A critical feminist teacher inquiry into the use of autobiography in teacher education

This dissertation is a teacher research project into the use of autobiography as a tool to promote reflective practice in teacher education. The overarching question is: how do writing and sharing autobiographies in teacher education courses reinscribe or challenge dominant ideologies? Teacher research, critical action research, and feminist research were the main qualitative research traditions used in designing the inquiry. Within feminist research, the theoretical perspective I draw most heavily from was feminist poststructuralism which names the interpretation of personal experience as a key site of political struggle over meaning.; Writing autobiography has become a popular activity in teacher education over the last decade. This acceptance has been due in part, to the burgeoning movement to legitimize narrative---both epistemologically and methodologically---in educational research. While I support the use of autobiography in teacher education, I argue that used unreflexively, autobiographies can be a norming practice that precludes reflexivity, shutting out perspectives that challenge dominant ideologies and thus thwarting efforts to understand difference and embrace diversity.; The evidence I use to make my argument stems from two interrelated teacher research projects. The first is an empirical teacher research project in which I asked students in my secondary language arts methods course to write and respond to critical literacy autobiographies, texts in which writers considered how race, class and gender affected their language and literacy development. Data collected include the students' autobiographies, the responses they wrote on each other's other biographies, notes from my teaching journal, and interviews with five students on the experience. The second project is a narrative analysis of two incidents of unintentional self-censorship in autobiographical texts. The findings from these two projects indicate that writers negotiated the political climates in which their autobiographies were produced.; If autobiography is to be used in the name of developing reflective practice, I recommend that the following conditions and perspectives be included: stories are juxtaposed and open to inquiry; stories are read and analyzed collectively; the emphasis is on autobiography as process rather than product; alternative discourses are made available to writers; and responding to autobiographies is part of the project.