Analytic autoethnography: Centering students’ linguistic and cultural experiences in assessment

Abstract

utoethnography is often used as a field research method and by educators to foster intersectionality in, and critical reflection upon, their own pedagogy. However, autoethnography is not commonly used as an assessment tool. There appears to be no literature on its use in a linguistics course, and this paper aims to address that gap. Analytic autoethnography is a productive assessment method for a linguistics course. The goal of analytic autoethnography is to connect one’s lived experience to theoretical concepts and research. I argue that using analytic autoethnography as an assessment method can help students critically reflect on their own lived linguistic and cultural experiences and to connect these to course content. Importantly, I argue that the assessment is more meaningful and more inclusive than standard exams.  Additionally, analytic autoethnography is well suited to antiracist teaching as it requires students to examine the ways linguistic privilege and discrimination have affected their own lives and their communities of practice, thereby creating a linguistics classroom that is inclusive of all students’ linguistic and cultural identities. As analytic autoethnography is written using the authors’ native dialect(s) and language(s), it mitigates the privileging of Standard English in the classroom and puts into practice linguistic justice.