This paper focuses on the experiences of four facilitators of a group mentoring programme for doctoral students aspiring to become academics. The methodology utilised collective sensemaking in a collaborative autoethnography. Aided by agreed reflective prompts, we initially analysed our own and each other's written accounts. This illuminated the…

The purpose of this study is to understand the experience of mothers who lost a child to suicide, and how they have learned to cope with their devastating loss. The study is grounded in transformative learning (TL) theory; the study design combined narrative inquiry and the first author's autoethnographic experience. Data collection consisted of…

In this reflective essay, Andrea Avery considers how teaching Lucy Grealy's 1994 Autobiography of a Face in a memoir class functions to cultivate embodied vulnerability among high school seniors. She discusses her own identity as a disabled/chronically ill teacher and how her positioning of and interaction with Grealy's text invites her students…

In this historical moment defined by the coronavirus (COVID-19), the global community struggles with and against a seemingly invisible foe. Students, faculty, and administrators open the blinds on windows in the morning, witnessing the brightness of the sun and seemingly the clarity of a morning welcome. Yet, there lurks, not in the shadows, but…

The purpose of this study was to employ autoethnography as a methodology to examine my doctoral comprehensive exam experience in the context of COVID-19. It was a special period of "isolation squared" with both the take-home exam and the stay-at-home order enforced. Through diary entries, I recorded my complex feelings of overwhelming,…

In this paper, I present my experiences as an emerging classroom-based researcher. Using personal narratives, I examine the tensions that emerge from the emotional work often required to conduct educational research. This autoethnographic approach explores the complexity of student-teacher interactions using Swanson's middle-range theory of…

My Career Story (MCS) comprises a self-guided autobiographical workbook designed to assist individuals across life's diverse spectrum to narrate and shape their career stories. We describe the development and use of the MCS and its relevance for all people contemplating career transitions. Results of a study using the MCS with 20 emerging adults…

This paper is an autoethnographic exploration of the topic of artistry in the author's work as an educator and what it means to be an artist and practitioner researcher, given his own history with the concept of art as a strained one. In this paper, the author discusses how his struggle for an identity as an artist in research has led to personal…

This paper engages some of the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of silence, and its implications for teaching and learning both within and beyond educational settings. In this exploration, the authors draw on self-reflexive observations, woven throughout the paper as a series of vignettes, to explore questions of silence and its…

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting's invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the…

Laypersons and experts believe that wisdom is cultivated through a diverse range of positive and negative life experiences. Yet, not all individuals with life experience are wise. We propose that one possible determinant of growth in wisdom from life experience is self-reflection. In a life span sample of adults (N = 94) ranging from 26 to 92…

In this article, I interrogate the changing forms that may be fundamental to transformative learning and how these are best chronicled and understood. Drawing on auto/biographical narrative research, I challenge the continuing primacy of a kind of overly disembodied, decontextualized cognition as the basis of transformation. Notions of epistemic…