The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language

The contemporary ‘boom’ in the publication and consumption of auto/biographical representation has made life narratives a popular and compelling subject for twenty-first century classrooms. The proliferation of forms, media, terminologies, and disciplinary approaches in a range of educational contexts invites discussion of how and why we teach these materials. Drawing on their experiences in disciplines including creative writing, language studies, education, literary studies, linguistics, and psychology, contributors to this volume explore some of the central issues that inspire, enable, and complicate the teaching of life writing subjects and texts, examining the ideologies, issues, methods, and practices that underpin contemporary pedagogies of auto/biography. The collection acknowledges the potential perils that life writing texts and subjects represent for instructors, with a series of short essays by leading auto/biography scholars who reflect on their failed experiences teaching life narratives, and share strategies for negotiating the particular challenges these texts can present. Exploring issues including teaching across genres, analyzing writing about trauma, decolonizing pedagogies, and challenging assumptions (our own, our students’, and our colleagues’), Teaching Lives illuminates what makes the teaching of life narratives different from teaching other kinds of subjects or texts, and why auto/biography has such a critical role to play in contemporary education. This book was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Introduction – Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives 1. Black Women and the Biographical Method: Undergraduate Research and Life Writing 2. Autobiographical Narratives: Pedagogical Practice as a Lifeline for Hospitalized Children 3. Multimodal Autobiographies as Sites of Identity Construction in Second-Language Teacher Education 4. Autobiography in the Language Classroom 5. Embracing the Surface: How to Read a Life Narrative 6. Coming to Life: Teaching Undergraduates to Write Autobiography 7. The Pedagogical Potential of Memoir in an Interdisciplinary Context Forum: Teaching Fails 8. Risky Business: Teaching "Fails" in the Auto/Biography Classroom: An Introduction 9. Teaching Life Writing: Four Ways to Fail 10. Graphic Life Narratives and Teaching the Art of Failure 11. Learning with The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book in a Cultural Studies Course 12. "I Won’t Remember―for You": What Life-Writing Criticism and Theory Could Bring to the Autobiographical Writing Classroom 13. Teaching Fail: The Life-Writing Scholar’s Cameo Appearance