The accounts of several autobiographers concerning the graduate student experience reveal how students find meaning in their academic apprenticeships. Academic autobiographers, now speaking as teachers themselves. focus on what was given to them by their teachers when they were students. (MSE)

Situates the origins of self-study in four developments within education, highlighting autobiography and correspondence (email, letters, and recorded conversations) because of the demands they present for producers and consumers. Provides a framework for determining what makes a piece of self-study writing research, using the work of C. Wright…

Drawing on the age-old adage "write what you know," teachers all over the country have embraced the memoir as an integral part of the language-arts curriculum. Before constructing their own personal narratives, students are immersed in the genre, listening to and reading a wide variety of samples front children's literature. As they read,…

This article discusses the relation between narrating a story and experiencing a learning process--for both the research subjects and the researcher--as an inherent feature of narrative biographical research. It is argued that in order to do justice to the particularity, the interpretation and the agency of the research subjects and thus to the…

Over the last 25 years, autobiography has gained increasing epistemological and methodological popularity and legitimacy in teacher education. Although this trend has opened up valuable new lines of inquiry, it has not been unproblematic. We have moved beyond the romantic, uncritical celebration of stories to the recognition of autobiographies as…

This article describes the history and events behind the development and progress of the San Francisco Digital Center--now known as the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS). First-hand accounts and reactions from local educators and the director of technology for the county that houses CDS are provided. The article also demonstrates how digital…

Gill Hatch was a very fine mathematician. Indeed, following her undergraduate studies in Cambridge in the late 1950s, she was one of the elite who went on to the notoriously difficult Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. In this article, the author describes the autobiographical accounts of Hatch during her teaching career in teacher education, as…

This article is both a sequel and a companion to the account by Gill Hatch, published in "MT196," of her experience in her first teaching post--as a College of Education Assistant Lecturer. A chance remark by Gill in 2001 made the author aware that their careers as mathematics teachers had begun in similar environments. They set about compiling a…

The genocide of American Indians over the last five centuries is documented by the persecutors in myriad historical media: diaries, audiotapes, autobiographies, photographs, books, essays, and newspaper accounts. Many authors believe that their stories convey an objective reality but scholarship has illustrated that writers construct history more…

There has been a strong faith in the power of education to create and maintain many kinds of progress in society: social cohesion and order, economic growth, equality, justice, etc. The history of education is in many ways involved in the history of religion and churches. Along with the rise of the lifelong learning policy, adult education has…

This article argues for a decolonizing multicultural education pedagogy, which engages the interstices in-between, hybrid spaces that emerge at the intersections of different cultures, histories, and locations. It also examines how those who work for social transformation are implicated in the very systems and structures they are attempting to…

There is a wealth of autobiographical material produced by people who describe themselves as experiencing autistic spectrum disorders. Increasingly, these writers and academics are suggesting that professionals should be using this material to help develop understanding. This paper describes a small scale, qualitative research project that…

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…