Teaching Assistants should never underestimate the value of personal experience in the classroom. Though many TAs recognize the pedagogical value of having students share their experiences and aspirations, facilitating such discussion can be a harrowing challenge for a TA. Often an attempt to integrate the rich stories and memories that students bring to the classroom can turn into a cacophony of emotional testimonials. Not wanting to lose control of the class, and feeling unqualified to respond to students' emotional confessions from their past, the educators are often tempted to minimize the personal comments of students and avoid an impromptu free-for-all.

Knowing how and when to draw on the personal experience of your students – as parents, employees, volunteers, and those in various other roles outside the university – involves a systematic plan for eliciting the most useful information at the right time. The trick is to design methods which induce student self-reflection in a way that is relevant to the course material and to then effectively incorporate these methods into lesson plans. One technique I have developed and implemented in my teaching draws from Sam Keen's book Telling Your Story: A Guide to Who You Are And Who You Can Be (New York: Double Day and Company, 1973). At first glance, this book might seem like another self-help book from one of many Jurassic bookstores teeming with pop-psychology titles. However, upon closer reading, the self-reflection exercises that Keen uses in his book reveal excellent strategies that TAs can adapt to have their students explore their roots, realities and 'personal mythologies' in a way that facilitates learning regardless of the subject matter. With creative adaptation and proper implementation of the exercises presented in Telling Your Story any TA can help his or her students recognize the wealth of knowledge and experience that they and their classmates bring to class: experiences as disgruntled employees; expecting parents; recovering alcoholics; devout believers – you name it.

Keen calls his methodology a travel guide for personal journeys, with philosophical maps which prompt individuals to travel in time – the past, the present, and the future – to sight-see their own landscapes. Keen refers to this as finding the 'nations' within the self...the public nation, the private nation and the unknown nation. By public nation, Keen refers to the psychic sphere; the part of ourselves that we reveal to others, including our colleagues, neighbours, friends and acquaintances. The private nation refers to our inner selves where emotions remain hidden from public view. Within the boundaries of this nation we keep guilt, fear, cruelty, desire, coldness of heart, self-loathing, and secret ideals. The unknown nation contains those feelings, experiences, fantasies and possibilities that we repress, although we wish to act them out. Revealing Freudian influence, Keen maintains that this unknown part of us reveals itself unconsciously, through dreams, bursts of anger, and intuitive thoughts.

A reflective exercise Keen uses, especially adaptable to the classroom setting, is his 'Viewpoints.' These are sets of questions designed to take readers on a 'side-trip' during their personal voyage, to places within their experiences. The questions that are posed allow each reader to reflect on him/herself, to gain a better understanding of where she or he has come from and where she or he is going, leading the reader to 'tell his/her story.' 'Each answer that is provided to these Viewpoint questions is like a souvenir or slideshow from the reader's personal journey. For example, the following series of 'Viewpoint' questions can be used to explore one's identity. This exercise of self-identification involves organizing a life-story, dividing life into stages:

Choose ten scenes from your past which were important pivotal events in your life and describe them. Detail the circumstances, characters, and backgrounds of each scene. How are these scenes you have chosen representative of your life? How did they change or affect you? How has your view of them altered over the years? Make an outline of your autobiography. What are the major divisions? Chapter titles? Subsections? What stages does your life naturally seem to fall into? When did you cease to be a child? (p. 82).

Another important self-reflexive exercise Keen promotes is a consideration of your clan and family, reminding us that every person is pluralistic. This exercise is particularly well-suited to a classroom of adults to draw awareness to the variety of motives people have for taking the course and the multiple roles that students have in their lives. By asking your students to consider the traditions and rules of their family life, and the personality, role and types of interaction they have with each member of their family, Keen proposes that people will gain a better understanding of the influences and role models that have influenced their own lives. The following 'Viewpoint' questions exemplify this type of self-reflection:

Who are you? Where did you come from? Who are your people? Reconstruct the physical setting of your childhood and you may recover the flavour of the family in which your psyche was first marinated. Draw a detailed floor plan of a house you lived in before you were ten. As you enter each room imagine the furniture, pictures, smells, and events you associate with the room. Where were your secret places? (Where did you stash your comic books or go when you wanted to be alone?). Who lived in the house with you? What was the dominant mood in the household? Which rooms are you unable to reconstruct in memory? Why do you think you forget them? Are there rooms you can't enter? (p. 43).

By adapting self-reflexive exercises such as these 'Viewpoints' questions to your lesson plan, you present your students with the opportunity to begin their own trip into self-knowing while making the course material directly relevant to their individual lives and experiences. In a controlled situation, your students can collectively move along the road to knowledge while marking special points of interest for later explorations on their own time. By creating a space for individual reflection, group discussion and follow-up consideration, you can ensure that the class will not lapse into a verbal free-for-all.

Self-reflexive exercises such as these can be used by TAs to have their students make connections between their individual lives and experiences and course content. For example, a Teaching Assistant in mathematics may have students identify their first recollections of things numerical and trace a line of events that brought them to a career in mathematics. A TA in race relations might ask students to sketch a racial 'map' indicating how they perceived the segregation of ethnic groups in their childhood neighbourhoods. In economics a TA could ask students to imagine how a radical change in the market would directly affect their lives and aspirations.

Teaching assistants may face resistance from students to engage in these types of self-reflection exercises, as they may be skeptical of the value of such exercises in a serious classroom setting. Nevertheless, your persistence will pay off and eventually your students will come to look forward to these opportunities to share their personal experiences and insights with their colleagues.

Whether the subject you are teaching is reason or religion, auto-mechanics or aromatherapy, your students have one thing in common: they are individuals who have a story to tell. Good teaching practice recognizes that student learning requires a positive and inclusive classroom environment. Many students are returning to school after years in the workforce or at home raising a family, and for these students, the classroom can be very strange and intimidating. Allowing your students to apply their own realities to course material not only facilitates student learning and understanding but also reveals that you, as a teacher, respect the experiences of your students as valid teaching tools. The stories and myths that are created through the types of exercises promoted in Telling Your Story: A Guide to Who You Are And Who You Can Be are not trivial or self-indulgent but, a way to help our students navigate their journey on the path of life-long learning.