Chapter 4: Song of Myself: Honoring the Individual as Critical Scholarship

The individual as researcher and as the subject of research as well as the power of personal narrative (including the techniques of personal narrative), memoir, and biography must inform the field of education. To embrace the individual is also an argument against privileging objectivity and the pursuit of objectivity since all human endeavors are necessarily subjective and social. This chapter examines the nature and role of personal narrative and educational biography within the norms of scholarly discourse broadly and critical qualitative research narrowly. The discussion also models the various modes explored in the chapter to highlight that these arguments remain a question of power.