Explores the teaching of narrative gerontology, based on aging as telling and retelling of life experience. Considers narrative as root metaphor and gives reasons for teaching story: it honors aging's aesthetic nature, confirms common-sense awareness, acknowledges the temporal dimension, and appreciates the social construction of life. (Contains…

Suggests how autobiography defines itself as a system of voices, with the author in a dialogic relationship with the elusive nature of language. Argues that autobiography is a sophisticated form of composing, appropriate for the advanced composition class. Suggests that autobiography can create a memorable educational experience. (RS)

As a means of facilitating adult development, autobiography is based on (1) memory--an element in the construction of meaning in experience--and (2) imagination--the expression of what people believe themselves to have been and to be. Through autobiography, the self is something to be imagined and constructed. (SK)

Explores the ontological status of autobiography as a literary genre. Defines the limits of what can be considered autobiography. Explores the ways in which autobiographies deal with history and consciousness, and addresses the relationship between autobiography and biography, fiction, and psychoanalysis. (DMM)

Reflects on the connections between narrative and lived experience, focusing particularly on a set of three dyads that suggest a relationship of tension: (1) storing life/storying life; (2) truth/fiction; and (3) collection/selection. (TB)

British historian Max Beloff's "An Historian in the 20th Century: Chapters in Intellectual Autobiography" is discussed and his many interests examined, including his scholarly preoccupation with Great Britain, Russia, and the United States; his approach to the study of history; and his establishment of a university in Britain, funded…

Narrates the experiences that the author encountered growing up in his native South Africa. Maintains the omnipresence of poetry and the need to educate the imagination to see and hear poetry everywhere. Considers ways of salvaging the imagination. (HB)

Contends that Zora Neale Hurston's 1943 autobiography contains two distinct lines of discourse: the surface narrative aimed at the White reader, and a second discourse for the Black reader, often conveyed by suggestion. Careful reexamination of this work is recommended. (DM)

Used guided autobiography to foster reconstruction of past life experiences among 12 older adults in Barcelona, Spain. Found a significant and gradual change in the construing system of those participants in autobiographical group as compared to control group of 10 older adults. Distance of elements self-ideal/self and self-ideal/others…

Argues that, as an elusive genre that defies marked definitions, autobiography offers literature and composition teachers various routes and roots for promoting multiculturalism in the classroom. (SR)

Six ideas for writing autobiographies with elementary school students include: model the writing process to get students started; read examples of autobiographies; brainstorm writing ideas; free-write the first draft; edit and revise; and publish the stories. Suggestions for mini-lessons are included. A student reproducible offers an editing…

The Kiss, is described as a controversial memoir about father-daughter incest that disturbed the cultural silence in a "well heeled" home. The emotional and psychological terrain of the daughter's experience is discussed.

Era Bell Thompson's "American Daughter", published in 1946 by the University of Chicago Press, is an autobiographical account of an African American woman who comes of age on the plains of North Dakota in the early twentieth century. It deserves to read and included in Great Plains studies because it recounts one of the rarest of…

Within teacher education the position of educational foundations courses is increasingly precarious. Such courses are often declared irrelevant by students who embrace the aims of training and immediate practicality over education as the essence of learning to teach. Drawing on student and instructor diaries and diary summaries, the article…

Two studies examined age differences in autobiographical reasoning within narratives about personal experiences. In Study 1 (n = 63), people completed brief interviews about turning points and crises in their lives. Older participants were more likely to narrate crises in ways that connected the experience to the speaker's sense of self, that is,…