Abstract 2B

Saturday, July 8 3:20pm

Analytical Autoethnography: Centering Students’ Linguistic & Cultural Experiences in Assessment

Miranda McCarvel mmccarvel@smith.ed
Smith College, Northampton, USA

Autoethnography is often used as a field research method and is also by educators to foster intersectionality in, and critical reflection upon, their own pedagogy (Frank & Uly, 2004; Hernandez & Munz, 2021; McCausland & McDonald, 2020; Pennington, 2007). However, autoethnography is not commonly used as an assessment tool (see Cook (2014) and Barr (2019) on the use of autoethnography as an assessment method in a sociology course and an international relations course respectively). There appears to be no literature on its use in a linguistics course, and this talk aims to address that gap. 

Analytical autoethnography (AAE) is a productive assessment method for a linguistics course. The goal of AAE is to connect one’s lived experience to theoretical concepts and research (Anderson, 2006). I argue that using AAE as an assessment method can help students critically reflect on their own lived linguistic and cultural experiences and connect these to course content. Importantly, I examine how the use of AAE leads to deeper engagement with the material by students and helps meet course learning objectives. Additionally, it is well suited to antiracist teaching as it requires students to examine the ways linguistic privilege and discrimination have affected their own lives and their communities of practice, thereby creating  a linguistics classroom that is inclusive of all students’ linguistic and cultural identities. As AAE is written using the authors’ native dialect(s) and language(s), it mitigates the privileging of Standard English in the classroom and puts into practice linguistic justice. 

This talk gives an overview of the course and assessment design of a lower level, general education language and culture course that utilizes AAE as the major assessment method and discusses how AAE helps meet course learning objectives while furthering principles of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

References

Anderson, L. (2006). Analytic autoethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35(4), 373–95.

Cook, P. S. (2014). ‘To actually be sociological’: Autoethnography as an assessment and learning tool. Journal of Sociology, 50(3), 269-282.

Frank, C. R. & Uly, F. L. (2004). Ethnography for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 55(3), 269-283.

Hernandez, L. H & Munz, S. M. (2021). Autoethnography as assessment: Communication pedagogies as social justice activism. Communication Teacher, 35(3), 229-246.

McCausland, J. D. & McDonald, S. (2020). Understanding self-ethnography as a pedagogical tool to combat whiteness in science education. Proceedings of the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), 2353-2354.

Pennington, J. L. (2007). Silence in the classroom/whispers in the halls: Autoethnography as pedagogy in White pre‐service teacher education. Race Ethnicity & Education, 10(1), 93-113.