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 chapter serves as a guide for quantitative researchers who seek to approach their research questions critically.

"Teaching for Joy and Justice" is the much-anticipated sequel to Linda Christensen's bestselling, "Reading, Writing, and Rising Up." Christensen is recognized as one of the country's finest teachers. Her latest book shows why. Through story upon story, Christensen demonstrates how she draws on students' lives and the world to teach poetry, essay,…

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…

The best way to understand and appreciate the forms and structures of autobiography is through the creation of lifewriting stories--memoirs, portraits, reminiscences, anecdotes, family histories, etc., which provide entry points for exploration in life experiences. Lifewriting texts provide the best point of penetration for the developing reader…

An historical survey of the themes, directions, trends, and artistic techniques of black writers in America provides insight into the works of such artists as Phyllis Wheatley, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones. (MF)

The 12 autobiographical selections in this publication were chosen to suggest the range, depth, and variety of personal experiences available through autobiography; to focus the student's attention upon his own personal experiences; and to raise artistic questions about the relationships between "inner" and "outer" experiences. The…

Developed for a high school quinmester unit on comparative biography, this guide provides the teacher with strategies to aid students in examining biography from "Plutarch's Lives" and Cellini's "Autobiography" to Nabokoc's "Speak, Memory." Special emphasis is placed on comparison of biographies of the same person and…