Empowering Students as Researchers: Teaching and Learning Autoethnography and the Value of Self-Narratives

Abstract

Helping students to connect their academic research with their creative writing processes is often a challenge but when achieved, can provide valuable pathways between their personal experiences and the social world under study. The author identifies supporting this connection as a potentially powerful teaching and learning tool, helping undergraduates to make the leap from student to writer and researcher. This chapter will identify possible ways in which the writing and sharing of autobiographical narratives can inform and enhance pedagogy in creative writing workshops with undergraduate students. The author identifies autoethnography as an evolving methodology that values and legitimizes personal stories and evocative academic work, and can facilitate recovery from personal events that have been difficult or traumatic (Richardson and St Pierre 2005). The chapter will explore how the study of self-narrative can empower students to make explicit links between these personal experiences and their academic research. This chapter will be of interest to teachers and students carrying out research in education and to those trying to develop their own teaching practice to incorporate student-focussed approaches to creative writing. The author suggests that an autoethnographic approach can contribute to an increased confidence in students' sense of their place within the discipline of creative writing and the place of their discipline within the wider world.

Collaborative autoethnography: “self-reflection” as a timely alternative research approach during the global pandemic

“…This is primarily significant for early-career academics and postgraduate students who may not have a strong voice in academia. Making explicit links between academic work and our personal experiences of going through the difficulties associated, for example, with the current pandemic can empower us and increase our self-esteem (Moriatry, 2018). Additionally, as a further training opportunity to develop our sociological imagination, CAE is exceptionally beneficial at the early career stage because this methodology "allows us to examine how the private troubles of individuals are connected to public issues and to public responses to these troubles" (Denzin, 2014, pp.…”

Autoethnography as/in Higher Education

“…In my explorations of self-reflexive approaches, I have realized that, although autoethnography developed primarily as a qualitative research methodology (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), it is becoming increasingly evident as an approach to learning and teaching in higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. To illustrate, there are published examples of autoethnography as pedagogy across a range of disciplines and subjects, including anthropology (Reed-Danahay, 2017), communication studies (Berry & Hodges, 2015), creative writing (Moriarty, 2018), international relations (Barr, 2018), performance studies (Alexander, 2016), social science (Furman, 2014), sociology (Cook, 2014), teacher education (Pennington, 2007), and graduate research programs (Pinchon, 2013).…”

“…Unquestionably, inviting the personal and expressive into the higher education classroom does also invite emotional and ethical complexities (Alexander, 2016;Moriarty, 2018). For instance, Barr (2018) reflected, "what concerned me .…”

Storying the self

“…In this way, the process can empower students to develop as thinkers and artists but also as people with a clearer sense of themselves and their academic and creative identity. This method can be useful for how they envisage themselves and their discipline in the world outside the classroom once they graduate (Moriarty 2017).…”

“…We identify this process as having the potential to help students' foster connections between lived experiences, academic study and their social worlds and argue that this align it with an autoethnographic approach. This process has provided the ethos driving the development and subsequent implementation of the module and also reflects our own approaches to research and writing as critical, reflexive practices which often adopts an autoethnographic position (Moriarty 2017(Moriarty , 2016).…”