Education Commons^™

Foreign Expert: A Memoir Manuscript, Jenny L. Rowe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a full memoir manuscript that I wrote for my MFA thesis, which is tentatively titled Foreign Expert. In this manuscript, we follow myself as narrator as I struggle to adapt to life in Beijing (prior to the pandemic) while also recovering from a recent divorce. The man I’d been married to for five years back in Iowa had become violently mentally ill, and though I’d been fortunate enough to remove myself from him, I quickly learned that being a foreign expert in China—my residential visa title—required more work than basic survival. By the end of my two years …

Off By Heart Lake, Gayle I. Sacuta

The Goose

Memoir, history and critique of girlhood on a farm on the Alberta prairie in the 1970's and 1980's.

Dreaming My Ancestors: A Poetic Inquiry Into Longing And Legacy, Maya T. E. Borhani

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This poetic inquiry traces certain aspects of my identity as the daughter of an Iranian immigrant growing up in the United States. I use autobiographic life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, Leggo, 2009) to lay out (some of) the bones of a larger personal and family story, followed by a suite of poems addressing some of the mysteries, wonderments, gifts and reckonings that I am left with—and which are inherent to—my misplaced, scattered family history and lineage. Although my father shared little about his life in Iran before coming to the U.S., with the help of other relatives I have gleaned a …

The Subtle Distinctions Of Memoir: Reclassifying Jeannette Wall’S The Glass Castle, Anna Cornelia Salvati

Scripps Senior Theses

In this paper, I will begin by exploring the history of memoir, the rise of the “misery memoir,” and I intend to challenge the generalized use of the term. Though the cultural rise of trauma memoirs is real, the genre cannot be a blanket term for memoirs that discuss trauma. I have selected The Glass Castle as my evidence because although it includes disturbing details, Walls effortfully tries to reorient the reader’s focus. The term misery memoir is inadequate to describe The Glass Castle because it is not about misery. It obscures Walls’s message that in order to achieve self-acceptance …

London Street: A Memoir (Book Review), James C. Schaap

Pro Rege

Reviewed Title: London Street: A Memoir by Jane E. Griffioen . Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2020. 248 pp. ISBN: 9781725267558.

(Trans)Form: Spoken Word As Queer And Transgender Testimony, Kaileigh/Wesley Strobel

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

(Trans)form will explore the importance of spoken word poetry in and for the queer and transgender community. Especially underscoring the significance of public voice in a culture that often wants to conceal or minimize the lived lives of LGTBQIAP+ people. (Trans)form will be a collection of self-authored spoken word poems that are influenced by—and in dialogue with—powerful transgender spoken word authors. The project will open with an essay on the importance of spoken word poetry and voice.

"The Day Of Realization": A Review Essay Of Abbie Gardner's The Spirit Lake Massacre And Captivity Of Abbie Gardner, James C. Schaap

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.

Reflections On The Eating Of Bologna Sandwiches: A Memoir, Benjamin M. Raphael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reflections on the Eating of Bologna Sandwiches is a memoir project intended to give light to my experiences teaching in a small public school located in the South Bronx. These experiences are directed to a general “second” person who takes the form of “you” and is intended to act as a general stand-in for the student population of this school, similar to the “you” used by James Baldwin in his seminal work “My Dungeon Shook”. This “you” is meant to breakdown the wall between the reader and the student population, allowing one to occupy another and in the process develop …

Poetically Composed, Educationally Imposed: Exploring Imagination And Poetics In Curriculum—A Memoir, Whitney J. Presnal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through the use of memoir, my work centers on how poetry is situated within public education curriculum. I explore the curricular context of poetry through the lenses of my lived experiences in early childhood, as a K-12 student, and as an early career classroom teacher. My dissertation draws upon a wide array of literature, honing in on the poetic perspectives of philosophers (Aristotle, 1996; Heidegger, 1947 & 1971/2013; Plato, 1955/2007), poets (Hall, 2003; Eliot, 1920 & 2009), and curriculum theorists (Leggo, 1997 & 2018; Pinar, 1994; Sameshima, 2007). The foundation of my work is drawn from my own circular experiences, …

