How did you become you?
Your story began before you were born.
Family. Place. Language. Culture. Opportunity. Loss. Work. Faith. People who taught you. Decisions you made. Decisions others made for you.
Autoethnography helps you examine your life in context, so you can understand what shaped you and decide what you want to build from it.
Answer the twelve questionsTwenty minutes for a first pass. Nothing to sign up for; nothing you write is kept here.
An autobiography says, “Here is my story.”
An autoethnography asks, “What shaped my story, and what does it help me understand?”
My Autoethnography goes one step further: “Knowing that, what will I do, create, and leave behind?”
The difference, in one table
| Autobiography | Autoethnography |
|---|---|
| What happened to me? | What shaped what happened to me? |
| Tells my story | Examines my story |
| Focuses on events | Connects events to context |
| “This is what I experienced.” | “What does this experience mean?” |
| Mostly looks backward | Uses the past to reconsider the present and the future |
| One person's account | Connects the person to family, culture, place, systems, community, faith and history |
I moved from Mexico to California when I was twelve. I struggled with English, worked with my family, went to school, and eventually became a teacher.An autoethnography asks
- What did migration mean in that era?
- How did language affect identity and opportunity?
- What did family expectations contribute?
- How did geography, economics, schools, culture, faith and institutions shape the experience?
- Who told me what that experience meant at the time?
- How do I interpret it now?
Now the story is evidence for understanding both the person and the world around the person. The twelve frames of THe BIGSPEARs™ are how we widen a story beyond its chronology, one question at a time.
The twelve frames of THe BIGSPEARs™, always in this order. Each one is a question you can ask about any life, including yours.
THeBIGSPEARsAutoethnography is where we begin
First we examine our experiences in the context of family, culture, place, history, relationships, beliefs, opportunities and challenges. Then we ask what those experiences have taught us, what we want to create from them, what we hope to do with the life ahead, and what we want to leave behind. Four movements, in the order a life asks them:
Study a life.
Their story teaches me how to look. A biography portrait of someone famous, someone from Scripture, someone in your family, or someone you have lost.
Look withinUnderstand your life.
My story teaches me who I have become. Twelve questions, one per frame, and a fuller account of who you are.
Look forwardDecide what you still want to build.
My future asks what I will do with it. A timeline that starts at the horizon and works back to today.
Leave behindPreserve what matters.
My legacy asks what will remain. A story to keep, a person to remember, something made from it.
You build it. We give you the questions.
Nothing you write is stored here. You build your autoethnography on your own phone or in your own Google account, using the apps you already have. Each section gives you the questions, step-by-step directions for a phone and for Google Slides, a prompt you can hand to Gemini or any assistant, and one finished example.