Autoethnography as a training and self-knowledge strategy with social work students

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the educational use of a qualitative research tool like autoethnographic stories in the process of training and building of self-awareness of future social work professionals. Our framework of analysis will be a teaching experiment of the au-thor in which autoethnography was used as training strategy in the classroom. Analyzing the students' stories will allow us to discover the value of autoethnography as a strategy to raise self-awareness. Also, we show how some especially relevant learning comes out of the encoun-ter of personal reflection and academic training, namely: the knowledge stemming from one's own experience as a user of the health care system; the one from a person's passing through healthcare institutions and the way they are presently organized; the one that emerging from the coming face to face with one's own vulnerability; and the corporealized experience of cer-tain phenomena associated with health/disease/care processes.