Shaping the Teaching Self Through Autobiographical Narrative

Abstract

As we study the forms of our own experience, not only are we searching for evidence of the external forces that have diminished us; we are also recovering our own possibilities. We work to remember, imagine, and realize ways of knowing and being that can span the chasm presently separating our public and private worlds. Madeline R. Grumet in Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching The Emergence of Autobiographical Narrative in Teacher Education In the past, autobiographical writing was often used in teacher education courses simply as a way to identify the concerns of pre-service teachers, to bring those concerns forward so that they might better be addressed (Parker and FitzGibbon.) Increasingly, teacher educators have recognized the importance of the individual's lived experience as relevant to the development of what he or she will bring to the classroom. Thus, the life histories of teachers have come to be seen as grounded experience for knowledge of teaching. Teacher educators across the disciplines have called for autobiographical writing as a way for prospective teachers to increase their teaching knowledge base, to make explicit for themselves knowledge about teaching and learning -- as they have experienced it. Rosenthal (1991) asked preservice science teachers to write their science autobiographies, their personal histories of learning science, of connecting with science. Pereira-Mendoza (1988) reported that he assigned a autobiography to his pre-service math teachers. Danielson (1989) asked her pre-service language arts teachers to write a literacy autobiography, to focus on their own learning to read and write, as a means of understanding the nature of language learning. The thinking is that if those who would teach can develop a critical distance from their own lived experiences with the content and skills of their subject, they can, perhaps, better assist their students in the mastery of their discipline. One Teacher Educator's Beginning As a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction at Virginia Tech in the 1980s, I was asked to write about my own high school experience in an assignment that Professor Robert Small called, Remembering High School. What did we notice as my classmates and I shared from those papers in our graduate seminar? Nearly everyone recalled something about a favorite or dreaded teacher's personality; memories of social interactions with friends and extracurricular activities also filled the pages; very little surfaced that was about the school curriculum except, as Dewey would have predicted, the memory of special projects. Even so, the assignment gave us an opportunity to explore our own concepts of high school and, more important, to look at some aspects of how those understandings had been formed. The assignment also situated us in our own perceptions of the sociological and psychological characteristics of adolescence, by putting us back in touch with our own adolescent experiences. Drawing from that experience in my post-graduate course work, I began including autobiographical writing in my courses when I first became a teacher educator in 1988. When I joined the English Education faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1990, I found colleagues who were committed to having students explore their own literacy learning -- to wnte their reading and writing autobiographies. For the past several years, then, autobiographical narrative has been a part of every course I teach in our teacher education programs. Masters students in my English teaching methods seminar write a paper titled Remembering High School. In a course on research in teaching literature and literacy, students do a three part Profile of the Self as Reader project in which they 1) examine closely their own literacy learning, 2) carefully analyze their response as a reader to a full length text, and 3) apply evidence from their personal history as readers to their understandings of their current reading selves. …