The Autoethnography of a Teacher Educator

Abstract

I turn to evocative autoethnographic storytelling as a means to experiment with the text of teacher education and re-imagine my role as a professor of education and early childhood literacy. When I feel that the rigidity of rubrics and standards designed to evaluate my students is creating an uncomfortable distance between us, I invite the formation of a literate thirdspace. My stories convey the feeling of being in-between states of authority and imagination, and question the image of the child’s fragility, including my own. As my students respond with their own memories through discussion, commentary, and writing, my autoethnography emerges as more personal and concrete. The inevitable death of my mother collides in my mind with the university’s literacy curriculum as I am teaching it, and I am forced to revisit the absence of friends, and my mentor to cancer. The denial of death as part of our own, and our children’s experience, is challenged by a child’s words at the end of this paper, where I finally learn to accept loss and the painful act of saying goodbye.