ABSTRACT
The autobiographical approach has now achieved considerable prominence both pedagogically and in educational research. It has been deployed in both adaptationist and transformative pedagogical practices. It seems to be ideally suited to revealing experience-based learning and in tracking the development of the self as learner. However, it is a deployment with many problematic elements since autobiography as a textual practice of self-representation is actually much more complex in its message and equivocal in its effects than educational discourse takes it to be. Critical questions are raised about education’s modernist assumptions concerning the self, experience and the developmental processwhat I will call the ‘story of the self’. Autobiography is a special kind of representational practice; a representation of the self through inscription, telling the story of the self through a written text and writing a text through a culturally encoded meta-story. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to highlight how a particularly dominant kind of autobiography works through a metaphysics of presence (Derrida, 1976). Here, the autobiographical process is conceived as a recounting of a fixed, unmediated and preserved, summonable past (the past as presence) by a self conceived as an independently existing person giving meaning to its experience, a meaning which is present (the self as presence)—both the past and the self being representable and knowable and communicated directly and transparently. Autobiography is thus conceived as a practice that must assume a centred time and a centred self.
