Narrative Knowledging in TESOL

Narrative Knowledging in TESOL GARY BARKHUIZEN University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand doi: 10.5054/tq.2011.261888 In the realm of storytelling I’m a little more at ease, and since stories, unlike scientific formulations, don’t expect (reject, in fact) clear-cut answers, I can muddle around in this territory without feeling bullied into providing solutions or advice Alberto Manguel (2007) his article introduces the special-topic issue on Narrative Research in TESOL It begins by describing the concept of narrative knowledging and continues with a discussion of narrative (co)construction, analysis, and reporting, integrating into the discussion research issues related to TESOL narrative research interrogated by the authors in this issue This broad discussion is organized in the form of a framework which delineates the generic, mutually informing stages and participants, and their interrelationships, in narrative research projects I remember very clearly giving my first lecture on narrative inquiry some years ago It was part of a graduate sociolinguistics course for language teachers at the University of Auckland, where I work, and the topic was sociolinguistic research methods Usually for this particular class I covered a wide spectrum of data-collection and analytical methods drawn from our readings on variationist sociolinguistics, pointing out overall trends, warning about potential problems (e.g., the ubiquitous observer’s paradox), and suggesting ways to overcome these But recently I had become excited about the idea of narrative and decided to share my enthusiasm with the teachers Although the idea of narrative research was new to me, I was beginning to realize that my research practices had for a long time featured some sort of narrative overtones, though I did not yet know what these were So I decided to explore further what narrative meant and how it applied to what I was doing and wanted to as a researcher and teacher educator My interest was triggered by a study I had been involved in for a number of years prior to my narrative inquiry lecture In this study I investigated the linguistic and identity experiences of Afrikaans-speaking migrants T TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 45, No 3, September 2011 391 from South Africa living in New Zealand I travelled the length of the country interviewing participants from a range of age, gender, and occupational backgrounds Beforehand, I had prepared in writing a common set of questions and supportive prompts for reference during the interviews On the whole, I thought that the data collection had gone rather well, and I was able to achieve my research and publication goals (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2006; Barkhuizen & Knoch, 2005) However, whenever I spoke about the research, both informally and in more formal academic settings such as conferences, I constantly found myself referring to and retelling the stories participants told me during the interviews Their stories took a variety of different narrative forms One type, for example, were narratives which formed coherent entities embedded within and relatively separate from the surrounding interview discourse These narratives may have been prompted by a question from me, but they continued with little, if any, further contribution on my part I was far more involved in the telling of a different sort of narrative, those which were constructed, or rather co-constructed, by both me and the participants over multiple turns at talk In some cases, this interaction appeared to resemble more closely an everyday conversation than a research interview And this should not be surprising since I too am from South Africa with plenty of my own immigration stories to share When retelling the participants’ stories, I sometimes focused on these smaller narratives, those embedded and those conversationally coconstructed, but at other times I told the bigger stories of individual participants based on their entire interview What I did was reconstruct into a coherent whole told experiences and events and their accompanying narrator emotions and moral positionings So, I told Johan’s story or Marie’s story On one occasion I was interviewed on a local radio station about this study The interviewer was interested in the group of migrants as a whole My retellings of the participants’ stories in this case were therefore peppered with statements beginning ‘‘They tend to …’’, ‘‘Many of them …’’, and ‘‘They believe that ….’’ What happened here was that I grouped the participants together, combining their individual stories, and reported on their collective experiences constructed from the collated interview data Based on these early experiences of my conceptual dabbling with things narrative, it became clear to me that there were three main areas of importance that concerned my work as a researcher, and this discovery was confirmed when I began to consult the relevant literature The first is that what is meant by narrative and narrative research is far from agreed upon Taylor (2003), for example, says that ‘‘narrative studies is a broad field encompassing a range of theoretical assumptions and analytical approaches’’ (p 195), and Stanley and Temple (2008) concur, saying that there is ‘‘little shared sense of core concerns, of approach, 392 TESOL QUARTERLY and even of what narrative is seen as’’ (p 276) In some ways I found this reassuring, because I too was struggling to make sense of the narrative territory I had entered, and so felt that my narrative muddling (to use Manguel’s term) had some legitimacy But in other ways, I found it somewhat frustrating because I felt a desire for conceptual coherence and the need for practical guidance for going about my narrative research work Second, narrative researchers are intimately implicated in their research activities In my case, I was not merely passively listening to the migrant participants’ stories, I was actively involved in constructing them I was part of the story being produced, both as narrator and as character And I could hardly retell their stories without talking