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 Community language learning (CLL) is a language-teaching approach focused on group-interest learning. It is based on the ''counselling-approach'' in which the teacher acts as a counselor and a paraphraser, while the learner is seen as a client an ...

(CLL), a method in education and specifically in Second Language Teaching. 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 The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

in 1944. As a psychologist and educator, he worked along with

Carl Rogers Carl Ransom Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (and client-centered approach) in psychology. Rogers is widely considered one of the founding fathers of ps ...

, and took certain principles from

person-centered therapy Person-centered therapy, also known as person-centered psychotherapy, person-centered counseling, client-centered therapy and Rogerian psychotherapy, is a form of psychotherapy developed by psychologist Carl Rogers beginning in the 1940s and ex ...

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 The input hypothesis, also known as the monitor model, is a group of five hypotheses of second-language acquisition developed by the linguist Stephen Krashen in the 1970s and 1980s. Krashen originally formulated the input hypothesis as just one ...

. In the early 1970s he proposed

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 A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in partic ...

, he wrote several books in which he addressed the topic of institutionalized religious education, and the theological concept of

sin In a religious context, sin is a transgression against divine law. Each culture has its own interpretation of what it means to commit a sin. While sins are generally considered actions, any thought, word, or act considered immoral, selfish, s ...

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 Industrialisation ( alternatively spelled industrialization) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive re-organisation of an econom ...

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".

Works

Books

* ''Personality Factors in Counseling'' (1945) * ''Counseling in Catholic life and education'' (1952) * ''A Catholic Psychologist Looks at Pastoral Counseling'' (1959) * ''The concept of sin and guilt in psychotherapy'' (1960) * ''Counseling and Psychotherapy: The Pursuit of Values'' (1968) * ''Religious Values in Counseling and Psychotherapy'' (1969) * ''Psychological Dynamics in Religious Living'' (1971) * ''Counseling-learning: A Whole-person Model for Education'' (1972) * ''Counseling-learning in Second Languages'' (1976) * ''Understanding: An essential ingredient in human belonging'' (1978)

Papers

* ''"Religious Factors and Values in Counseling: Counseling, Religion and Man'' (1958). The Catholic Counselor and Readings. Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 3–24, Autumn * ''Some Ethical and Scientific Values in the Counseling Therapeutic Process'' (September 1960). Personnel and Guidance Journal. 39:15-29. * ''Counseling, Psychotherapy, and the Unified Person'' (1963). Journal of Religion and Health. * ''Religious Factors and Values in Counseling: Counseling, Religion and Man

References

Bibliography

* Clarke, K. M. (1989). Creation of meaning: An emotional processing task in psychotherapy. ''Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training, 26''(2), 139-148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0085412 * C. Kevin Gillespie (2001). "Psychology and American Catholicism: From Confession to Therapy?". Crossroad Pub. * Robert Kugelmann (2011), "Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries". * Keiko K. Samimy & Jennybelle P. Rardin (1994). "Adult Language Learners' Affective Reactions to Community Language Learning: A Descriptive Study." Foreign Language Annals. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/flan.1994.27.issue-3/issuetoc {{DEFAULTSORT:Curran, Charles Arthur 1913 births 1978 deaths Educational psychologists 20th-century American psychologists Ohio State University Graduate School alumni