Book Review: Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History, Alterity: The Selected Works of William F. Pinar

Abstract

In the book Educational Experience as Lived: Knowledge, History and Alterity, William F. Pinar enacts his intellectual history of curriculum studies, intersecting knowledge, history, and alterity. He explores eighteen concepts of education that characterize his life works. The main argument of this volume is the centrality of subjective reconstruction through studying educational experience. What makes experience educational is one’s study, informed by historical knowledge and one’s engagement with others and the world. This book gives no practical strategies to solve educational problems, but instead provides us with insights to understand them, with which we might see what we experience clearly and differently. In this era of standardization, globalization, and cybertization of education, this book tells us how we have come to today, and questions what thoughts or actions would I, and you, take.