or writing about my own experiences Narrative researchers elicit, coconstruct, interpret, and, in their retelling, represent participants’ accounts of lived and imagined personal experience These practices come with complex ethical, ideological, and emotional responsibilities The third salient area concerns the meaning making that accompanies the telling and retelling of stories In the process of constructing narratives, narrators make sense of their lived experience; they understand it, give it coherence, make connections, and unravel its complexity The converse, of course, may also be true; the act of narration can sometimes confront disconnections, dead-ends, and uncertainties As Ochs and Capps (2001) say, ‘‘certain life experiences resist tidy, ready-athand interpretive frameworks’’ (p 35) Meaning making endures beyond the original telling of stories, however It continues when researchers analyze their data, and when they discuss their interpretations with participants The preparation of narrative research texts involves further meaning making, as does the reception of these I refer to this multistage, active meaning making as narrative knowledging, which I discuss more fully below Having come to these three significant insights about narrative research, I decided to explore them and others outside the scope of my immigration research project I did this by taking my developing ideas into the teaching and research work I with language teachers—hence my introductory lecture on narrative inquiry in my graduate sociolinguistics course My reading showed me that in education there existed a substantial literature in the field (e.g., Carter, 1993; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Elbaz, 1991; Polkinghorne,1995; Gudmundsdottir, 1997, an introduction to a special topic issue of Teaching and Teacher Education), and in TESOL there were early signs that narrative research was beginning to attract the attention of researchers and teachers (Bell, 2002; Johnson & Golombek, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002) In the past decade TESOL has seen huge growth in both interest in narrative and the practice of narrative research (e.g., Barkhuizen, 2008, 2009, 2010; NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 393 Benson & Nunan, 2004; Curtis & Romney, 2006; Golombek & Johnson, 2004; Hayes, 2010; Liu & Xu, 2011; Menard-Warwick, 2007; SimonMaeda, 2004; Swain, Kinnear & Steinman, 2011; Tsui, 2007; a further two, Kalaja, Menezes & Barcelos, 2008, and Nunan & Choi, 2010, are reviewed in this issue) For instance, my call for abstracts for this specialtopic issue on narrative research in TESOL attracted over 100 abstracts The diversity of topics, the multiple methodological approaches, and the many research-related issues addressed in these abstracts are further evidence of this growing trend The articles in this special-topic issue cannot possibly represent such a broad range of interests and practices They do, however, achieve what the call for abstracts stipulated: ‘‘Contributions will draw on narrative data to focus on issues related to narrative research in our field.’’ In doing so, the authors interrogate issues, particularly those relating to research methodology, teacher and learner identity, teacher education, and language pedagogy, as significant and current in the field of TESOL In this article, I position these issues, which interlace with my three early insights discussed above, within a broad framework which outlines an ongoing concern for narrative researchers in TESOL, that is, managing the tensions inherent in their work between the (co)construction of narratives, their analysis and interpretation, and reporting research findings I begin by introducing the concept of narrative knowledging, referred to above, and I conclude with an invitation to narrative researchers in TESOL to explore and thereby locate and re-locate their epistemological and methodological selves within the story-world of narrative research NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING My narrative entry into language teacher education was via the sociolinguistics course referred to above After my initial narrative inquiry lecture, I began to include more narrative activities into this and other courses I taught In the sociolinguistics course, for example, I invited teachers to write a series of personal narratives relating their language teaching and learning experiences to the content we were covering in the course I read and commented on these, thus establishing a narrative dialogue with the teachers For an assignment, the teachers were required to analyze their narratives and to include a commentary on their thoughts about writing and analyzing them Based on what the teachers had to say, it soon became clear to me that this reflective activity resulted in them becoming more aware of, and thus understanding better, themselves and their practices In other words, through their narrative writing and analysis they were making meaning of their teaching and learning experiences (Barkhuizen & Benson, 394 TESOL QUARTERLY 2008) And some were also beginning to understand the nature of these meaning-making processes, as one of the teachers said:1 Teachers teach We hit the same walls We’re in the same course; we looked at the same books So when I look at my narratives, I don’t want to see the topics, I want to see how I addressed them I want to see the questions I attached to them I want to see how I developed over time Meaning for me is to be found indirectly; to be recreated in the changes themselves, something experienced in movement Meaning is dynamic It’s a process This teacher understands that meaning changes over time as he continuously interprets and reinterprets (and thus shapes and reshapes) his experience He also realizes that meaning making through constructing and analyzing his narratives is an active process requiring cognitive work; in short, narrative is a ‘‘sense-making activity’’ (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p 35) Some researchers have argued that narrative researchers may have overstated the claim for narrative as a means for making sense