The field of teacher education has long sought to examine the impact of coursework on teacher practice and student learning. Despite the promise of many forms of educational pedagogy and curricula utilized in teacher education programs, many novice teachers continue to feel unprepared and insecure about their teaching. Pre-service teacher…

This article is an auto-ethnography detailing the lived experience of the mainstreaming, Regular Education Initiative, and inclusion movements from the teacher and administrator perspectives. The article illustrates the challenges of integrating students with disabilities in general education and the sociopolitical contexts within which this…

In this study I used autoethnography to analyze fifty years of African-American educational history in Georgia. The impetus for the study was the Atlanta cheating scandal, widely interpreted as a character problem for individual teachers and administrators. As a lifelong resident of Georgia, a student, a public school teacher, and a parent, it…

Many teachers use their own work as the basis for research and this can be a complex and confronting task. It demands merging the roles of teacher, researcher and research participant. These roles may not speak with one voice. Some voices are faint, mere echoes; other voices convey a more confident sense of the different roles. This paper draws on…

Using sociocultural and poststructuralist theoretical lenses, this study examines the narrative construction of language-learner identity across time and space. We applied cross-narrative methodologies to analyze language-learning autobiographies and interview data from three English users who had recently transitioned to a U.S. context for…

In two experiments autobiographical memories from childhood were recalled to cue words naming common objects, locations, activities and emotions. Participants recalled their earliest specific memory associated with each word and dated their age at the time of the remembered event. A striking and specific finding emerged: age of earliest memory was…

Literatures is both a rich resource and a blunt instrument in conveying the complexities of identity, in particular, the elusive "deaf identity". The rarity of the fully realized deaf person in memoir and fiction shapes the way readers regard deaf people and throws up fresh challenges in redesigning stories of deafness free of the taint of…

This article has at its core the unraveling of factors that have influenced the identity of those who have been caught in between two worlds (Mexico and The United States) and whom will be called pre- and in-service returnees from now on. A qualitative approach was chosen in order to delve deep into the participants' lived experiences through…

Preservice teachers' autobiographical stories can serve as a personal, powerful, and poignant curriculum for teacher education. This research examines what and how preservice teachers learned through sharing their own and witnessing others' autobiographical narratives in a literacy methods course. The teacher educator's key role is examined in…

I revisit one of the iconic Chicago School studies, Clifford Shaw's "The Jack-Roller". A naive reading of Shaw's book leaves the reader with a sense of having been inducted into a melange of what we now know as "sociology" and "social work," but which to Shaw seems a coherent stance. I suggest that this is close to the heart of how things were,…

In this article, the author shares reflections on a difficult learning journey. Tianlong Yu first describes the difficulties and resistance students demonstrated in understanding anti-racist education in general. He then shares his attempt to understand such student difficulty and resistance through an analysis of the social and educational…

This interview conducted with Henry Giroux begins by probing Henry's childhood, upbringing and undergraduate years to discover where his sense of social justice took hold. It also questions Henry about his working-class background and the major influences on his thought, including his relationships with Paulo Freire and Howard Zinn. The interview…

In this article we propose a five-step sequenced approach to integrative interdisciplinary learning in undergraduate gateway courses. Drawing from the literature of interdisciplinarity, transformative learning theory, and theories of reflective learning, we utilize a sequence of five steps early in our respective undergraduate gateway courses to…

I focus on three critical autobiographies in the field of composition studies: Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared," Keith Gilyard's "Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence," and Victor Villanueva, Jr.'s "Bootstraps: From an American Academic of…

In this paper I adopt an auto/biographical method and a critique of abstract social theories to explore how the neoliberal restructuring of universities interacts with the gender order. Many universities are being remoulded as businesses for other businesses, with profound effects on internal relations, the subjectivities of academics and…