Autoethnography: making memory methodology

Abstract

This paper looks at memory, autoethnography and analytic authoethnography as a methodology in the context of narratives of learning, through an outline of a research study into the professional identities of university-based teacher educators in England. The research took an autoethnographic approach in examining the author's own narrative experience alongside those of six other teacher educators. Within educational research, autobiographical, life-history and narrative methodologies have moved from the margins to become established, although not unchallenged. Pioneering studies with teachers in various contexts by, for example, Ball and Goodson (1985), Elbaz (1990), Huberman (1993), and Erben (1998) among others, combine to form a rigorous and widely-respected foundation in demonstrating the valuable insights that are gained into teachers, students, schools and pedagogy through the examination of participants' life-histories. Through her longitudinal study of primary school teachers Nias (1989) demonstrated that practitioners' lives are not easily separated from their craft, making the now well-established arugment that 'the self is a crucial element in the way teachers themselves construct the nature of their job' (Nias, 1989, p.13).