Introduction To And Bibliography For The Study Of Alimentary Life Writing And Recipe Writing As War Literature, Louise O. Vasvari

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Introduction to and Bibliography for the Study of Alimentary Life Writing and Recipe Writing as War Literature" Louise O. Vasvári defines the concept of "alimentary life writing" and locates it in the broader multidisciplinary context of alimentary history, the history of everyday life, gender studies, trauma, and war and holocaust studies. She also underlines and exemplifies the cultural and gendered significance of alimentary life writing in particular in grounding personal and collective identity formation in the female immigrant and ethnic and multicultural writing. Vasvári also compares and contrasts such life writing to wartime food memoirs, as well …

If You Don’T Want To Talk About Food, Don’T Sit Next To Me, Judith L. Polk

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

If You Don’t Want to Talk About Food, Don’t Sit Next to Me has as its main characters the same qualities taken from the new philosophy of Le Cordon Bleu: “Aspire, Discover, Flourish, Delight, and Thrive,” and the memories made while a full-time student.

Sammye Greer, Sammye Greer

All oral histories

Professor of English Sammye Greer was on faculty at IWU from 1970-1982. On behalf of the newly-formed 2014 Women's Caucus, Greer was asked to provide any recollections she had of the ca. 1970s IWU Women's Caucus, including any records or documentation that might still exist. Her remarks describe the campus climate for female faculty, events of the Caucus in her era, and perspectives on the issues she encountered as department chair.

Dr. Greer received IWU's Teaching Excellence Award and gave an Honors Day Convocation address in May 1978. The text for that address may be found at http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/teaching_excellence/42

Kokkyo Wo Koete Omoi Wo Tsutaeru: Seikatsu Tsudurikatata Kyoiku To Mekishiko Kei Imin No Kodomotachi / Sending A Message Across The Border: Life Experience Writing And Children Of Mexican Immigrants, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

This article focuses on how the principles of Seikatsu Tsuzurikata Kyoiku, Life Experience Writing Education, can assist understanding literacy practices of migrant children in Pennsylvania.

Anay's Will To Learn: A Woman's Education In The Shadow Of The Maquiladora, Elaine Hampton

Elaine Hampton

The opening of free trade agreements in the 1980s caused major economic changes in Mexico and the United States. These economic activities spawned dramatic social changes in Mexican society. One young Mexican woman, Anay Palomeque de Carrillo, rode the tumultuous wave of these economic activities from her rural home in tropical southern Mexico to the factories in the harsh desert lands of Ciudad Juárez during the early years of the city’s notorious violence.

During her years as an education professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, author Elaine Hampton researched Mexican education in border factory (maquiladora) communities. On …

Critical Pedagogy Of A Post-9/11 Muslim Memoir, Esmaeil Zeiny

Esmaeil Zeiny

Traditional education of literature would do injustice to both students and the discipline in this age of globalization. This is the era when teachers should use critical pedagogy to teach any genre of literature. Nowadays, a great number of memoirs form the Middle East perpetuate Islamophobia; yet some of them are taught at schools in the West. Perpetrating and perpetuating Islamophobia, as a trait of globalization, can be seen in some Iranian diasporic writings as well. This paper examines Persepolis: The story of a childhood, a diasporic Iranian memoir that is included in the educational curriculum of some Western schools. …

The Absent Father In Literature, Culture, And Personal Memoir, Abigail Louise Jensky

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Who is the absent father? What happens to a child when the father is absent? What happened to me? This thesis explores my personal experience of having an absent biological father and my attempt to try to understand why my father left my family before I was born. While my biological father was physically absent my entire childhood, there are other children who have fathers who are both physically and emotionally absent for different portions of their lives. We want answers for this abandonment. We want to understand why we feel the way we feel about our fathers. Is it …