Everyone has a personal learning story, a time when they became actively engaged in their own education. Maybe it was an especially challenging teacher, or a uniquely supportive environment, or a collaborative classroom. In "Faces of Learning", both well-known public figures, such as Arne Duncan and Al Franken, and ordinary Americans recall the…

Growing up as a young girl, summer camp was a typical affair. Packed lunches kept cold with frozen freezer packs, seemingly endless slip n' slides, activities, games, contests. Every morning, the author was eager to wake up and head off to hours and hours of fun with friends and counselors. However, one may think the camping experience could not…

In writing these reflections, the author is not seeking to apportion blame nor absolution about life choices that less than 1% of the population gets to make and lives to regret. In some ways, this piece is a rearview mirror projection of a life that took a very different turn to that which the author expected when he embarked on a doctoral…

The language of story and poetry, mythopoetic language, is at the heart of our English discipline. It is language designed to enrich our comprehension of our inner lives, a language that helps us to see beyond the literal, beyond the world revealed to us through other disciplines like science and mathematics, history and geography. In this it…

Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman's "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation" is a collection of narratives written by individuals with a wide range of gender identities and expressions from around the world. The text shows how gender-nonconforming people are changing how society looks at gender. As many of the individuals who are challenging gender…

Rousseau's political philosophy presents the great legislator as a civic educator who must over time transform naturally self-loving egoists into citizens animated by a general will without destroying freedom. This is an educational process which is "denaturing" but which aims to produce autonomous adults who can ultimately say to their teacher…

This study presents a novel methodology for the measurement of negativity bias using positive and negative dictionaries of emotion words applied to autobiographical narratives. At odds with the cognitive theory of mood dysregulation, previous text-analytical studies have failed to find significant correlation between emotion dictionaries and…

Written and oral literacy narratives produced by seven fifth-grade students are examined to identify the literacy identities students construct when narrating their past and present experiences with reading and writing. The narrative analyses reveal four major findings: 1. The students who contributed to this study have experienced literacy in…

Researching the learning experiences of postgraduate students requires a different type of qualitative research to enable access to areas of their lives which may well remain hidden with more conventional methods of research. Narrative inquiry as both method and methodology allows such access. In this article, I focus on the use, appropriateness,…

Acceptance of mental illness is essential to promoting recovery and is uniquely impacted by issues of culture, race, and ethnicity. Qualitative case narrative methodology was used to identify themes related to the cultural facilitators and barriers in the acceptance process. Five participant narratives are presented to assist practitioners in…

Use of new technologies in university training is an ongoing reality today. However, the inequalities that exist among university students are the source of an important problem. Such inequalities need to be detected and analyzed and therefore a study of college freshmen can be very valuable. This qualitative study intends to analyze the digital…

This paper explores the phenomenon in which, for many people, subjective personal belief is viewed as a more accurate representation of reality than objective scientific knowledge developed over the course of human history and transmitted through secular education. The first half of the article is based on personal observations of the author…

Molly Poland is a first year English and Home Economics teacher who began her career in a small Far North Queensland town. In this article, she writes about her first year teaching and the last year of her degree and the challenges she faced as both teacher and student. Reading Boomer's "Negotiating the Curriculum" forced her to think a…

The critical incident technique (CIT) is a qualitative research method where subjects are encouraged to tell personal stories that provide descriptive data. Researchers who use the CIT employ a structured methodology to encourage respondents to share their experiences regarding a particular topic. Incidents are considered effective/successful when…

Background: Children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are known to have difficulties in narrative language and especially with use of evaluative enrichment devices. However, little is known about their production of event narratives. Aims: To establish if children with ASD differ from typically developing peers in their production of general…