Lives Stories Don’t Tell: Exploring the Untold in Autobiographies

Over the last 25 years, autobiography has gained increasing epistemological and methodological popularity and legitimacy in teacher education. Although this trend has opened up valuable new lines of inquiry, it has not been unproblematic. We have moved beyond the romantic, uncritical celebration of stories to the recognition of autobiographies as complex political texts that, when not open to inquiry and contextual analysis, can reinforce oppressive dominant ideologies. The teacher essay presented here, drawing on the growing field of self-study in teacher education, examines the role of particular social and political contexts in the production of autobiographies but also challenges teachers and teacher-educators to reflect on their roles in creating the contexts that affect autobiographical texts. The heart of the article is a narrative analysis of two specific incidents of self-censorship that occurred in teacher-education classrooms located in communities with undercurrents of anti-Semitism and homophobia. In exploring these instances of censorship, I question how censoring my sexual identity in an autobiography shared with my methods students may have been linked to one of my students censoring her Jewish identity in her autobiography. I argue that we can use our own experiences of self-censorship to question the kinds of pedagogical spaces we help create and sustain, an important issue in understanding how difference is denied or acknowledged in classroom spaces. Recommendations include: analyzing and critiquing the sociopolitical contexts in which classrooms are embedded (e.g., school and community); broadening the autobiographical frame to include more listening and attending to what students share outside of written texts; and recognizing silence not as a deficit of language but as a “counterlanguage” (Lewis, 1993) and as a “strategic suspension” (Hurtado, 1996) that can lead to political action.