Retreating to renew educational imagination, purpose and practice.

In December 2021, the Currere Exchange Journal issued a call for papers exploring Currere—an autobiographical approach to curriculum theorising grounded in educators’ analysis and interpretation of their own educational experiences. The method was created by William Pinar as part of the ‘reconceptualist turn’ in curriculum studies in the 1970s, and since then reconceptualists continue to critique traditional understandings of curriculum for promoting positivistic (i.e. reducing knowledge to what can be measured), scientistic (i.e. treating only scientific methods as valid), and technical rational (i.e. managerial and outcomes-driven) approaches. In contrast, they emphasise lived experience, subjectivity, and the complexity of teacher / learner identities, values and interactions. Curriculum, in this view, is not simply what is taught; it is what is lived.

At the time of the journal’s call, however, I found myself struggling to write. It was late-pandemic, the world was experiencing considerable political and economic turmoil—I had turned 50 (!), and I was wrestling with possible trajectories for my teaching and research.

Recognising this struggle, my wife suggested I go for a walk, so I grabbed a book and headed out the door. These “reading walks” quickly became a mode of thinking and theorising—a moving meditation, if you will. This led to my article “Ambulare,” in which I proposed walking as both a metaphor and method for curriculum theorising. Currere has always emphasised reflection, but often in ways that to me seemed disembodied, overly introspective, or abstract. Although still in development as a methodological reonceptualisation of Currere, Ambulare is my call to slow down the theorising of our practice and to take reflection ‘out of the mind and into the body.’ This can be done in a variety of ways, but for me, walking became my way to think with the world—to situate my reflections in place, rhythm, body and breath.

Ambulare… rejects “the race” and “running” in favor of more valuable concerns than speed, competition, and ranking. It emphasizes health and wellbeing, in both an individual and socio-cultural sense. Walking, unlike racing, is conducive to other activities that nourish us—eating, drinking, laughing, listening, and more. Ambulare also acknowledges alternative routes, choices, opportunities, avenues, and trajectories. There is no fixation on the course, finish line, or stopwatch. We can accelerate, decelerate, veer, turn, or simply stop—whatever is needed. Finally, Ambulare argues that it is better to walk than run, in most situations, and that it is better to take time when engaging in complicated conversations (Smith 2022, p.113).

Following this insight, I travelled to UNICAMP in Campinas, Brazil in 2023 where I created a practical and accessible approach to introducing educators to Currere/Ambulare as an embodied, emplaced, and decelerated approach to curriculum theorising framed through the concept of ‘retreat.’ By this, I mean withdrawing from everyday demands, not as an indulgent and idle escape, but as an opportunity to reconnect, reaffirm and renew one’s educational imagination, purposes and practice – to engage in work that renews, not depletes.

In early 2024, I approached the Curriculum & Pedagogy Collaborative Research Network (CRN) with an idea for a Currere/Ambulare retreat in Aberystwyth. During the retreat, we were joined by my friend and mentor Professor Tom Poetter from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a cohort of educators and researchers from across Wales. Over the weekend, we participated in guided Zen meditation sessions, prepared and ate communal meals, and reflected on, discussed and wrote about indelible educational experiences, future aspirations and the realities of our current educational practice. The retreat generated a collection of Currere research that was later published in a special issue of the Currere Exchange Journal.

Later that year, through the Cardiff University/University of Waikato Strategic Partnership, Dr Jessica Rubin, Ms. Katie Arihia Virtue and I collaborated on a project offering similar retreats focused on conceptualisations of place from Wales and New Zealand. Our first retreat was held at the Dare Valley Community Woodland, where we discussed Cynefin with Dr Dylan Adams and Dr Mirain Rhys from Cardiff Metropolitan University, and Darren Lewis and his brilliant team at the woodland.

Then, in February of 2025, I travelled to Aotearoa with Mr Andy Williams, a PhD student of mine who is investigating how Currere can enhance teachers’ understanding of agency, and Dylan from Cardiff Met, to examine resonances between the Welsh concept of Cynefin and the Māori notion of Tūrangawaewae—both of which speak to deep, spiritual relationships with place. The retreat was held at the Sculpture Park at the Waitakuru Arboretum near Hamilton – a perfect venue for the event. This project served as the basis for a Horizon Europe bid I’m currently developing with Jessica and Katie, which proposes using Currere to create a digital repository of educators’ narratives from Europe’s minority language and cultural communities.

As an added bonus, we also met a teacher from Japan who was curious about the retreat and enthusiastically accepted our invitation to attend. I’m now working with her in developing a retreat investigating linkages between Currere, Jibunshi (personal history) and Seikatsu Tsuzurikata (life composition) as a means to foster a culturally-responsive approach to Currere/Ambulare in Japan.

Encouraged by these projects and the people involved with them, and in drawing on concepts such as Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989; Kaplan 1995), embodied cognition and movement (Varela et al 1993; Oppezzo and Schwartz 2014; Schneegans and Schöner 2008), the Biophilia Hypothesis (Wilson 1984;Gaekwad et al 2022) and Situated Learning (Lave and Wenger 1991), I’ve had the pleasure of facilitating two additional Currere Cymru retreats with colleagues from the Curriculum and Pedagogy CRN in January and March of 2025 at Gregynog Hall—a venue deliberately chosen for its capacity to support reflection, embodiment, emlpacement, scholarship and community. We are also planning an additional retreat in 2025 focusing on Cymraeg (Welsh language) and Cymreig (Welsh culture) and how these aspects of life in Wales feature in teachers’ curriculum work.

My aim in working in close-to-practice research with educators, researchers and students at Currere/Ambulare retreats is not merely to develop funded projects or a model for professional development, but to co-create meaningful impact in education through research, dialogue, community and action. While they may seem indulgent, these events are intellectual retreats in the truest sense: a deliberate stepping back in order to reflect, reaffirm, renew and reconnect with our educational imagination, purposes, values, practices and community.

Although rewarding, education is often challenging, with work often extracting energy without renewing it. These retreats are not only reflective—they are deliberately emplaced, drawing on our powerful connection to landscape, rhythm, and community in a human and more-than-human sense, so that educators have the opportunity to engage in curriculum work that is biophilic, not necrophilic, regenerative, not degenerative and transformative, rather than static, or worse, stagnant. This vision is rooted in my own journey as a curriculum theorist, educator, researcher, and now an avid long-distance walker.

As this work continues to grow across languages, continents, and contexts—my aim remains the same: to co-create spaces with the educational community where educators can reflect, reconnect and renew their educational imagination, purposes and practice. It is my hope, that through embodied, emplaced and situated reflection, undertaken within a community of curious and diligent educators, researchers and students, attendees can reimagine and reclaim curriculum as lived—not delivered, theorised—not prescribed, a walk and not a race.