The Pedagogy of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives: A Survey

This study examines pedagogical uses of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), an online, publicly available, searchable database of autobiographical stories about literacy development. The DALN aspires to make visible the everyday literacy practices of ordinary people, a mission that makes it an invaluable resource for scholars and teachers. In particular, the DALN offers opportunities to deepen and complicate pedagogical approaches to literacy narratives in composition, rhetoric, and literacy studies. This article briefly reviews the historical uses of literacy narratives in composition courses before turning to current experiments incorporating the DALN. Based on surveys and conversations with instructors, the authors categorize and synthesize various approaches, providing specific examples and instructors’ reflections that offer insights and highlight areas of concern. The final discussion considers what this research suggests about best practices and critical questions for educators interested in using the DALN in their teaching.