of experience For example, Schiff (2006), a narrative psychologist, suggests that in emphasizing narrative we may be ‘‘reifying a Western, arguably middle and upper class, concept as the universal mode of shaping and articulating subjective experience’’ (p 20) And Sartwell (2006) cautions that narrative researchers may be guilty of ‘‘the neglect of other ways of organizing experience or the importance at times of leaving experience unorganized’’ (p 156) Despite these reservations and the fact that the links between meaning making and knowledge are contested (e.g., Does meaning making become knowledge? What counts as knowledge?) (with regard to teacher knowledge, see Johnson & Golombek, this issue; Lyons & LaBoskey, 2002), I use the term knowledging to refer to the activity of meaning making, learning, or knowledge construction, and narrative knowledging as an umbrella term to refer to the meaning making, learning, and knowledge construction that takes place at all stages of a narrative research project Narrative knowledging, then, is the meaning making, learning, or knowledge construction that takes place during the narrative research activities of (co)constructing narratives, analyzing narratives, reporting the findings, and reading/watching/listening to research reports As can be seen from this definition, different participants engage in narrative knowledging at various mutually informing stages of the research process, including (co)narrators (which could include the researcher), researchers, and consumers of research reports Figure shows an (inevitably simplistic) breakdown of these stages and the participants involved in narrative knowledging at each stage In the next three Extract used with permission NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 395 FIGURE Stages and participants in narrative knowledging sections of this article, I discuss each of these stages in turn and provide examples of narrative knowledging from the articles in this issue For now, I explain in further detail what I mean by narrative knowledging First, and most important, narrative knowledging is an activity (hence the verb knowledging) It is a cognitive activity Making sense of and reshaping an experience through narrating, analyzing narratives, reporting narrative research, and consuming research findings are cognitive activities Narrative knowledging is something that we do, and in the process we understand that experience—we generate knowledge (Doyle, 1997; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2007) However, this knowledge is not constant When narrators retell stories of particular experiences, they understand these experiences differently each time; researchers’ interpretations of their narrative data may change each time they revisit and reflect on their data, even after the data have been fixed in research reports (see Bell, this issue); and consumers of research, each time they read, listen to, watch, or reflect on research reports, shift understandings as they know, re-know, and un-know the reported experiences (see Nelson, this issue) The concept of narrative knowledging, therefore, recognizes the active, fluid nature of meaning making, and aims to avoid conceptions of narrative knowledge as stable, permanent, and unchallengeable In the field of language learning (and learning in general), Swain (2006, 2010; Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi, Suzuki & Brooks, 2009) uses the concept languaging in a similar way She describes languaging as a cognitive activity; ‘‘the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language It is part of what constitutes learning’’ (Swain, 2006, p 98) Furthermore, ‘‘languaging is a process which creates a visible or audible product about which one can language further’’ (p 97) It is the same with narrative knowledging The products (or narrative artifacts; see Figure 1) which the act of narrating generates (e.g., interview transcripts, language learning histories, teacher journals) are available to research participants and 396 TESOL QUARTERLY researchers for analysis and interpretation, that is, for further narrative knowledging Narrative, therefore, mediates knowledging, just as ‘‘languaging serves to mediate cognition’’ (Swain, 2006, p 97) In fact, Lenchuk and Swain (2010) suggest that narrative is a type of languaging It should be obvious by now that narrative knowledging is also a social activity Narratives are discursively constructed with others in particular spatiotemporal contexts and, after analysis by researchers, are presented to an audience for (re)interpretation Narratives in these various forms of social interaction function as mediational tools for narrative knowledging Johnson and Golombek (this issue) make this point from a Vygotskian sociocultural theoretical perspective in the field of second language teacher education In their article they argue that through narrative inquiry teachers not only make sense of their experiences but also make worthwhile changes to their teaching practices The ‘‘transformative power of narrative’’ therefore lies in narrative’s functioning as a mediational tool for fostering teacher professional development Johnson and Golombek illustrate how this happens by analyzing (re-storying) two published teacher-authored narrative inquiries The original teacher-authored products (narrative artifacts), both published in 2002, and their re-storied accounts in Johnson and Golombek’s article, are made available through their publication to other practitioners and to researchers Johnson and Golombek suggest that this extends the transformative power of narrative as a tool for narrative knowledging to the wider professional landscape of second language teacher education, and they present examples of how this is currently taking place in both center and periphery contexts Chik and Breidbach’s study (this issue) provides a further example of how narrative products serve as mediational tools in teacher education In their case, the products are the language learning histories of English learners and preservice English teachers in Hong Kong and Berlin, respectively The histories were shared in online