Self‐fashioning through memoir: becoming an adult educator

Abstract

This self‐reflexive personal narrative charts the autoethnographic journey of an adult educator, exploring her own practices, values and beliefs about teaching. Drawing upon postmodern scholarship in reflexive literary methodologies, the author uses personal memoirs as a research text for engaging in a process of interpretation and re‐interpretation, creating new and/or altered readings that may offer the possibility for personal and professional transformation. Six stories—both past and present—are remembered and written into an evocative text designed to created a shared textual space for readers to interpret and explore in the context of their own social and cultural experiences. Its conclusion invites teachers to consider how self‐reflexive writing can result in the production of new or altered narratives that have the potential for engaging both self and others in generative change.

Notes

1. Nancy is a pseudonym for the teaching assistant assigned to this graduate seminar.

2. This discussion on emotion and cognition is very simplistic. I acknowledge that many feminist writers have contesting views of emotion and cognition. Chodorow (1999) as an example within the psychoanalytic tradition, suggests that from ‘earliest infancy, meaning is emotional as well as cognitive … and antedates the acquisition of language’ (p. 76, as cited by Locke, 2002, p. 99) and is highly individualized. Alternatively, Locke (2002) describes emotion as culturally determined and discursively practiced. Lutz (1990) suggests emotions are a result of gendered roles and represent issues of power: ‘any discourse on emotion is also, at least implicitly, a discourse on gender’ (p. 151, as cited in Locke, 2002, p. 103). A fuller discussion of emotion and its links to the personal, cultural or political is beyond the scope of this paper, but certainly worthy of further consideration. For example, see Meagan Boler’s (1999) book Feeling power for a theoretical discussion on the question of emotion, reason and power.

3. This line is paraphrased from T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ as cited in Egan (1998, p. 60).