Contributors to Teaching Lives consider what makes the teaching of life narratives different from teaching other kinds of subjects, and why it has such a critical role to play in contemporary education. It was originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Laurie McNeill is a Senior Instructor of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She is the co-editor (with John Zuern) of Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of Biography; and has published in a/b: AutoBiography Studies, Identity Technologies: Producing Online Selves and Genres in the Internet.

Kate Douglas is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (with Anna Poletti, 2016).

Introduction - Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives 1. Black Women and the Biographical Method: Undergraduate Research and Life Writing 2. Autobiographical Narratives: Pedagogical Practice as a Lifeline for Hospitalized Children 3. Multimodal Autobiographies as Sites of Identity Construction in Second-Language Teacher Education 4. Autobiography in the Language Classroom 5. Embracing the Surface: How to Read a Life Narrative 6. Coming to Life: Teaching Undergraduates to Write Autobiography 7. The Pedagogical Potential of Memoir in an Interdisciplinary Context Forum: Teaching Fails 8. Risky Business: Teaching "Fails" in the Auto/Biography Classroom: An Introduction 9. Teaching Life Writing: Four Ways to Fail 10. Graphic Life Narratives and Teaching the Art of Failure 11. Learning with The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book in a Cultural Studies Course 12. "I Won't Remember-for You": What Life-Writing Criticism and Theory Could Bring to the Autobiographical Writing Classroom 13. Teaching Fail: The Life-Writing Scholar's Cameo Appearance