spaces (Web 2.0 technologies and social networking platforms) internationally between the groups of students for comment, analysis, and reflection; in other words, for narrative knowledging Karen Johnson and Paula Golombek The transformative power of narrative in second language teacher education A reviewer of their article says that the argument put forward by the authors ‘‘is timely and deals with an important question: How does the act of narrative have an impact on understanding of self and, in the case of teacher education, on professional practice?’’2 Reviewer comments in this article used with permission NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 397 (CO)CONSTRUCTING NARRATIVES So far I have discussed two personal experiences of working with narratives—the first, my research with Afrikaans-speaking migrants in New Zealand, and the second, the narrative activities which continue to form part of my teacher education classes In each case my involvement in the construction of the narratives was very different When the migrant research participants told me their stories during interviews, I was actively involved in shaping both the content and the form of the narratives When the teachers in my graduate courses write their reflective journals, my involvement is more passive; I only read and comment on their written narratives once they have been completely formed Narratives as research data (see the left-hand side of Figure 1) could be placed along a tellership (Ochs & Capps, 2001) continuum, with the extent and kind of involvement of those participating in their construction determining where on the continuum they lie Toward one end of the continuum are those narratives which involve a high level of discursive collaboration Here stories are told with another (Ochs & Capps, 2001) These narratives are typically conversations or unstructured life history interviews In Hayes’s (2010) study of the life and career of a Tamil English teacher in Sri Lanka, for example, he acknowledges that his interview with the teacher ‘‘was co-constructed by two individuals, each a complex array of beliefs, attitudes, and feeling’’ (p 66) And in Simon-Maeda’s (2004) study of the construction of professional identities of Japanese EFL teachers, she used an openended interview approach to ‘‘maximise opportunities for dialogical authoring (Bakhtin, 1981) and co-constructed understanding of work identities’’ (p 408) Toward the other end of the tellership continuum, narratives are told to others (Ochs & Capps, 2001) The telling of stories becomes more of an individual affair with little or even no participation on the part of the audience Long turns at interview talk in which experiences of past and imagined events are narrated are one example (see Barkhuizen, 2010), and, although not empirically oriented, published memoirs of language learning (see Pavlenko, 2001) are another All these cases demonstrate that narratives are discursive artifacts and, whether written, spoken, or visual (e.g., drawings, drama), are constructed in particular contexts I say more below about the significance of context in narrative analysis, but for now it is worth pointing out that recently much attention has been paid by theorists and researchers to the interactional contexts of narrative production (see Va´squez, this issue; also de Fina, 2011; Coffey & Street, 2008; Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Rugen, 2010; Simpson, 2011) Implicated in these contexts of production are the identities of the narrative 398 TESOL QUARTERLY participants In telling stories, participants are performing themselves; they are doing their identities As Watson (2007) says, ‘‘If identification is conceived as an ongoing performance accomplished locally in and through our everyday interactions then it is the narratives that emerge in this context that become the focus of interest’’ (p 372) Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra Harnessing storytelling as a socio-pragmatic skill: Applying narrative research to workplace English courses A reviewer sums up this article by saying that it ‘‘argues for the usefulness of both narrative analysis in TESOL research and the teaching of narrative skills in TESOL courses.’’ Holmes and Marra (this issue) focus their interest on narratives constructed during the social activity of small talk in the workplace The four participants in their illustrative data are professional migrants enrolled in a Workplace Communication Skills course in New Zealand The course aims to teach sociopragmatic knowledge and awareness of how to use English appropriately in the workplace After a period of time in the classroom, participants begin an internship in a workplace setting Holmes and Marra present and analyze numerous small stories, that is, snippets of often mundane talk in conversations (and sometimes in interviews) which tell of past, imagined, or hypothetical events, as opposed to big narratives like life histories and those compiled from multiple interviews and other ethnographic data collected over an extended period of time (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008; Vasquez, this issue; Watson, 2007) The authors argue that narratives are often overlooked as discourse resources in the workplace, dismissed as distracting or superfluous Instead, Holmes and Marra show that the workplace narratives which the migrants co-construct with their workmates (in the form of small stories embedded in workplace discourse) are significant sites for professional identity construction and for the building of good relationships In their study, Holmes and Marra are not directly involved in the construction of the workplace narratives Their narrative knowledging occurs in their role as researchers at the analysis stage (moving to the middle section of Figure 1) The situation is quite different for Norton and Early (this issue) They were active researcher participants in the construction of the small stories they analyzed I have made the point that narratives are constructed in particular interactional contexts and Bonny Norton and Margaret Early Researcher identity, narrative inquiry, and language teaching research A reviewer of this article says that it is ‘‘a welcome and important contribution’’ and adds that ‘‘since the researcher’s identity can significantly shape educational processes such as collaborative research, more discussion on this topic is very worthwhile.’’ NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 399 that storytellers constantly pay attention to the local (and wider sociocultural) contexts in which the stories are told, and this includes the identities of participating co-narrators Consequently, as de Fina (2011) says, ‘‘storytelling activities and story types both reflect and shape relations among participants based, among other factors, on their local management of situational and portable identities’’ (p 28) When the co-constructors are researchers, the storytelling that participants engage in inevitably follows a somewhat different trajectory Norton and Early interrogate the negotiation of researcher identity in the midst of a narrative inquiry in which they, as university researchers, collaborate with teachers on a project to promote digital literacy in a poorly resourced rural school in Uganda—circumstances fraught with potentially inequitable power relationships Their content analysis of the small stories co-constructed on site shows a number of researcher identities, including researcher as international guest, teacher, teacher educator, and collaborative team member Their narrative knowledging also reveals how they sought to transform the power differentials between themselves and the teachers and to encourage the teachers’ investment in the collaborative project, thereby making ‘‘visible the complex ways in which researcher identity impacts research.’’ ANALYZING NARRATIVES In 2002, two short articles about narrative appeared in an issue of TESOL Quarterly In one of these, Bell (2002) stated categorically that narrative inquiry is more than just telling stories By this she means that (a) storytellers engage in narrative knowledging when telling their stories, and (b) researchers systematically analyze ‘‘the underlying insights and assumptions that the story illustrates’’ (p 208) In other words, in the process of narrative knowledging, researchers actually things with narratives Atkinson and Delamont (2006) claim that this does not always happen, because some researchers, they argue, are ‘‘complicit in the general culture of ’the interview society, ’ and are too ready to celebrate narratives and biographical accounts, rather than subjecting them to systematic analysis’’ (p 164) Pavlenko (2007) points out that inadequate analyses may also be the result of some researchers, particularly novices, not knowing what to with narratives once they have collected them In the other 2002 TESOL Quarterly article, Pavlenko (2002, and more thoroughly in Pavlenko, 2007) suggests an analytical approach which acknowledges the co-constructed nature of narrative and the social contexts (sociohistorical, sociocultural) of the phenomena that are the focus of investigation (e.g., language learning) In her discussion she alludes to the tensions that exist between analytical focus 400 TESOL QUARTERLY on the content of narratives, their rhetorical and structural form, and the social contexts of their production (for related, earlier models for the classification of analytical approaches, see Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998, and Mishler, 1995) Narrative Content Va´squez (this issue) traces the development of approaches to analysis in TESOL, focusing particularly on sociolinguistic interest in identity She points out that the dominant mode of research has been that of narrative inquiry (see Bell, 2002), ‘‘with its concomitant privileging of autobiographical ‘big stories’’’; i.e., narratives that ‘‘entail a significant measure of reflection on either an event or an experience, a significant portion of a life, or the whole of it’’ (Freeman, 2006, p 131) Big-story research may include substantial data collected over an extended period of time, such as multiple interviews, a series of written reflections, and field notes generated from classroom observations Here the focus is typically on the content of the narratives: what they are about; what was told; and why, when, where, and by whom The aim is narrative knowledging about past events and lived experiences Connelly and Clandinin (2006), for example, refer to narrative inquiry as ‘‘the study of experience as story’’ (p 477) They encourage researchers to explore three dimensions or commonplaces relating to temporality (the times— past, present and future—in which experiences unfold), place (the place or sequence of places in which experiences are lived), and sociality (personal emotions and desires, and the people narrators interact with) My own initial ventures into narrative inquiry followed this analytical path (see Barkhuizen, 2008), as have others (e.g., Tsui, 2007; Xu & Liu, 2009) Early on, I also found Polkinghorne’s (1995) distinction between analysis of narratives and narrative analysis quite useful for conceptualizing my attempts at narrative knowledging His two approaches to doing analysis correspond to the two ways of knowing (i.e., two kinds of cognition, or ways of organizing experience) described by Bruner (1986) One of these Bruner called paradigmatic cognition, which entails ‘‘classifying a particular instance as belonging to a category or concept’’ (Polkinghorne, 1995, p 9) Sense is made of the world by looking for similarities among things and then grouping them as members of the same category Analyses of narrative content (Polkinghorne’s analysis of narratives) follow the procedures of coding for themes, categorizing these, and looking for patterns of association among them Bruner’s second way of knowing, narrative cognition, organizes experience temporally, seeking explications ‘‘that are context sensitive and particular’’ (Bruner, 2006, p 116) Instead of pulling experience apart, then, narrative thinking emplots experience, synthesizing it into a unified whole What Polkinghorne’s narrative analysis NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 401 does, is configure the various