Former student teachers, collaborating teachers, and researchers examined how literacy teacher educators' language is a means of circulating truth claims about reading instruction. Because truth claims can potentially perpetuate instructional inequities, they provide an appropriate context for exploring power relations in literacy teacher…

Language arts teachers and library media specialists bear the responsibility of teaching students how to properly feed their brains. In this article, the author describes how she teaches her students to make wise choices when selecting books. Furthermore, she presents the "Brain Food Pyramid" model that looks similar to the food pyramid but it…

Increasing numbers of music education researchers have begun to use qualitative methods to examine research topics using interviews, observations, documents, and archival data. In this article, I review qualitative research methodology and its origins and methods, discuss topics that have been studied by music education researchers using…

I present autobiographical writing and photographic imaging, an arts-based research methodology, to understand my personal knowledge as a means to understand my professional knowledge. Using my passions for writing and photography, I explore the conflicts, opportunities, and purposes of using a visual form of arts-based narrative inquiry from a…

Recent evidence suggests that there have been significant increases in the number of problems reported by students who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. This paper seeks to describe, by means of autobiographical account, the educational implications of being identified as "queer" within schools. It draws on experiential stories to illustrate…

This article argues that school administrators can learn about themselves through fictionalizing their real world experience. Examples of this writing form are offered in the text to illustrate the form and possible function of this type of work. The author presents this alternate writing form as a reflective tool that can assist professionals in…

This article describes an autobiographical writing assignment completed by students and faculty that is shared in an off-site retreat. It highlights an approach to learning about human diversity that blends affective and behavioral approaches with more traditional cognitive methods. It supports the interrogation of student and instructor…

This paper presents a narrative that explores the author's own life as a woman from a working class background who is now a professor. After situating her work in the small but growing research field about the intersection of social class and academics, the author presents her autobiography by providing a documentary through the three categories…

This study investigated cultural differences in autobiographical memory of trauma. Australian and Asian international students provided self-defining memories, narratives of everyday and trauma memories and self-reports assessing adjustment to the trauma. No cultural distinction was found in how Australian or Asian subjects remembered a personal…

This book contains memoirs about growing up as the son of Mexican immigrants in rural California, as well as stories that the author's parents told him about their childhoods and village life in Mexico. In a preface and introductory stories, the immigrant explains how his family culture sustained him during bad experiences in school, and describes…

If educators are to realize the power of the link between cultural studies and composition studies, they must examine the cultural codes that govern their own professional discourse as teachers of writing. They must accept the responsibility for their own acts of literacy in describing pedagogical practices, in reporting their research, and in…

Inspired by a writing group that met regularly in North Carolina, Alice Kaplan of Duke University decided to write a memoir at the age of 38. Practiced in the third-person perspective and schooled in a scholarly writing style, Kaplan found it difficult to write first-person narrative. The transition challenged her: she had not realized what an…

This paper presents a cultural/historical interpretation of "The Education of Little Tree," a children's book by the late Forrest Carter. The 1976 book, which sold over 700,000 copies and was widely used in classrooms to present Native American values and lifestyles, is the story of an orphaned boy named Little Tree, raised by his…

This publication provides autobiographical essays by students originally from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, all of whom arrived in the United States as refugees between 1975 and 1982. Following an introduction is an initial essay, "Becoming a Refugee, Being a Refugee, Ceasing To Be a Refugee," by L. Nguyen-Hong-Nhiem. The student essays are…

This publication contains two types of materials generated by the Second Iowa Adult Literacy Congress. Part I consists of summaries of four sessions during which the 40 delegates discussed and offered suggestions on 4 topics: leadership, changes in relationships, self-esteem, and literacy in the workplace. Part II presents special life stories of…