Writing an Educational Autobiography as a Way to Become a Reflective Teacher

This dissertation presents my educational autobiography, the result of my reflection on experiences during my school life, my teaching life, and my life as a mother to reveal who I am personally and professionally in my journey to become a reflective teacher, a teacher who takes her students’ wellbeing into her mind in the everyday life of classrooms and schools. In order to write my stories, I searched incidences that related to my experiences with learning and teaching and making sense of them. Through the process of framing and reframing my experiences, I gained a better understanding of my journey as an educator and became capable of articulating my experiences along this journey. My broad goal in this thesis is to improve the quality of teacher education at Universitas Terbuka (UT) through broadening the notion of reflection in its curriculum. As writing autobiography is one of the pathways to becoming a reflective teacher, I would like to experience the process of writing autobiography before I introduce the idea to student teachers. I would like to experience the dark, the disoriented, the dreadful feeling and the brightness of writing autobiography narratively. Writing my autobiography not only helped me to excavate my old lives and make meaning out of them, revealing my self, but also to realise the importance of learning from my experience. Professionally, writing my autobiography helped to overcome my fear of writing. The process of making meaning of incidents was strengthened by my understanding of concepts and theories that could be used to illuminate them. I gained new knowledge because writing my autobiography encouraged me to search for related literatures that helped me understand my experiences. From my experience of writing my autobiography and synthesizing theories and practices of reflection in teacher education, I propose ideas to improve UT’s teacher education by strengthening the notion of reflection in its curriculum.