An Autoethnography: One Step Forward—My Democratic Learning Journey

Abstract

This autoethnographic research explores my personal and professional growth within a monolithic social, cultural, and educational site. In addition, I utilized Pinar’s (2019; 1994) four stages of currere, the regressive, progressive, analytical and synthetical, as both a theoretical framework and methodological tool to answer my central research question: how have social, cultural, and educational influences shaped my unique learning journey and fostered my emancipatory goal of becoming a democratic learner? For the purposes of this paper, a democratic learner is characterized by the cultivation of agency and autonomy in decision-making within an individual, fostering their ability to make independent learning decisions regardless of broad social, cultural, and political influences. By employing autoethnography, I merged personal narratives with broader cultural, social, and political contexts, using my life as a site for critical reflection. Data was collected through uninterrupted free writing that documented my thought flow. This was supported by a collection of journals and artifacts that captured my life epiphanies. The data coding and analysis process was highly iterative, featuring a strategy of “memoing” that helped identify three key themes in the data: Nature or Nurture, Transmissional or Transformational, and Personal Curriculum. Through the interpretive-analytic autoethnographic writing process, I examined the intersectionality of my identities and explored how they influenced my learning journey to become a democratic learner. This process not only deepened my understanding of the personal and cultural forces that have shaped my life but also provides insight into the role of autoethnography in education. Ultimately, the study aims to contribute to a broader understanding of the relationship between personal curriculum and democratic learning in education. Key Words: autoethnography, democratic learning, currere, personal curriculum, interpretive analysis