This autoethnographic narrative explores the challenges and successes of employing critical pedagogy in an eighth-grade history classroom. Using the threads of teacher, scholar, and individual, the author shares the intellectual and emotional progression through hope, frustration, humility, and growth that this endeavor demanded. Further, this…

Teacher identity has been recognised as critical to the practice and development of teachers. However, there remains a paucity of scholarship capturing the voice of pre-service teachers' meaning making of their own development as teachers during initial teacher education. This paper sets out to explore seven pre-service teachers' meaning making of…

One of the major goals of the English Language Arts is to teach students to read, understand, and write narratives. This report examines the ways in which the skills that support narrative develop during the school years, outlines a model of narrative as a "key practice" in which the ability to model social situations supports narrative…

Standards-based reforms of education favour narrow forms of teacher professional learning tied to generic standards and pre-determined, measurable outcomes. In high-stakes accountability-driven environments, in schools and initial teacher education programs, educators are rarely encouraged to inquire into their work and professional identities…

In Western cultures, life narratives are typically expected to recount the narrator's life from birth to the present. Disparate autobiographical memories need to be integrated into a more or less coherent story, which is facilitated by an overarching temporal macrostructure. The temporal macrostructure consists of elaborated beginnings that…

In this essay, the author describes how, and why, she tackled a lifetime of questions about her deafness and experiences of being deaf by writing a memoir called The Art of Being Deaf. While researching her memoir, the author discovered that the questions about her deafness that she most needed to answer were her own. Having first read many…

"Researcher / Researched" calls for a complementary research methodology by proposing autoethnography as both a method and text that crosses the boundaries of conventional and alternative methodologies in higher education. Autoethnography rearticulates the researcher / researched positions by blurring the boundary between them. This…

In times of several criticisms of free public schooling and resistance to social and authorial transformation of teacher and teaching education, a dialogical and critical perspective towards teacher education has become of paramount relevance. By looking at student-teacher memoirs of formation, the researchers examine transformative movements of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences of faculty as they engaged in professional development under a Teacher Preparation Initiative (TPI). This initiative engaged faculty in a community of practice that included activities such as aligning curricula, professional development, and examining teaching practices. This study was…

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting's invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the…

In this paper, I argue that memoir, as a form of auto-ethnographic research, is an appropriate method for exploring the complexities and singularities in the practice of western educational practitioners who are immersed in the social reality of offshore higher education institutions, such as those in Mainland China. I illustrate this proposition…

The topic of deafness has been studied in the field of music education; however, this work largely reflects hearing world perspectives. The author of this study, a music educator who identifies as hard-of-hearing, draws upon Deaf cultural discourses as a way of bringing a more nuanced understanding to this topic. The purpose of this study is…

This article explores how three doctoral candidates enrolled in the discipline of Higher Education gained an understanding of social justice, equity-mindedness and diversity in the academy. Prior to the admission of these three students, two faculty members had reformed the doctoral programme to align it with the principles of inclusive pedagogy.…

In responding to Jonathan Silin's article "At a Loss: Scared and Excited", the author takes up his invitation to articulate a relationship between the personal and the professional, and contemplates the autobiographical as more than a mode of recounting one's own experience. In so doing he foregrounds possibilities for working with an…

This article reports on methodological issues in the study of autobiographical narratives about transition to school within a life course approach. The data consist of 89 Australian participants' recollections of starting school between 1928 and 1995. These narratives are considered as life reviews and part of the story of "continuing…