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…

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…

This volume presents 34 autobiographical chapters from past issues of "Annual Reviews." These essays have been written by scientists active in all areas of research. Some examples are the following: "Musings of an Erstwhile Plant Pathologist" by F.C. Bawden, "Some Personal History and Reflections from the Life of a Biochemist" by John T. Edsall,…

The experiences of a cerebral palsied individual in meeting the challenges of education and employment are narrated. Self-acceptance and an ability to understand people are two important factors which were found to assist the handicapped individual to overcome social pressures. (EC)