Autobiography is now debated as ultimately problematic, a charge that may impede the growth of a growing cultural pedagogy. As a tool in the classroom, it is under siege for many reasons: because it does not teach "real-world" skills; because in asking students to deal with painful memories, it may impede intellectual and emotional growth; and…

These memoirs of Gordon Selman, a nationally and internationally recognized practitioner and scholar in Canadian adult education, give insight into his thoughts and feelings during a 40-year professional life in university extension work and historical scholarship in adult education. Chapter 1 describes his activities before he entered the field…

"Twelve Years a Slave" is a script intended to go with accompanying audio cassettes. It was developed for Voices of Liberty (a project of New Faces of Liberty) and was produced by the San Francisco Study Center as one of their "Cutting Edge Curriculum Materials." The story told by the script is excerpted from the 1989 edition…

Through the narratives of North American slaves a vivid picture of their lives, struggles, hopes, and aspirations emerges. The slave narrative arose as a response to, and a refutation of, claims that blacks could not write. Slave writings were often direct extensions of speech. Through a process of imitation and repetition, the black slave's…

For a composition teacher--comparing a passage from his Caucasian grandmother's (May Blossom Gould's) diary with the autobiographical narrative dictated by an African-American student's great-great grandmother (Violet McNeil) to a literate member of her family--racial politics and the privileges afforded by literacy irrevocably separate the two…

How can classrooms and the educational system be made more productive, humane, enabling, and equitable for all students, particularly through writings studied and produced? The values of inclusive feminist pedagogy can lead to answers. Women emerge from high school with higher grade point averages but lower self-esteem than men. Female and male…

Thoughts on retirement after 46 years teaching English. (JH)

An individual folk anthology unit covering eight topics is described in this paper. The eight topics include (1) I have an identity, (2) my interesting name, (3) mandalas and sentences, (4) rhythms and rhymes of old times, (5) myths of my childhood, (6) folk legends/old and new, (7) aspects of folklore, and (8) slang. The activities accompanying…

This paper presents a rationale for using a biographical approach in understanding how teachers think and act and how they have come to think and act in the way they do. This approach is seen as being able to provide a fundamental understanding of the teacher's perspective. Understanding how teachers individually and collectively think, act,…

Anzia Yezierska and Agnes Smedley grew up in the United States in poverty-stricken, working-class families. Both women became famous authors and participants in social movements of the early decades of the 20th century. Yezierska's "Bread Givers" and Smedley's "Daughter of Earth", published in the 1920s, were fictionalized…

The concepts of distance, modalization, comprehensibility, and tension, as used for discourse analysis, can be applied to the analysis of speech events in literary texts. Such a linguistic approach may lead to new insights for the psychological description of authors and/or literary characters. Available from Dept. of English, University of…

This book is both a personal memoir of the author and a history of adult education in Western Canada during the first half of the twentieth century. The memoirs cover Robert England's three years as a teacher of Slawa Rural School (1920-23) in northern Saskatchewan; his cooperation with the Masonic Memorial Scholarship Scheme for fifty teachers in…

This study was designed to determine whether the divergent career directions of a sample of woman educators might have been predicted from personality-related data taken from autobiographical essays written when these educators applied for teacher training 20 years ago. Data were analyzed for 77 educators who entered the same graduate…

Several people have tried, unsuccessfully, to learn the facts about J. D. Salinger's life. The little information available from secondary sources about Salinger indicates that "The Catcher in the Rye" has autobiographical elements. Salinger's life parallels Holden's fictional adventures in that Salinger (1) was born and reared through…