Auto/ethno/graphies as Teaching Lives: An Aesthetics of Difference

Abstract

In the midst of the everyday of academia, two teaching lives collide in an office doorway, tentatively exchanging stories of students' language "art"-each sparked by the other's interest in the aesthetic of pedagogy. These intersectings of "knowing and not knowing" conspire in our lives to begin a daunting journey of evoking in teachers-to-be aesthetic possibilities in the teaching of language arts. We share the personal scriptings and scripts of our teaching lives, exposing both the vulnerabilities and the possibilities of the arts for our selves and our students in the pre-service language arts classroom. We draw from qualitative methodologies that work with biography, autobiography, and ethnography settling with "auto/ethno/graphy" to unsettle the scripts of hegemonic discourse. Clear your desk. Dip your brush...About the AuthorsCynthia M. Morawski is an associate professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include literacy and integrated arts, learning differences, and bibliotherapy. She is particularly interested in the intrapersonal dimensions of learning and employs multiple expressions and representations in teaching and research. Correspondence to C. Morawski, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5. E-mail: morawski@uottawa.ca Pat Palulis is an assistant professor of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research interests include curriculum theorizing in language, literacy, culture, and spatiality; post-structural and post-colonial discourses; intertextuality; performative auto/ethno/graphy related to teaching lives and praxis. Correspondence to P. Palulis, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5. E-mail: ppalulis@uottawa.ca