A Narrative Inquiry Beyond Exemplar

By Author: Alex Lee
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To explore narrative inquiry in language teacher education further, beyond exemplar the literature, I had the opportunity while visiting South Africa to collaborate in an inquiry with English teachers in the context of a university postgraduate ELTcourse. I was the lecturer on the course, and its focus was on recent issues to do with language teaching, generally and in the South African context. There were only two students in this class, one with 20 years' English teaching experience (I'll call her Roxanne), and the other, a recent graduate with no classroom experience (I'll call her Betty). The intensive course ran over the period of a month, with two-hour meetings 2-3 times a week.

These conditions appeared to me to be ideal for engaging with narrative systematically for the first time. The potential for interaction was high and the content of the course lent itself to debate and open-ended discussion, especially since the two students came from very different cultural and educational backgrounds. Roxanne completed her teacher education in a west African country, taught English there, and then worked in a southern ...
... African country before moving to South Africa. Betty too was educated outside South Africa, in a different southern African country, and went to South Africa to complete her first degree and to study for an English teaching qualification.

Our narrative work involved the following: Thomas Sabo Charms
1.The students were required to write a series of three personal narratives or stories (about 1000 words each) which together would form one long, connected story. The stories were to be submitted to me as part of an assignment—see below. The following topics were suggested to provide some focus to the stories an introduce yourself and tell the story of your interest in English teaching. b What are your ideas regarding the process of becoming a language teacher—generally, as well as personally? c What are some of the desires, fears, concerns, moments of joy that language teachers experience?

2.Opportunities were created in class for the students to share their stories with each other and with me. This was done in an informal way, and these conversations, together with those stories which stemmed from them, as well as entirely new stories, contributed to the data of the inquiry.

3.Of course, I too was part of these conversations, and so shared my own experiences of English teaching and being a teacher educator.

4. All these stories were integrated with our more formal discussions and interpretations of the theoretical literature we were reading during the course, including that on narrative inquiry in the field of language teaching.

5.My independent involvement included keeping narrative notes of my experiences during the course. In these notes, I recorded what I was learning about narrative inquiry, how our story telling and sharing was progressing, and what we were learning, both individually and collectively, about language teaching and language teacher education in the contexts in which we lived and worked.

6.Lastly, as part of their assignment (see point i above), the students were required to conduct a content analysis of the three stories they constructed; that is, analysing the stories for themes, and then organizing the themes into categories meaningful to themselves as (prospective) English teachers (Ellis and Barkhuizen 2005; Polkinghorne 1995). Thomas Sabo Bracelets To do so, they were encouraged to use Clandinin and Connelly's (op. cit.) three dimensional contextual space to guide their analysis and interpretation.