Former student teachers, collaborating teachers, and researchers examined how literacy teacher educators' language is a means of circulating truth claims about reading instruction. Because truth claims can potentially perpetuate instructional inequities, they provide an appropriate context for exploring power relations in literacy teacher…

I present autobiographical writing and photographic imaging, an arts-based research methodology, to understand my personal knowledge as a means to understand my professional knowledge. Using my passions for writing and photography, I explore the conflicts, opportunities, and purposes of using a visual form of arts-based narrative inquiry from a…

This article argues that school administrators can learn about themselves through fictionalizing their real world experience. Examples of this writing form are offered in the text to illustrate the form and possible function of this type of work. The author presents this alternate writing form as a reflective tool that can assist professionals in…

This article describes an autobiographical writing assignment completed by students and faculty that is shared in an off-site retreat. It highlights an approach to learning about human diversity that blends affective and behavioral approaches with more traditional cognitive methods. It supports the interrogation of student and instructor…

This paper presents a narrative that explores the author's own life as a woman from a working class background who is now a professor. After situating her work in the small but growing research field about the intersection of social class and academics, the author presents her autobiography by providing a documentary through the three categories…

This book contains memoirs about growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants in rural California, as well as stories that the author's parents told him about their childhoods and village life in Mexico. In a preface and introductory stories, the immigrant explains how his family culture sustained him during bad experiences in school, and describes…

If educators are to realize the power of the link between cultural studies and composition studies, they must examine the cultural codes that govern their own professional discourse as teachers of writing. They must accept the responsibility for their own acts of literacy in describing pedagogical practices, in reporting their research, and in…

Inspired by a writing group that met regularly in North Carolina, Alice Kaplan of Duke University decided to write a memoir at the age of 38. Practiced in the third-person perspective and schooled in a scholarly writing style, Kaplan found it difficult to write first-person narrative. The transition challenged her: she had not realized what an…

This paper presents a cultural/historical interpretation of "The Education of Little Tree," a children's book by the late Forrest Carter. The 1976 book, which sold over 700,000 copies and was widely used in classrooms to present Native American values and lifestyles, is the story of an orphaned boy named Little Tree, raised by his…

This publication provides autobiographical essays by students originally from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, all of whom arrived in the United States as refugees between 1975 and 1982. Following an introduction is an initial essay, "Becoming a Refugee, Being a Refugee, Ceasing To Be a Refugee," by L. Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem. The student essays are…

This publication contains two types of materials generated by the Second Iowa Adult Literacy Congress. Part I consists of summaries of four sessions during which the 40 delegates discussed and offered suggestions on 4 topics: leadership, changes in relationships, self-esteem, and literacy in the workplace. Part II presents special life stories of…

Teacher knowledge and development from the teacher perspective were studied. Teachers wrote their own stories using collaborative autobiography (writing individual stories in groups). This report documents the evolution of the research methodology in discerning the personal, individual, similar, common, and collective as researchers moved from…

An autobiography course for nontraditional students at community colleges can foster appreciation for cultural diversity and integrate discourses that challenge writing genre hierarchies. Students who signed up for such a course developed processes that worked best for them. Selected as texts for the course were autobiographies that reflected…

A writer and educator with an obsession for writing and a concern with the teaching of writing demonstrates how all writing, in many different ways, is autobiographical and that autobiography grows from a few deep taproots that are set down into the past in childhood. Autobiography (described as the way an individual makes meaning out of his or…

Black autobiography can only be viewed sensibly in the classroom if an attempt is made to come to terms with the social and historical milieu in which the work was produced and with the persona and ethos of the writer. Critical failure to do so puts critic and text at a serious disadvantage because such failure restricts critical vision to the…