Lives of the nation: On Teaching Life Writing in the Canadian Studies classroom

In our introduction to Teaching Life Writing (2022), Amanda Spallacci and I noted that the key question in auto/biography pedagogy is how we teach life stories, rather than what we teach (p. 375). Later that year, as I transitioned from teaching English literature to teaching Canadian Studies, I was struck by this very question and its ripple effects. What is the role of life stories in Canadian Studies classrooms? How do I teach life stories within a distinctly national framework? How do I invite students to engage with life stories beyond their perception as historic documents? Encourage them to understand autobiographical practices as modes of knowledge making? And how do I foster a learning space that calls students in? Exploring the public work of life stories in the Canadian Studies classroom, this essay reflects on the ways that I invited students to engage with the tensions embedded in the registers of truth, authenticity, agency, citizenship and relationality in autobiographical discourse, attending to the pedagogical potentialities of life stories as sites of knowledge-production, theory-making and future-building.