Starting with Self: Teaching Autoethnography to Foster Critically Caring Literacies by Patrick Camangian. Research in the Teaching of English. Vol 45, Number 2, November 2010.
This author took many words to say some important things that could have been boiled down to:
1. In many marginalized communities peoples' stories are not recognized or affirmed as legitimate and they are often taught to distrust one another and not value themselves.
2. Because of this, kids bring all sorts of their trauma into the classroom, impacting classroom relationships and their ability to learn.
3. One way to combat this is to have students do an autoethnography. Camangian describes an autoethnography as a self-examination, which "required students to make sense of their own lives by explicitly reflecting on how they were, in part, shaped by the experiences they were examining." (page 184)
I'm on board with the ideas, I just wish the article included some practicalities about how he structured the assignment. What did he do to set the stage for the assignment? How did he get students to be so real at the start of the school year? What did he say the assignment had to include? How did he handle the kids who said, "I don't know what to write about."? This article felt like all theory and analysis, but no actual methodology section.
This author took many words to say some important things that could have been boiled down to:
1. In many marginalized communities peoples' stories are not recognized or affirmed as legitimate and they are often taught to distrust one another and not value themselves.
2. Because of this, kids bring all sorts of their trauma into the classroom, impacting classroom relationships and their ability to learn.
3. One way to combat this is to have students do an autoethnography. Camangian describes an autoethnography as a self-examination, which "required students to make sense of their own lives by explicitly reflecting on how they were, in part, shaped by the experiences they were examining." (page 184)
I'm on board with the ideas, I just wish the article included some practicalities about how he structured the assignment. What did he do to set the stage for the assignment? How did he get students to be so real at the start of the school year? What did he say the assignment had to include? How did he handle the kids who said, "I don't know what to write about."? This article felt like all theory and analysis, but no actual methodology section.