Toward a “Pedagogy of Reinvention”: Memory Work, Collective Biography, Self-Study, and Family

In this article, we illustrate how we have drawn on the methodology of collective biography as a way to inform our teaching practices. Collective biography offers a strategy for retrieving and reworking memories/experiences that can be used to understand subjectivity. In doing so, we utilize this work on our memories, experiences, and subjectivities as we engage in the self-study of education practice. Seeking to incorporate embodied, familial, emotional, temporal, contextual, and cognitive interpretations of past and present, we aim to make our pasts useable for our futures. We discuss the ways in which memory, experience, and reinterpretations of both as interplays among past, present, and context contribute to our reinvention of teaching practices.