“Feeling bad” and “refusing reading”: Teachable moments in the life narrative classroom

In Life Narrative studies, the apology has been theorised as a mode of writing broadly concerned with instances of failure, denial, erasure and contestation. In our life narrative classrooms, notions of apology or anti-apology have also played a role in how non-Indigenous students encounter and witness life narrative texts by First Nations writers. This paper aims to explore our experiences teaching First Nations life narrative as non-Indigenous teachers who want to engage students in questions of knowledge, history, memory and truth that are especially relevant to reading and responding to the first-person voices of Indigenous people in Australia. Through Life Narrative studies, we argue, students can understand colonial structures of violence and domination in the context of lived experience, examine the writer’s strategies for communicating or refusing to communicate that experience, and connect the personal or auto/biographical voice to larger logics of inequality, power and reparation.