Living Reflexively, Writing Autoethnographically

The postmodern researchers in education have voiced concern in individual's experiences and growth in certain educational contexts. The relevant researches are mostly done with qualitative methodologies. Autoethnography, one of those, takes the researcher him/herself as the subject and participant through narrating about one's own life experiences in an autobiographic way, so as to probe into the self deeply, with the factors such as history, society and other people which all shape it, in that way, the researcher has to reflect and interpret to let more topics emerge and invite more meanings to come.Autoethongraphy centers the researcher in first voice throughout the whole research process, so it is not only a method as in qualitative research, but also the true research process itself as a writing genre and the final written or presented texts with research results. As the autobiographic paradigm shift in postmodern educational research, autoethonography holds its merit and charm as being authentic, reflexive and transformative.This research is a revisiting to my lived experiences as an English learner and teacher and a graduate student through autoethonographic inquiry and analysis, accompanied with photographic (visual) inquiry and artifacts served as various, authentic data. I try to write chronologically my own experiences in a very reflective, creative and experimental hyper-text way. Via the techniques such as memory, random access and monologue, I attempted to dialogue with myself, to resonate with my diversified potential readers, and thus to reconstruct myself.The research tries to present and answer how autoethnography was used to let self be open in the text and grow in reflections as the narratives show the self-construction and knowledge production through life experience. I take myself as the subject as well as the object, revealing the encounters, experiences so as to allow more topics to emerge in the process of reflection. I narrated and re-narrated to relive, I constructed and deconstructed to reconstruct. I showed my world from private, personal to public and social; I offered metaphors in learning and teaching as lived experiences; And I discussed my schooling and the possibility of transformation.The implication of such self-study lies in the divergent way of thinking and researching in an experimental way, to call for more individual voices in the various contexts of education. By reflecting on an individual's experience and connecting with the broad social, political and cultural realities, one can grow and transform.