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Vermilya, Shelley

College of Education and Social Services

2006

Ed. D.

Integrating an understanding of the impact of social and political events and systems on our lives comprises one of the fundamental narratives of our life stories. A conscious, intentional discourse around the writing of one's life is crucial to teachers and learners engaged in liberated and passionate pedagogy -- for this work may save, declare, and transform lives. As teachers working with this methodology, we need to know how to locate our students and ourselves in the context of sociopolitical events and systems, and be willing to modify our ideas about power in our relationships with students working in memoir. I contend that recognizing a student's positionality in relationship to identity development and critical theories will guide teachers' interaction with and assessment of students' work. Education involves moral and political development, which leads the student to furfher understanding of personal identity. The use of memoir as a methodology with conscious pedagogical intention offers the student a powerful experience of the intersection of these three developmental dynamics. The work can disrupt power dynamics and systems of oppression, individually and institutionally, and places a value on individual experience. In this pedagogical context students come to understand that their lives contain knowledge, even create knowledge. The purpose of memoir as a scholarly endeavor then, is to teach students to mine their experiences for new knowledge. This dissertation bridges inter-disciplinary divides to bring teachers into a clear understanding of how to engage students in this work. In the interest of advancing the promise of radical democratic justice, cultural criticism, and a politics of hope, this dissertation instructs teachers in the practice of encouraging self-referential writing that repositions both writer and reader--in this case teacher-- entirely. In this repositioning lies the potential for new knowledge, thus the claim of the memoir as a research methodology is supported here.