One of the defining features of autoethnography that binds all autoethnographies, as Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis observed,“is the use of personal experience to examine and/or critique cultural experience”(2013, p. 7). In this chapter, I address the question of how autoethnography can contribute to teaching in higher education institutions, and situate this work in the context of South Africa. What are some of the considerations, challenges, and benefits of autoethnography? I write from my position of being a semi-insider (and semi-outsider): as an honorary professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, currently conducting research with South African teachers (both preservice and in-service), supervising doctoral students, and working alongside colleagues who are both teachers and researchers in various South African higher education institutions. This semi-insider status may give me a somewhat privileged position of looking “inward” through my teaching and research experiences in two countries, Canada and South Africa, and as such being made aware, from time to time, of occupying particular border spaces. But it is also the case that this may also give me a position for looking “outward” in relation to broader issues. It is these border spaces of being both inside and outside, that strike me as being ideal for engaging in autoethnography. My particular angle for this chapter draws on the work of Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner (2003). As they wrote:

Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth ethnographers gaze, first through an ethnographic wide-angle lens [emphasis added], focusing on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then they look inward [emphasis added], exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract and resist cultural interpretations.(p. 209)