A Pastoral Boy’s Transformative Journey Towards an Ideal English Language Teacher: A Currere

Abstract

I have explored my transformative journey towards an ideal English language teacher in this study. I have used currere as a theory and method. I have used currere as a theory for processing understanding of my lived experiences and as a method of inquiry for documenting my lived experiences reflecting on the present endeavors and the future possibilities. The currere as a method provides the foundation for recollecting my educational and professional lived experiences as the regressive phase, looking for my future course as progressive phase, reflecting on my past experiences and future endeavors as analytic phase, and returning to the present reflecting on past lived experiences and future plans as synthesis. Then, I analyze my past, present, and future desires in terms of socio-economic, cultural and political context. Finally, I synthesize my past experiences, present endeavors and future desires relating to my lived currere. After reflecting on my lived experiences, I feel that an individual’s lived experiences can be a reliable first-hand resource to explore transformative journey as an ideal English language teacher. In this study, I have tried to explore the answers to two questions: i) How did I evolve towards an ideal teacher and a headship? And ii) How do my family, colleagues, and students perceive my currere journey as an ideal teacher? This study mainly deals with my personal, familial, educational and professional journey. My lived experiences have been explored based on my personal reflections from the perspective of my four students, one colleague, my parents, my eldest brother, and my spouse. This study employs the currere and transformative learning as a theoretical lens. The currere supports to document my lived experiences and the latter one looks for the alternative approaches to traditional classroom teaching learning. Both the currere and the transformative learning focus on context based interactive, collaborative, critically reflective, rational, and active participation-based epistemic and deeper-level teaching-learning pedagogies. The ontological stance of my study is that realty is plural as it is determined by the interpretation of the information provided by the research participants; the epistemological stance is that information and views of the participants’ interpreted by using a theoretical lens determine the meaning-making; the axiological assumption is that the researcher’s personal values based on lived experiences also may influence the meaning-making process. But, the perspectives of the participants have been given due respect. Regarding methodological stance, currere has been deployed as a method as it contributes to exploring, recording, and interpreting the lived experiences of the inquirer. Findings indicate that the inquirer has transformed himself from a pastoral boy to an academic and a professional person. It also suggests that the ideal teachers are required to adopt transformative learning strategies that embrace space for lived experiences, critical self-reflections, and rational discourse for being open to the best alternatives based on credible evidence and information. The traditional frames of pedagogical practices that place learners as the passive receivers must be destructed, and the teachers should be open to exerting collaborative, innovative, and activity-based activities that embrace learners’ lived experiences and indigenous knowledge as the learning content. In such learning environment, every learner should be participating actively through rational discourse, being open to alternatives.