny"

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: History, Philosophy, and Curriculum (Table 3)

Abstract

Drawing from Greene’s (1967) slim volume titled Existential Encounters for Teachers, this paper asks“How can we put our existential encounters to use” amidst the ideologically charged horizons of this curricular moment. Towards these ends, this paper retraces routes of existentialism in curriculum as guided by Maxine Greene’s (1967) and explores the ways in which currere as a practice of curricular inquiry aimed at what Grumet discusses as the “cruel scrutiny” of self in relation to knowledge (as opposed the superficial ministrations of self-care) can be seen to resist and recast compensatory curricular cure-alls that serve to alienate teachers from their own encounters with ambivalent horizons between being and non-being, and the angst of their own dreadful-freedoms.

Authors

• Laura M. Jewett, University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley
  Presenting Author

• Germaine Tondji, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
  Presenting Author