The Currere Exchange is a retreat designed to engage “complicated conversations" (Pinar, 2012) among a diverse community of curriculum and education activists. The retreat is an opportunity for graduate students, teachers, school administrators, community activists, professors, citizens, and youth who are interested in curriculum and cultural studies to affirm, connect, and refresh their personal, scholarly, and social action agendas.
By focusing on autobiography as a method for personal development and political action, the retreat intends to help participants surface new points of view, challenge the status quo in schools and society, and provide outlets and direction for those interested in troubling the intersections of identity, culture, leadership, curriculum, and politics.
The purposeful ends of the retreat are to engage participants in a non-traditional conference format that focuses more on conversation than presentation and more on dialogue and meaning making than performance. In this way, we hope to create, both individually and collectively, a more just community and society in the present and future; a more relevant and rich curriculum and pedagogy for all; and a more prominent role for autobiographical scholarship as social action in discourses on leadership, culture, curriculum, teaching, and schooling for a more robust democracy.