Pedagogies of self: conscientising the personal to the social

Abstract

This paper considers the catalytic potential for autoethnography, one of the “new ethnographies” (Goodall, 2000), to provoke emancipatory consciousness raising activity. Autoethnography opens possibilities for the development of a critical reflexivity wherein senses of Self and agency might come to be understood in terms of the social processes that mediate lived experience and the material realities of individuals. It is on this basis that autoethnography offers opportunity for the enactment of a genuinely critical pedagogy. By means of exploring the Self as a social construct, possibilities for exposing the mediating role that social structures play in the construction of identities become apparent and open to deep critique and change.