The "Wandiny" creative gathering of Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets, artists, Elders, and participants across Australia actively sought to foreground First Nations voices, stories, poetry, art, and ontology. This paper presents the auto-ethnographic reflections from the event organisers, demonstrating that participation in a…

This piece demonstrates a creative practice that invites educators from diverse backgrounds to consider the memories, stories, and cultural histories alive within them. How we carry and know our own stories influences how we can critically and reflexively enact or challenge policies of cultural responsivity in education. Given that the political…

Education is a human endeavor, yet its research often prioritizes empirical knowledge while marginalizing human aspects of the educative experience. Creating space for self has the capacity to foster wholeness where there is disconnectedness and, therein, challenge academic conventions that prioritize dehumanization. Situated within…

In this article, we reflect on our identities as English educators of color and how they have influenced our journey to becoming academic writers. Through reconciliation with our collective experiences of linguistic violence, we share how the experiences have impacted the ways we show up as secondary and higher education English educators in our…

"Autobiography on the Spectrum" challenges prevailing notions about autism by offering a critically unconventional perspective--the viewpoint of adolescents who are themselves on the spectrum. Examining a year-long inquiry, Myers highlights the autobiographical works of the students through writing, photography, poetry, art, and more.…

In currently dominant accounts, English as a school subject, its content and processes, are construed as an induction into a well-defined, already-established disciplinary discourse or set of discourses. In an attempt to challenge this version of English, I present some examples of autobiographical writing by secondary students and I tell the…

Deficiency-oriented attitudes are still common occurrences despite growing emphasis on linguistic and cultural diversity. Promoting inclusivity in learning, Herrera (2016) proposed "biography-driven instruction" emphasizing the power of students' assets. Though her work was intended for young learners' biliteracy, I argue that the tenets…

High school teachers Gallagher and Kittle describe a 9-week unit on writing a narrative they created (and taught at their respective schools) that gave students many chances to practice different elements of writing a story. Their unit "spiraled" students back to key skills at each step, giving extended writing practice often lacking in…

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that…

The tradition of teachers engaging in narrative-based inquiry is now well established, as is its value for creating situated knowledge about teaching. This reflexive autobiographical article weaves together narrative accounts around a senior literature classroom environment. The article features two voices: a teacher (Natalie Bellis) and a Year 12…

In this essay, the author describes how, and why, she tackled a lifetime of questions about her deafness and experiences of being deaf by writing a memoir called The Art of Being Deaf. While researching her memoir, the author discovered that the questions about her deafness that she most needed to answer were her own. Having first read many…

In this reflective essay, Alberto Ledesma explores how being undocumented can produce a particular form of writer's block. He argues that there is a pattern of predictable silences and obfuscations inherent in all undocumented immigrant autobiographies that cannot be easily negotiated when undocumented students are asked to write about "their…

In this paper I reflect on epiphany moments in teaching and learning and the ways in which writing such moments can serve both to refresh and revitalise what Palmer calls the inner landscape of the educator, while also offering opportunities to enliven pedagogy. I use the notion of the liminal disposition to position such writing as an agentic act…

Thus far, pedagogical discussions about comics in the college classroom have focused primarily on "reading," with less attention paid to the complementary potential of "composing" comics. This essay advocates using narrative theory alongside comic studies to provide students and teachers with a flexible, transferable vocabulary…

The Will to Adorn is a project that began with the idea to work with scholars, educators, students, and cultural practitioners to document the arts of everyday dressing. Dress represents a multifaceted aesthetic tradition closely related to identity, but not often recognized as an art form. This article describes how the Will To Adorn initiative…