Autobiography and the necessary incompleteness of teachers’ stories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18593/r.v46i.27182Keywords:
Curriculum, Autobiography, Teacher educationAbstract
This article is an invitation to interrogate my work on autobiography, gender and curriculum. In dialogue with the work of Maxine Greene, especially with “The shapes of childhood recalled”, I revisit my interest in autobiography as both genre and method in educational research. The issues that compel my attention are the poststructural, psychoanalytic, postcolonial and queer theory challenges to the unity and coherence of the intact and fully conscious “self” of Western autobiographical practices and to the limits of its representation. I am arguing that autobiography as one form of educational inquiry be regarded as literature, assuming the potential of imaginative literature to disrupt rather than reinforce static and essentialized versions of our “selves” and our work as educators. This may be, in my opinion, the only reason to use autobiography as a form of educational inquiry.
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