Workshop: Letting Our Bodies Tell the Story: Conducting a Feminist Co/Autoethnography

Workshop: Letting Our Bodies Tell the Story: Conducting a Feminist Co/Autoethnography

Monica Taylor is the Director of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, and doctoral faculty in the Teacher Education and Teacher Development Ph.D. program at Montclair State University holds a workshop on December 7 from 1 - 3 pm in classroom K-205 in Stakkahlíð.

How do you let your body tell the story? What is the value of embodied knowing as we reflect on who we were as learners and who we are now as educators? How do we examine where our teaching beliefs and practices have come from? How do we conduct a co/autoethnography? In this workshop, Monica Taylor will invite participants to explore the use of the body as a means of investigating our lived experiences through co/autoethnography. This version of co/autoethnography has its roots in the self-study methodology that she constructed with Lesley Coia (Taylor & Coia, 2020), but has been reimagined through her collaborative work with Emily Klein, with new nuances and complexities that arose from their feminist friendships. The meaning often resides in the interweaving of their stories and their conversations. For this workshop, Monica Taylor invites you to bring some artifacts from your childhood and adolescence such as photographs, poetry, musical lyrics, fictional books, school assignments or report cards, artwork, or cultural artifacts in order to help the stories in your body be accessed. Her hope is that inviting a variety of ways of knowing will offer you multiple entry points into your own narratives by evoking emotions, embodied memories, and stories. 

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Monica Taylor is the Director of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, and doctoral faculty in the Teacher Education and Teacher Development Ph.D. program at Montclair State University. She writes about feminist pedagogy, self-study, LGBTQ+ inclusive practices, teaching for social justice, and teacher leadership. Her newest book is Our Bodies Tell the Story: Using Feminist Research and Friendship to Reimagine Education and Our Lives. Other edited and written books include: The 2nd International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices; Playhouse: Optimistic Stories of Real Hope for Families with Little Children; A Year in the Life of a Third Space Urban Teacher Residency: Using Inquiry to Reinvent Teacher Education; Gender, Feminism, and Queer Theory in the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices; and Whole Language Teaching, Whole Hearted Practice: Looking Back, Looking Ahead. She is the co-editor of The Educational Forum, and the co–principal investigator of the WIPRO Science Education Fellows grant that supports teacher leaders in five New Jersey districts. Monica also serves on the board of Planned Parenthood of Metro New Jersey and volunteers as an advocate for asylum seekers and voter protection. Her commitments to fighting sexism, heteronormativity and racism manifest in all aspects of her life.