This presentation rethinks currere as a dialectical and sensory mode of educational inquiry by bringing Walter Benjamin’s autobiographical and critical writings into conversation with William Pinar’s theory of autobiographical understanding. Rather than approaching currere as a reflective recounting of personal experience, the presentation frames it as a practice of attending to the self in relation to its material, social, and historical surroundings.

Drawing on Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and The Arcades Project, the presentation explores how fragmentary memory, urban observation, and sensory encounter function as modes of learning. Benjamin’s use of thought-images and montage offers a way of engaging experience not as linear narration but as moments that flash up in the present, interrupting habitual perception and opening critical awareness. This dialectical orientation resonates with currere’s recursive movements, particularly in how the self moves between subjectivity and distance, personal memory and collective conditions.

Autobiographical approaches have long been viewed with suspicion in academic contexts, often dismissed as overly subjective or insufficiently rigorous. This work challenges that assumption by foregrounding the dialectical dimension of currere, showing how autobiographical inquiry can cultivate a form of learning that is neither purely personal nor detached, but relational and educational. Positioned within everyday urban life rather than formal pedagogy, this work promotes a learning of self that is inseparable from learning one’s surroundings, offering currere as a critical, situated practice for understanding both personal experience and the world we inhabit.

Authors:
Peisen Ding, University of British Columbia, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Peisen Ding is a sessional lecturer and PhD candidate in Art Education at the University of British Columbia. Peisen's research explores art practices engaging the built environment, identity, and affect within educational contexts.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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