An English Speaker of Other Languages (ESOL) Educator’s Currere of Loneliness

Abstract

In this article, I psychoanalytically and critically endeavor to understand loneliness in relation to my life experiences by honoring currere’s (Pinar & Grumet, 2015) autobiographical approach to educational experience analysis. In doing so, I seek to explore: what my lived experiences of being alone look like as an English speaker of other languages (ESOL) educator who also was a learner and what the lived experiences of loneliness imply in the context of neoliberal education (Biesta, 2014; Harvey, 2005). The findings will bear implications for curriculum studies in the current “epidemic of loneliness” (Bound, 2018; OSG, 2023), to which loneliness researchers, be it psychoanalysts or social psychologists, concur that it is “an abstract summary of a cluster of specific feelings, thoughts, and behaviours” (Heinrich & Gullone, 2006, p. 704).