Starting with Self: Teaching Autoethnography to Foster Critically Caring Literacies

By P. Camangian. Research in the Teaching of English, 2010

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article illustrates the application of critical literacy (Freire & Macedo, 1987; Gutierrez, 2008; Morrell, 2007) pedagogies that draw from young people’s funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to actively nurture personally, authentically, and culturally caring relationships (Howard, 2002; Noddings, 1992; Valenzuela, 1999) that reflect a concern for students’ lives. Specifically, it discusses the impact of students performing autoethnographies (Alexander, 2005; Carey-Webb, 2001) “cultural narratives that build toward critical social analysis” as a means toward increasing critical self-reflection and building compassionaterelationships between youth of color with fractured collective identities. Such approaches, as I argue, can tap into youth confusion and anger in order to engage them as critical readers, writers, and oral communicators. The findings suggest that autoethnographies increased students’ knowledge of self and, upon recognizing one another’s all-too-familiar struggles, the classroom climate became more conducive to constructing a critical common identity among youth of color. In this way, the article has implications for building classroom relationships that make for more effective pedagogies engaging dispossessed, working-class children of color with culturally relevant critical literacy teaching practices.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/63287ee3456ccf5609e0ec1ec6ca3cbffe71261f

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Citations in the corpus

Translanguaging, Coloniality, and English Classrooms: An Exploration of Two Bicoastal Urban Classrooms (2017, methodology): “Within oppressed communities of color, autoethnographic writing has been a tool for decolonial thought and praxis (Aldama & Quiñonez, 2002) and a powerful mechanism for youth of color to write against the forms of coloniality that manifest in their everyday lives (Camangian, 2010).”
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 20 Years Later: Progress or Pontificating? What Have We Learned, and Where Do We Go? (2017, methodology): “Camangian (2010) used auto-ethnography as an approach to foster critically caring and authentic relationships with high school students in an English classroom in Los Angeles.”
Social and emotional learning is hegemonic miseducation: students deserve humanization instead (2021, background): “Instead, they often fight each other; ignore each other; disrespect each other; and distrust one another (see Camangian 2010, 2015).”