Drawing from your reading this unit, discuss why it is important that we are conscious of how our lived experiences are operating in our teaching and learning roles. Please use poetry or images if it is helpful to you.

My teaching experience may have started like many others, but it came with little to no formal training or instruction with a “just wing it” direction. I was 19 years old, and part of my duties was to give school talks in the local k-12 community. This duty was assigned to all the junior police officers. What do I talk about while standing in front of a class while wearing the uniform of a mounted policeman? Who cares? Every class I attended was pretty much a here I am and do you have any questions? Voila! A perfect combination.

            Fast forward 45 years – how did that happen? What has changed and allowed me to reflect on why we must be conscious of how our lived experiences are operating in our teaching and learning roles. Perhaps I could do qualitative research using autoethnography as a platform—a little self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experiences. I could connect it to a broader social meaning and understanding of my learning and teaching experiences. Besides, autoethnography is a form of research involving self-observation and reflexive investigation. I like this method of research into myself because it as Ellingson & Ellis (2008) points out, “the meanings and applications of autoethnography have evolved in a manner that makes precise definition difficult” (p. 449).

            One of the principal concepts of reflexivity is a requirement to learn about ourselves. This centrality of self-awareness reflects on Palmer’s (1998) insistence that we teach who we are. I educate like I manage a business using values, skills, and techniques that work for me at work and in school. When I educate, that is who I am. When I meet my learners out of the classroom, they laugh because I talk and act the same way out of class as I do in class. Not taking life too seriously, focused, and having fun. I love to tell a good “war story” in the classroom, where the meaning is found in retrospective reflection through remembrance and narration. My learners remember the stories because I make sense of the experiences in the process of storying them. With a reflexive process, the experiences for me and my learners mean something special.

References

Ellingson, Laura. L., & Ellis, Carolyn. (2008). Autoethnography as a constructionist project. In J. A.         Holstein & J. F. Gubrium (Eds.), Handbook of Constructionist Research (pp. 445-466). Guilford            Press.

Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach. Jossey