Kathryn M. Benson, an associate professor at Southern Arkansas University, Magnolia, has received good reviews for a book she has written and published titled “Conversations of Curriculum Reform: Students’ and Teacher’s Voices Interpreted through Autobiographical and Phenomenological Texts.”
“Educational autobiography can be done poorly or well—Kathryn Benson does it very well in this book,” says Joe L. Kincheloe, Canada Research Chair of McGill University. “Using autobiography, hermeneutics, and phenomenology, Benson takes us through a rich, well-informed, and enlightening exploration of her consciousness as a teacher in Louisiana. This is curriculum theorizing at its best and should serve as a model for subsequent work in explorations of the lifeworld of teaching.”
Molly Quinn, associate professor of education at Teacher’s College at Columbia University states that “Benson’s work boldly inquires into the heart of educational life via the voices of those most impacted by it—students and their experiences of curriculum and schooling. This provocative book eloquently illuminates the lives of ‘teachers and students held by threads of desire and distancing’ as together they ‘wander the borders of meaning’ in uncovering and recovering their educational lives through reading and rewriting the texts of their own lives.”
In the book, Benson involves readers in the retelling and recapturing of the school lives of students whose dialogue with their teacher and each other is a transformative and tentative attempt to express and define school experiences complicated by the loss of two classmates. Meeting as adults, the former classmates reconsider their past and reinterpret their work as the author engages in critical discourse on the limitations and complications of dialogical methodology. This book moves toward troubling the familiar notions of the personal and the spaces of autobiography in curriculum research and theory.
Kathryn M. Benson is associate professor of curriculum and instruction at SAU. She received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. Benson is currently the program director of an alternative licensure program.
For more information or to order this book, go to www.peterlang.com or www.amazon.com.
