Name Charles Curran Role Priest | Died 1978 | |
Books Counseling-learning: A Whole-person Model for Education, Counseling in Catholic life and education | ||
Charles Arthur Curran (1913–1978) was a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus and psychologist who is best known as the creator of Community Language Learning (CLL), a method in education and specifically in Second Language Teaching.
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He was a central member of the psychology faculty at Loyola University Chicago, and a counseling specialist.
Career
Curran received a Doctorate in Psychology from Ohio State University in 1944.
As a psychologist and educator, he worked along with Carl Rogers, and took certain principles from person-centered therapy and applied them to the field of education.
In 1952, Curran proposed the essential idea of the "Counseling-Learning" approach, or "counselearning". He incorporated counseling techniques that take into account the students' feelings toward their learning experience, and are meant to lower the affective filter. In the early 1970s he proposed Community Language Learning as a method based on his approach. His views, which were mostly promoted and tested by his students Paul G. La Forge (1971) and Taylor (1979), among others, gained particular attention and prominence in the 1980s & 1990s through the work of Jennybelle P. Rardin (1994), Keiko Komimy (1994) and Katherine M. Clarke (1989).
As a priest, he wrote several books in which he addressed the topic of institutionalized religious education, and the theological concept of sin compared to the sense of guilt in psychotherapy.
Part of the problem of the human condition, in Curran's view, was the "mechanized concept of man," or the idea that man is merely a machine (something that he saw as the result of industrialism and scientism, and criticized). In his writings, he advocated a change in the "approach to the human person" or a "return to a more ancient unified view of man".