Using the concepts of identity and agency, this "Perspectives" article discusses my recent efforts of self-development when designing an identity-oriented Teaching English as a second language (TESL) teacher education course around teacher candidates' semester-long autoethnography writing assignment called "critical autoethnographic…

This essay examines textual engagement of two students during a Multiliteracies lesson on a French poem ("Liberté", Paul Eluard) in terms of the "multilingual subject" (Kramsch, 2009) and "the authentic speaker" (Van Compernolle, 2016). The case studies are based on personal data: (1) the students' autobiographies…

A critical piece of teacher education is to create opportunities for teachers to come to understand their cultural selves and the ways in which they intersect with the cultures of their students. Such understanding is an essential quality of culturally responsive pedagogy, a prospective means of transforming education for historically marginalized…

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…

This case study conducted by a writing specialist and a theatre specialist examines the ways in which writing to learn and learning to write took form in a course in which the ultimate goal was a staged production for a live audience. Using naturalistic methodology that deployed both ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches to analyze the…

Supporting prospective teachers to enact high quality instruction requires transforming their methods preparation. This study follows three teachers through a practice-based elementary methods course. Weekly class sessions took place in an elementary school. The setting afforded opportunities for prospective teachers to engage in cycles of…

This article presents the results of three comparative analyses on forty-seven student papers in order to examine the effectiveness of a basic writing course in developing students' academic writer identity. The course curriculum, grounded in social identity theory, focuses on the core writing concepts and dispositions that promote writer…

A paper, presented at a workshop on "Teachers Writing" at the 1976 Conference on English Education, which describes an English methods course that involves students in writing autobiographies. (DD)

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)

Discusses in cost/benefit terms an approach to teaching the sociology of religion which involves students in writing their religious autobiographies. Considers the nature of the assignment, level of methodological sophistication, difficulties in grading, and justification of the exercise. Concludes that the biographical approach has wide…

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)

Developed for a high school quinmester unit on comparative biography, this guide provides the teacher with strategies to aid students in examining biography from "Plutarch's Lives" and Cellini's "Autobiography" to Nabokoc's "Speak, Memory." Special emphasis is placed on comparison of biographies of the same person and…