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LUCY TOWNSEND & GABY WEINER. Deconstructing and reconstructing lives: Auto / biography in educational settings. London, ON: Althouse Press. (2011). 384 pp. Paper $42.95 (ISBN: 978-0-920354-69-8).
Divided into four sections, Deconstructing and Reconstructing Lives introduces auto/biography as an important educational research method that can be used to illuminate educational issues through the personal. In the first chapter of the opening section, Weiner, the author of the section, stresses that biography is a useful research method in part because it can highlight individuals as "active in negotiating their identities within social and cultural norms and expectations" (p. 6). From a theoretical standpoint, she emphasizes three characteristics of auto/biography: "bridging the relationship between the individual and society, interactivity between subjective experience and historical setting, and active agency of the individual player" (p. 7). Anchored in this discussion, in the second chapter, Weiner points to key areas that need to be addressed in the analysis of auto/biography, such as the politics of identity, the politics of truth, the roles of narrative, and ethics.
The second and third sections are built on this framework. In the second section, Townsend and Weiner provide insights into various ways that auto/ biography can be used for educational research and include concrete examples of how to put auto/biography into practice. Amongst the different forms of biography discussed are...