This article advocates for art curriculum to be guided by the goal of challenging the discrimination, stigmatization, marginalization, and medicalization of disabled people. The Disability Arts Movement provides an important site through which to engage students in exploring the sociopolitical issue of ableism in art curriculum. The pedagogical…

In this speech, the author uses five moments of his own existence to speak to how he thinks the West conceptualizes and depicts Africa and Africans. This involves autobiography in a sense because he used his own life, but the discussion is not about him. It is about western conceptions and representations of Africans as reflected in the following…

This action research project was aimed to improve geometry students' achievement and the retention in a suburban public high school over a one-year implementation cycle. The curricular design was influenced by Dweck's (2006) theories of growth mindset, educational standards, and directives outlined by the National Council of Teachers of…

Engaging emotions in multicultural education is an important but a relatively neglected issue in teacher education. This essay calls for pedagogical attention to the role of emotions and attempts to analyze how teaching autobiographies and films sheds light on the emotional dynamics of multicultural education. Two films, "The Color of Fear", and…

This article reports findings from a mixed-method investigation of a cohort of teacher candidates who were placed in an urban and culturally diverse practicum site at an elementary school. Fifteen preservice teachers completed pre- and posttest measures related to hope, motivation for teaching, and efficacy for teaching. Throughout the semester,…

As new technologies promise to be an enduring feature of the landscape of teachers' work, we consider how teachers implicitly bring stories forward into their classroom explorations with new media as a part of their "informal learning". By "stories" is meant specific classroom texts as well as preferred teacher practices with those texts. The…

An autobiography class at Elizabethtown College (Pennsylvania) used one of its four technique paper assignments to focus on the exploratory essay, since the concept of exploration, simply for the sake of questioning, probing, and testing, has both validity and purpose in a class or assignment focusing on autobiography. First the class brainstormed…

An autobiography by Francis Pendleton Gaines, who served as a college president or university dean for 35 years, is presented. Dr. Gaines came from an academic family: his father was president of Washington and Lee University and his uncle was a Hampden-Sydney College president. The account covers his family background, his boyhood and personal…

This paper outlines a narrative method for the study of teaching which has as its principle feature the reconstruction of classroom meaning in terms of narrative unities in the lives of classroom participants. This purpose is achieved by comparatively outlining similarities and differences with closely associated lines of work. This study of…

"Dust Tracks on a Road," author Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography, is not a typical black autobiography. Hurston is a complex woman and author who addresses both black and white audiences, shifting the cadences of her voice to invoke a readership that can hear the textures of many voices and respond to an underlying call to a world…

Papers are included which focus on humanist geography, specifically the theoretical, methodological, and empirical implications of humanist perspectives for the study of human-environmental relations and the implications of the concern for these relations for humanist theory, method, and questions. Individual foci, defined by each author of the…

This article relates the life experience of William Gould Vinal, one of the last of the "second generation" naturalist-educators in North America. Written by Vinal, the article pinpoints over 50 experiences which relate directly to Vinal's nature recreation/education activities, 1881-1951. (TK)

Autobiographical sketches of four Australians living with physical handicaps are presented in this Australian early childhood resource booklet. Life experiences in school and out are reported by a blind man, a young woman who was brain damaged due to injuries in an automobile accident, a mother of a child with spina bifida, and a Doctor of…