bits of data content into a coherent whole, that is, the outcome of narrative knowledging is a story The distinction between Polkinghorne’s two broad analytical approaches is not always clear, however There is obviously some similarity in the analytical methods used, and also in the later presentations of the findings (i.e., a coherent story or a discussion of separate, extracted themes) It is probably true to say that the analysis of narratives type of study is more prevalent in TESOL, in the past and currently, possibly because they are more readily recognized ‘‘as an academically valid research methodology’’ (Bell, this issue; see also Nelson, this issue) Narrative Form Much rarer in the TESOL field, says Vasquez (this issue), is narrative study (as opposed to narrative inquiry, see Pavlenko, 2002) with its analytical focus on the form of narratives (structure, sequence of events, choice of words, coherence, etc.), particularly small stories The contributions of Holmes and Marra and of Norton and Early in this issue underline a shift in TESOL toward a more detailed examination of the structural and linguistic make-up of narratives (see also Rugen, 2010; Simpson, 2011) Both examine small stories in their data, but so in contrasting ways Norton and Early’s analysis incorporates aspects of a typical narrative content analysis such as the coding and categorizing of identity themes, albeit with a critical eye Whereas Holmes and Mara’s analysis takes on more of a conversation analytical approach, observing how participants in the story orient to what is going on locally in the coperformance of the story (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) They also integrate, where relevant, elements of Labov’s (2003) well-known canonical narrative structure to complement their narrative knowledging, that is, abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda My first empirical encounter with narrative form occurred when a colleague and I were invited to take part in a professional development program for college teachers of English in China In order to learn about this particular teaching context, we designed a series of what we called narrative frames (Barkhuizen & Wette, 2008; Wette & Barkhuizen, 2009; see also Barnard & Nguyen, 2010) to gather information from the participating teachers about their work experiences A narrative frame is a written story template consisting of a series of incomplete sentences and blank spaces of varying lengths It is structured as a story in skeletal form The aim is for participants to produce a coherent story by filling in the spaces according to their own experiences and their reflections on these in the process of narrative knowledging Frames ‘‘provide guidance and support in terms of both the structure and content of what is to be written From the researcher’s perspective the frames ensure that the 402 TESOL QUARTERLY content will be more or less what is expected (and required to address the research aims) and that it will be delivered in narrative form’’ (Barkhuizen & Wette, 2008, p 376) In designing the frames, of course, the big question is, What is the structure of a story? We drew on the oftquoted claim that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and, where appropriate, we incorporated into the frame templates Labov’s narrative elements Although the use of narrative frames as datacollection instruments has several limitations, the procedure certainly alerted me to the importance of paying attention to narrative form as well as to referential meaning in narrative Researcher narrative knowledging can combine both content and structural analyses Riessman (2008) advises that doing so enhances the quality of the analysis, generating insights beyond what a content analysis alone would achieve (as does Pavlenko, 2007, most pointedly) Menard-Warwick’s reflective piece in this issue illustrates this nicely She contemplates the process of selecting and analyzing data in preparation for writing a research report about teacher alienation and identity and their connections with pedagogy Her illustrative data are extracted from life-history interviews with practicing English teachers in California and Chile Menard-Warwick suggests that a useful first step is thematic (or content) analysis During this process the theme of alienation, vague at first but more satisfactorily moulded later, emerges from the data Building on this analysis, she engages in a formal analysis which enables her to identify the arrangement of episodes in the life story of one focal teacher Menard-Warwick then examines the linguistic resources (including names of characters, words that provide sensory details, and words which depict ethnicities) used to construct the events in the narrative episodes Finally, she analyzes aspects of the dialogic performance of the life-history interviews; how stories are ‘‘coproduced in a complex choreography—in spaces between teller and listener, speaker and setting, text and reader, history and culture’’ (Riessman, 2008, p 105) Menard-Warwick’s analysis, then, includes a focus on content, form (structural and linguistic), and context, all working together to produce a systematic account of the data Narrative Context To quote Riessman (2008) again, ‘‘Stories don’t fall from the sky …; they are composed and received in contexts—interactional, historical, institutional, and discursive—to name a few’’ (p 105) Atkinson (1997) makes the same point when arguing that too many narrative analyses lack a thorough scrutiny of social action and organization, saying ‘‘The narratives seem to float in a social vacuum The voices echo in an otherwise empty world There is an extraordinary absence of social context, social action, and social interaction’’ (p 339) These two NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 403 quotations make the following point very clear: context is important in the study of narrative But exactly how it is important is complicated by the variety of meanings assigned to context, and of course also to narrative Take, for example, the analysis of conversation and interview narrative data Here context can be interpreted on