Possible Selves: Restor(y)ing Wholeness Through Autobiographical Writing

Abstract

Education is a human endeavor, yet its research often prioritizes empirical knowledge while marginalizing human aspects of the educative experience. Creating space for self has the capacity to foster wholeness where there is disconnectedness and, therein, challenge academic conventions that prioritize dehumanization. Situated within post-qualitative inquiry and drawing on autobiography, I invite students to explore with me premises gleaned from Palmer’s work on identity and integrity. While we explicitly seek to explore how including autobiographical tenets can overcome practices that limit integrated ways of knowing, we also implicitly seek to legitimate the element of selfhood in our education contexts.

Rehumanizing Education: Teaching and Learning as Co-Constructed Reflexive Praxis

“…Engaging poetically in the context of academic study is also engaging autobiographically, a channel through which Maxine Greene (1995) says we can achieve "freedom in an expanded sphere" and "act…to transform…what alienates people from themselves" (p. 27). But such expanded spheres require courage to navigate the inevitable vulnerability (Lyle, 2018;Lessard et al, 2018;Snowber & Wiebe, 2009). Acknowledging that, "poetry reaches out to and from the human heart, embodying through artistic form what it means to be alive," we must be prepared for inquiry that "pulls us out in brave ways" (Finn, 2015, p. 5).…”

“…As educators, we are not solely responsible for creating a safe space for our learners; we are also responsible for creating a safe space for ourselves. Embracing humanity within a learning space invites dialogue and extends an opportunity for individuals to speak a new language of creativity and knowing beyond a world of objectivity (Bochner, 1997;Lyle, 2018). Our experiences provide a window of opportunity to become re/acquainted with the new and changing seasons of our lives.…”

“…The ability not only to cultivate new perspectives, but also to act upon new-found insights, is a necessary constituent of transformative learning among current and prospective educators (Liu, 2015). Embracing the fragmented pieces or broken paradoxes that have framed our perceptions of self and others, fosters creative space for existing narratives to become dismantled or rewritten (Lyle, 2018).…”

Aprendizagens do “tornar-se”, das experiências formadoras e da visibilidade: aproximações entre autobiografias e educação

“…The dictionaries of and Moisés ( 2013) did not take into account, or did not deepen, the rich historical-conceptual and epistemological discussion, which arose, directly or indirectly, since the work of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), passing through Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005 and Jerome Bruner (1915Bruner ( -2016, as well as in more specific works (BRUNER, 2014;DILTHEY, 2010;DOSSE, 2015;GUSDORF, 1991;LEJEUNE, 2014;LYLE, 2018). Some general considerations are necessary, in view of the construction of the perspective we have adopted, anchored in (auto)biographical research, which highlights the educational issue.…”

Episodic Return Decomposition by Difference of Implicitly Assigned Sub-trajectory Reward

“…The trouble with the delayed reward function is that it affects RL's sample efficiency when using it to estimate the value function. Specifically, delayed rewards introduce numerous noneffective updates and fitting capacity loss (Lyle, Rowland, and Dabney 2022) into Temporal-Difference (TD) Learning and result in a high variance in Monte-Carlo (MC) Learning (Arjona-Medina et al 2019). The problem is more severe in the highly delayed case that the feedback appears only at the end of the episode.…”