In the introduction of "Performing Live", Richard Shusterman challenges the reader to decide of the book, "Do its diverse texts manifest an individual style, or at least a reasonably consistent one?" In reflecting on this question, Higgins answers, "Yes." For her, the essays in the book, although written over the course of a decade, do exhibit…

Many of us do not realize the prejudices we learn by living our lives. However, through reflection we can understand who we are, why we are that way, and how we can change. As a teacher I naively believed that I had transcended prejudicial thinking and acting. Yet, through much reflection during my doctoral program, I came to understand myself…

Mentoring new faculty into vocations of teaching falls squarely on the shoulders of those entrusted with setting the course for the next generation of faculty. Often the role of new teacher development is assigned to senior faculty. In this essay the author provides an autobiographical account of experiences both as a mentor and as one who had…

A British historian of the American South examines the forces of contingency and the stimulus of teaching that led him to become a historian of the United States and, in particular, the American South. Belonging to a generation of British historians who aimed to make their work indistinguishable from their American counterparts, he has been forced…

This article focuses on a collaborative project between two fifth-grade dual language teachers (English-Spanish) and a university researcher as they engaged children in a study of memoir. The bilingual children in these classes cultivated their genre knowledge by participating in the ways of writers of memoir through the careful adaptations the…

The purposes of this study are to discuss the visionary instructional planning through the social process as school wide faculty collaboration and prepare teachers through their identity connections of graduate reading application. The discussion exemplifies four collaborative instructional teams from Honduras Elementary School, Houma, Louisiana,…

This study examines autobiographies of American teachers of French in order to make explicit their beliefs regarding French language and culture. The themes of class and power are prominent in these teachers' belief systems, as is the desire for self-transformation through mastery of French and miming a subset of French behaviors. These notions…

"Change Matters," written by leading scholars committed to social justice in English education, provides researchers, university instructors, and preservice and inservice teachers with a framework that pivots social justice toward policy. The chapters in this volume detail rationales about generating social justice theory in what Freire calls "the…

A study investigated whether there are common experiences which most people who become writers share. Samples of autobiographical writing assignments completed by about 120 graduate students (over 90% of whom already had some teaching experience) enrolled in masters programs in education and/or English were examined. Most of the narratives were…

A Reading-for-Empowerment project used a critical social science approach. Phase I of the project was an in-depth study of successful lives to discern the critical factors which lead to success. Four graduate counselor trainees at South Carolina State University examined the autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Zora Neal Hurston, John H. Johnson, and…

A teacher uses reflections, analysis, and study of her own teaching and learning across a 23-year period to consider a case of science knowledge development. Because her learning about science has become increasingly influenced by analyses of her own students learning, the teacher's pedagogical autobiography is interwoven with stories of her…

"The Road from Coorain" is the autobiographical story of Jill Ker Conway, the first woman president of Smith College. The story traces Conway's journey from powerlessness to power. Born in the outback of Australia, where all people were powerless in the face of the vacillations of nature, forced off the land into a city life to which she…

The legacy of the New Critics, including its historically male-dominated canon of poets, continues to hold influence, in part because its methods of reading preside over many college classrooms. New Critical readings stress careful explications, based solely on the evidence offered in the lines of the poem. This way of reading encourages careful…

Autobiographical writing can, by its nature as expressive discourse, connect to the residual orality and literacy that students possess before they enter college writing classes, because it crosses more easily between the spoken word and the written word than other forms of writing. Adapting the Ong-Havelock orality-literacy thesis to writing…

Recently some psychologists have shown a renewed interest in the relationship between cognition and emotion and have begun to examine the relationship between the representation and processing of factual and emotional information. To investigate the role of emotional state in personal memory retrieval, a study was undertaken to replicate and…