This paper describes a teacher educator's self-study of work with her M.Ed. students at a private international university in Pakistan. This systematic inquiry highlights changes and improvements in teaching drawn from experiences of practice based on autobiographies. Analysis shows that improvement in teaching came from the author's learning…

This article describes and analyses the background and goals of students at the Finnish open university in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The material consists of statistics based on the student records of the Finnish open university in 2000 (n = 9080) and of the stories, educational autobiographies written by the adult learners (n =…

I define the "literacy autobiography" as a reflective, first-person account of one's development as a writing being. In this article I share a classroom practice that invited language learners to consider and compose their literacy autobiographies (LA). The context was a university credit English as a second language (ESL) classroom. The purposes…

The relationship between research and autobiography is explored. The planned study was a qualitative study of literacy methods instruction at the college level, a case study of one class of students and their professor. The study was based on the premise that preservice teachers need experience-based learning opportunities in the classroom in…

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…

These memoirs of Gordon Selman, a nationally and internationally recognized practitioner and scholar in Canadian adult education, give insight into his thoughts and feelings during a 40-year professional life in university extension work and historical scholarship in adult education. Chapter 1 describes his activities before he entered the field…

"Twelve Years a Slave" is a script intended to go with accompanying audio cassettes. It was developed for Voices of Liberty (a project of New Faces of Liberty) and was produced by the San Francisco Study Center as one of their "Cutting Edge Curriculum Materials." The story told by the script is excerpted from the 1989 edition…

Through the narratives of North American slaves a vivid picture of their lives, struggles, hopes, and aspirations emerges. The slave narrative arose as a response to, and a refutation of, claims that blacks could not write. Slave writings were often direct extensions of speech. Through a process of imitation and repetition, the black slave's…

For a composition teacher--comparing a passage from his Caucasian grandmother's (May Blossom Gould's) diary with the autobiographical narrative dictated by an African-American student's great-great grandmother (Violet McNeil) to a literate member of her family--racial politics and the privileges afforded by literacy irrevocably separate the two…

How can classrooms and the educational system be made more productive, humane, enabling, and equitable for all students, particularly through writings studied and produced? The values of inclusive feminist pedagogy can lead to answers. Women emerge from high school with higher grade point averages but lower self-esteem than men. Female and male…

Thoughts on retirement after 46 years teaching English. (JH)

An individual folk anthology unit covering eight topics is described in this paper. The eight topics include (1) I have an identity, (2) my interesting name, (3) mandalas and sentences, (4) rhythms and rhymes of old times, (5) myths of my childhood, (6) folk legends/old and new, (7) aspects of folklore, and (8) slang. The activities accompanying…

This paper presents a rationale for using a biographical approach in understanding how teachers think and act and how they have come to think and act in the way they do. This approach is seen as being able to provide a fundamental understanding of the teacher's perspective. Understanding how teachers individually and collectively think, act,…

Anzia Yezierska and Agnes Smedley grew up in the United States in poverty-stricken, working-class families. Both women became famous authors and participants in social movements of the early decades of the 20th century. Yezierska's "Bread Givers" and Smedley's "Daughter of Earth", published in the 1920s, were fictionalized…