a number of different levels First, the context of the talk-in-interaction (de Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008)—the central concern at this level is how the narrative unfolds in sequences of turns at talk, following very much a conversation analysis tradition Who is talking, and when, and what their speaker roles (de Fina, 2011) are (including possibly that of researcher) at each moment of talk are examined in detail I discussed above narrative coconstruction whereby narratives emerge through collaborative, negotiated performance, which is fundamental to this perspective of context A second interrelated level is the immediate context of the narrative telling (Cortazzi, 2001; Elbaz-Luwisch, 2007; Rymes, 2010)—time of day, physical setting, language choice, other present people, purpose of talk, and conditions of interaction (e.g., time constraints, permission to talk) This, and the next level, takes the analysts’ focus beyond, though without ever forgetting, the narrative text A third, and again interconnected, level of context relates to links between narrative construction and social practice, that is, the role of narratives in the doing of social lives in particular sociocultural and sociohistorical contexts (de Fina & Georgakopoulou, 2008) These broader, beyond-the-text levels of context are described in Pavlenko’s (2007) conclusion of her discussion of narrative contextual analysis: Narrative analysis in sociolinguistic studies has to consider larger historical, political, social, and economic circumstances that shape the narratives and are reflected in them, language ideologies and discourses that have currency in narrators’ communities and with regard to which they position themselves, and, last but not least, the setting where particular versions of narrative experience are produced and the audience they are produced for (pp 176–177) Not all analysts follow sociolinguistic approaches to narrative knowledging, with its detailed examination of narrative text Furthermore, although the analysis of conversations and interviews, particularly the latter, is common in many forms of narrative inquiry, as I have shown from studies discussed in this article, sometimes the focus is more on the content of what interviewees have to say Also, other forms of narrative data are common in TESOL, such as digital learning histories, teacher reflective journals, teacher blogs, videorecordings of classroom interaction, classroom observation field notes, narratives frames, memoirs and 404 TESOL QUARTERLY diaries But the same analytical interest in local and macro contextual details still applies Kate Cadman and Jill Brown TESOL and TESD in remote Aboriginal Australia: The ‘‘true’’ story? A reviewer of the article comments that it ‘‘gives vivid glimpses into teachers’ representations of their lives and those of the people they teach, and their working conditions,’’ and it also provides ‘‘pointers towards official ‘wrongheadedness’ and neglect.’’ Cadman and Brown’s contribution to this special-topic issue illustrates such interest Their article describes their narrative inquiry journey to learn about the situated working experiences of three English teachers working in remote Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory of Australia The authors comment that they chose not to conduct a ‘‘socialtheoretical analysis’’ and instead take a more literary route to examine plot (events which unfold in the teachers’ lives over time and the meaning they assign to those events), character (the people in the stories, including students, community elders, and administrators, and their relationships with the teachers), and setting (the classrooms, schools, and communities where the stories were situated) Their analysis of their dialogic conversations (Anderson, 1997) presents an account of the teachers’ experiences rich in contextual detail At the local level, they cover life in the remote location, everyday classroom activities, and the ‘‘physically and culturally confronting’’ setting of the community The wider context is also brought into the picture in order for the researchers (and the readers of their research report) to gain a fuller understanding of the teachers’ experiences, including Australian educational policy and practice and the ‘‘paralysing muddledom of governments.’’ Cadman and Brown’s narrative inquiry journey, however, was not quite what they had planned Along the way they encountered serious questions about their own methodological responsibilities as narrative researchers, especially the potential for ‘‘predatory,’’ coercive behaviour and the asymmetries of power in research conversations They also encountered questions regarding their retelling of the teachers’ stories, in the form of the article they wrote for this journal, which is the topic of the next section REPORTING THE FINDINGS By the time narrative researchers report their findings in the form of research texts, such as dissertations, journal articles, conference presentations, and ethnographic playscripts (Nelson, 2011), the narrator’s lived events have gone through multiple layers of representation NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 405 The first, which I discussed above, is the telling of the story during the data-collection stage of an inquiry Polkinghorne (2007) distinguishes between life events (what actually happened to the research participants in real life), experienced meaning (the meaning participants make of the life events), and storied descriptions (the narratives constructed by the participants which express their meaning made of the life events) These correspond quite closely to Pavlenko’s (2007, p 165) three types of reality: life reality (how things are or were), subject reality (how things or events were experienced by participants), and text reality (ways in which things or events are narrated by the participants) Benson (this issue) provides an example of these differences with his concept of language learning careers; careers, as learners’ underlying conceptions of their learning activities and processes, mediate between those activities and processes and the discursive