Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal experiences. In Study 1 (n = 63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to the speaker's sense of self, that is,…

This descriptive study uses narrative analysis to examine the nature and quality of pre-service teachers' initial attempts at reflection via the genre of memoir writing in a social studies methods course. The paper begins by reviewing other uses of narrative reflection and autobiographical writing in teacher education. This is followed by an…

This comparative study (i.e., three age groups, three measures) explores the distribution of retrospective and prospective autobiographical memory data across the lifespan, in particular the bump pattern of disproportionally higher recall of memories from the ages 10 to 30, as generally observed in older age groups, in conjunction with the…

"Following the Curve of the Sentence: Notes From a Reader's Diary" is comprised of excerpts from the author's Reader's Diary, using experimental writing practices that can be modeled and used by English teachers in classrooms. The Reader's Diary is a subgenre of autobiography, memoir and poetic prose essay, a flexible, hybrid form of inquiry. The…

This article describes activities and experiences that encourage students to construct and reconstruct knowledge of self and teaching through community building and reflective practices. Following the assumption that teacher education should focus on the human and ethical dimensions of teaching, and the conscious development of a sense of self,…

This study examines the use of autoethnography as a teaching method to work with pre-service teachers in an elementary school setting. Focusing on Whiteness and critical race theory as a lens for reviewing their experiences while working with children of color, the author includes her own story of exploring her racism as a classroom teacher, a…

In this study, data in the form of (preservice teacher) "student voices" taken from mathematical autobiographies, written at the beginning of the semester, and end-of-semester reflections, were analyzed in order to examine why preservice elementary school teachers were highly motivated in a social constructivist mathematics course in which the…

This qualitative case study examines the relationship of teachers who mentor other teachers. We studied 125 autobiographical portfolios submitted by elementary and secondary teachers who had won awards as outstanding educators from their campuses and were competing at the district level. The research site was a midsize city (population 95,000) in…

For one instructor, her work in autobiography began with an interest in understanding how her past has influenced her present work of teaching. Autobiography is an interpretive act and both a reunion and a release from the past. While there is commitment to truth in writing an autobiographical text, the autobiographer necessarily engages in the…

This paper argues that instructors of child development should use literature to supplement theory and research in their courses. It is argued that literature elucidates psychological concepts with real life examples while deepening students' appreciation for the complexity and diversity of human development. Particularly effective in achieving…

Despite the stereotype of today's undergraduates as having an inadequate literacy level, a teacher of English at a large midwestern university was surprised to find that students' literacy autobiographies reflect what might be called a conventional literacy success story, one that represents a strain of American autobiography dating back to…

Situated between academic discourse and that kind of personal writing that is only for the writer herself, autobiographical writing could serve as a middle ground in which first-year college writers render and describe personal experiences yet at the same time explain and analyze them. In "Lives on the Boundary," Mike Rose offers some…

A doctoral student's interest in self-culture connections led her to observe an English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing class focused on autobiography and read all the students' papers. Autobiographical writing not only gives ESL students a chance to write about what matters to them, but the teacher can capitalize on students' cultural…

Although the recent thrust toward writing as interaction with a text has led to de-emphasis of personal-experience writing per se, autobiography, if approached in the context of textuality (in Roland Barthes's sense), can provide a model for writing as a means of discovering one's identity--of interacting with life as text and with the written…