This research started as an effort to recover lost childhood memories. I (Emilio Bassail) used the film-making apparatus as a device that allowed me to excavate, elaborate and produce representations based on the small fragments of memory I had left. After creating an archive of reconstructed memories, I started questioning the images I had…

We examined whether age differences in life stories and personality traits mediated age differences in subjective well-being. One hundred one young, 77 middle-aged, and 81 older participants completed measures of subjective well-being and personality traits. They described chapters and specific memories in their life stories and rated these on…

This article draws on research undertaken as part of a Collective Biography project generated by a group of activists and lecturers teaching and researching in youth and community work (YCW). Collective Biography (CB) is an approach to research in which participants work productively with memory and writing to generate collective action orientated…

This study investigates the relation between Viola Spolin's methodology of theatrical education and Konstantin Stanislavski's. It elucidates major similarities and diff erences between Spolin's theater games and Stanislavski's system in more detail than previous research. This investigation belongs to a research project on the origins of Spolin's…

This study generated from our interest in learning about social justice events in the lives of teacher candidates in our programs of study. In many schools of education, including our own, social justice is a concept that is integrated into the curriculums, yet there is wide variation as to how this is actually done. A unique aspect of this study…

This issue of the Bank Street "Occasional Paper Series" is a labor of love. It testifies love for Jonathan Silin, who for 17 years served as Editor-in-Chief. This issue has been designed to exemplify two commitments that have shaped the decades of Jonathan's career and that will resonate with readers of the "Occasional Paper…

Stories live to be told to others, Dan McAdams (2008) writes: "Life stories therefore are continually made and remade in social relationships and in the overall social context provided by culture. As psychosocial constructions, life stories reflect the values, norms, and power differentials inherent in societies, wherein they have their…

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children's encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an 'emergent intracorporeal multiplicity' [Fritsch, K. 2015. "Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal…

In this memoir, I accounted several episodes of my childhood of a middle class family in early 1990s in a Chinese urban city. Two major discourses permeated my account: the nationalism and socialism discourse and the upward social mobility discourse. While my family and I cherish the comfort and joy of everyday life enjoyed in the era of…

Collective biography draws on memory work methods developed initially by feminist sociologists (Haug et al., 1987) where people collaboratively examined the social and discursive resources through which they take themselves up as particular gendered subjects in the world. Their own memories become resources to investigate processes of…

In this article, the author argues that the narrative forms imposed on students closely follow the narrative conventions of the "Bildungsroman," the novel of human emergence that has traditionally been associated with what educators of adults would call experiential learning. The author's presenting question--If the self is a text,…

The intent of this paper is to stress the importance of narrative and story, and to share the experience of opening the windows of memory to look into the past and uncover fascinating and valuable histories as portrayed in a current study. The longitudinal study of an educator follows his life story and his role in education. Set in Victoria, it…

"Possibilities for postmodern emergence" [Somerville, M. (2007). "Postmodern emergence." "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education," 20(2), 225-243] in professional practice were explored by a group of tertiary educators working together on a collaborative memory project. This allowed new…

In the winter of 2010, as the professor of an introductory Gender Studies course in a Canadian university, author Ilya Parkins was involved in a community service learning project centered on the memorialization of women murdered in her university's local community. In this article, Parkins considers what limited this project, which was so…

Reminiscing--"the act or process of recalling the past (Butler, 1963, p. 66)"--is a core activity for any society. Research shows that the desire and tradition for reminiscing can be traced back to early civilizations where the elders of the community were responsible to know and share the history of their community (Butler, 1995;…