Letting the life stories of students or parts of those stories into composition courses not only helps students improve their writing skills, but also helps many of them connect with themselves--who they are, who they are becoming, what they want to become--in ways that enhance their abilities to learn in their own fields. Students who fail to ask…

Develops a college-level writing assignment using Adrienne Kennedy's autobiography, a multisectioned list poem. Discusses why the personal list poem is appealing and how lists--a simple but generative form--work well for students. States that students wrote a succession of paragraphs about people in their lives who had influenced them. Gives…

Describes the genesis and history of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers from 1921-38. Discovers in that school's methodology an antecedent to today's feminist and progressive pedagogies. Looks at the autobiographical narratives of participants to analyze the development of powerful critical voices. (HB)

Autobiography is now debated as ultimately problematic, a charge that may impede the growth of a growing cultural pedagogy. As a tool in the classroom, it is under siege for many reasons: because it does not teach "real-world" skills; because in asking students to deal with painful memories, it may impede intellectual and emotional growth; and…

Suggests that personal writing poses both opportunities and risks in writing classrooms. Discusses the experiences of two children in a fifth/sixth-grade writing process classroom. Notes that benefits of personal writing are opportunities for authenticity, finding voice, and a therapeutic value; whereas risks include coercion of students who are…

Through three semesters of teaching the nonfiction essay, an instructor has come to terms with the fact that she has yet to attempt the type of personal essay that she asks her students to write, essays in which personal experiences with death are shared. However, a reminiscence on death through a recounting of her reactions to and understanding…

Students cannot trace all the sources that inform who they are at a given moment, but all of them can explore a wide range of sources that inform their sense of self, clarify their values and their relationships to the world and others in it. Writing about family fits especially well into a sequence in which students narrate a personal experience,…

Argues that instructors might have more success in teaching analysis and exposition--public forms of writing--if the autobiographical writing of undergraduates were viewed primarily as a private way to find ideas, not always as material itself to be shaped into public autobiographical prose. (MS)