Welcome back from a long break from our class. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Rainey’s and Smith’s autoethnographies assigned over the break. We’ll consider these texts as sample autoethnographies and identify conventions of each that will help you move towards your final autoethnographies.

Looking at Models of Autoethnographic Writing

We’ll split into groups and take time to re-familiarize ourselves with Rainey’s “Her Own Voice: Coming Out In Academia with Bipolar Disorder” & Smith’s “Collaging the Classroom, the Personal, and the Critical: Autoethnographic Writing in the National Writing Project.”

Address each bullet point below with specific examples from the text.

• Describe the author’s perspective. What do they focus on? What is the subject of their attention in their essay?
• Describe their literary techniques. What special or unique patterns of writing do you see the author use to demonstrate the purpose of their essay.
• What is the purpose of the essay? What is the author ultimately trying to demonstrate?

What can we transfer into our autoethnographic writing?

For our purposes, I’ve adapted Rebecca L. Jackson & Jackie Grutsch McKinney’s framework for autoethnographies here to identify the following requirements for your final autoethnography this semester:

1. the student-author writes from personal experience within this writing class and is invited to make connections to writing and collaboration experiences in other parts of their lives.
2. the student-author uses data collected from class, which they analyze and integrate into their own writing.
3. the student-author writes in conversation with at least two assigned texts from our class.
4. the student-author writes back to or intervenes in a cultural narrative or conversation.

HOMEWORK

COMPOSE a draft of your autoethnography for workshopping next class! I will adapt the above list of requirements into a rubric that you will use to guide your drafting process.

Work Cited

Jackson, Rebecca L., Jackie Grutsch McKinney, editors. Self+Culture+Writing: Autoethnography for/as Writing Studies. Utah State UP, 2021.