Courses: Argumentation, Public Speaking, Political Communication. Objectives: After completing this unit activity, students should be able to (1) demonstrate comprehension of Burke's (1941) concept of terministic screens; (2) apply the concept of terministic screens to write a brief political autobiography of themselves that analyzes the history…

Discusses a women's literature course designed to explore the connections between the narratives that students read and discuss and the narratives that they live and write. Examines a variety of sources, including fiction, biography, autobiography, literary criticism, history, psychology, sociology, and popular culture. (RS)

Students read Mark Vonnegut's "The Eden Express," an autobiographical account of a young man's schizophrenic breakdown, and wrote papers comparing how different perspectives, e.g., the biomedical and behavioral, would describe the cause and cure of Vonnegut's schizophrenia. Students liked the book and the assignment. (RM)

Presents a Holocaust literature class that brings new voices to the community college literature curriculum. Describes a course that involves reading five survivors' autobiographies, hearing four survivor speakers, one of whom was one of the authors, and hearing a speaker who had researched the murder and victimization of her family during the…

A method is described for incorporating student papers based on published biographies or autobiographies into an upper-division undergraduate personality theory course. Students are required to submit a term paper analyzing their selected target person, using concepts from a variety of theories presented in the course. (Author/RM)

A University of Redlands course, intended as an introduction to ethics and morality for college freshmen, is described. The course, "Educational Odysseys," shared personal experiences and books that had helped shape the values of the college administrators who taught the course. (MLW)

Suggests that autobiography is a fertile context for students to develop a facility for reading and writing and for defining and constructing themselves within an academic setting. Discusses using autobiography in an introduction to academic discourse course for developmental college students. (RS)

Describes a high-school course called "Autobiography" that discusses nonfiction and gender. Describes how students write their autobiographies piecemeal while reading and discussing a partly autobiographical work of fiction, and how the course eventually centers around identifying biases of different sorts in one's own and in others' writing.…

This paper describes the content, techniques, and benefits of a life history course, which was designed to extend the traditional goal of psychological development through autobiography into a spiritual context. The three major components of the course are described. The format of the lectures is presented, focusing on concepts, ideas, and tools…

When she began teaching, one instructor thought everything had to come from her. It took a couple of years before she understood that what students themselves bring to the experience is instrumental--even vital--in helping them connect with what happens in the classroom. In their freshman composition journals, students produced writing based on…