construction of the narrative telling of those events, which Benson refers to as language learning histories The issue that concerns narrative researchers is that by the time a narrative is constructed as data (storied description, text reality or learning history) the actual life events have been filtered through the narrative knowledging of the participant and its textual reproduction So, what we hear in an interview or read in a teacher journal has imposed structures on and re-shaped the actual life events This is so for a number of reasons, for example, the limitations of language and memory; participants’ willingness, ability, and opportunity to tell; and the micro and macro contexts of telling, including the relationship with the researcher and that researcher’s contributions to narrative coconstruction How true are the stories then that we are told—whether the facts of what happened or the participants’ experiences of these (i.e., the meaning they attach to them)? And what is not told? What is left out? (Phillips, 1997; Polkinghorne, 2007; Sharkey, 2004) These are questions that concerned Cadman and Brown They felt considerable disquiet about the ‘‘silenced voices’’ in their research landscape (not only of the participants, but also of others in their classrooms and communities) and their own complicity as narrative inquirers in this silencing, especially when they prepared their report on the study—the article included in this special-topic issue A second layer of representation comes into play, then, when researchers publish or present their research reports (moving to the right-hand side of Figure 1) Canagarajah (1996) reminds us that reporting research findings ‘‘is no insignificant appendage to the research process It is the written document [spoken presentation, performed play] that embodies, reflects, and often constitutes the whole research activity for the scholarly community’’ (p 322) This is where the voices of the participant narrators are heard In reflecting on the 406 TESOL QUARTERLY reporting process, Cadman and Brown identify a paradox at the heart of their narrative inquiry journey: ‘‘It is not possible to fulfil the conventional goals of academic research without engaging the technologies of silence that are required for a successful outcome.’’ Included in these technologies of silence is the recasting of participants’ stories for the purpose of reporting The retelling of the stories gives significant power to authors; they choose what to retell in the report and how to organize it, and they choose what to leave out These choices have serious ethical implications (see Cortazzi & Jin, 2006), which Bell (this issue) discusses in relation to big-story narrative inquiry She mentions possible ethical tensions arising from cultural differences in representing the lives of participants, the relationships between participant and researcher (which she says may develop into a close friendship), negotiating exit at the end of a study, and maintaining the anonymity (if desired) of the participant in the research report Cadman and Brown conclude that the reporting aspect of narrative knowledging remains a major challenge for narrative researchers working in TESOL, and suggest that alternative ways of reporting be sought Nelson (this issue) suggests possibilities which may work toward achieving this goal Cynthia D Nelson Narratives of classroom life: Changing conceptions of knowledge A reviewer of this article comments that Nelson warns of the pitfalls of presenting autobiographic narratives in the form of research reports and dissertations, and makes the case for ‘‘narrative research securing a more solid footing in the TESOL field as a legitimate form of knowledge construction.’’ Focussing on classroom narratives, Nelson suggests incorporating into language education research crafted narratives of classroom life By these she means narratives that are ‘‘deliberately styled in arts-based forms’’ such as poems and plays and which are meant to be evocative and aesthetically engaging These could be in written, visual, video, or performance modes In 1996 Canagarajah pointed out that ‘‘narratives are gaining prominence in research publications because they represent holistically the local knowledge of the communities studied’’ (p 327) Nelson agrees but feels that narrative authors are not doing a satisfactory job She recalls feeling disappointment when reading the conclusion of ‘‘yet another self-focussed text.’’ She says why: … too much detail, too little depth; too much angst, not enough insight; too much about what happened, not enough about what it all might mean – especially for readers in other locales Some autobiographic narratives seem strangely generic; on the bland side; sometimes the tone seems aimlessly NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 407 confessional or self-consciously clever; sometimes the accompanying analysis seems sketchy, failing to come together into a focused scholarly argument Nelson’s inspiration for considering the inclusion of crafted narratives in language education research was not only the disappointment she felt with the quality of the narrative reports she encountered She also questioned the epistemological purpose of her own narrative reporting, especially within a context of shifting conceptions of knowledge Nelson proposes that crafted classroom-life narratives, within a critical narrative studies framework, will contribute to the democratization of knowledge work—for teachers, learners, researchers, and readers—by making what is reported more accessible, relevant, and inclusive (i.e., critical narrative knowledging) But where are the researchers in all of this? In their research reports, narrative researchers aim to represent the stories of their participants and their interpretations of these systematically, creatively, credibly, and ethically What participants do, who they are, and the meaning they make of their experiences are of central interest In most cases, the researchers have been intimately involved in all aspects of the inquiry project; selecting the participants, co-constructing narrative data with them, analyzing the data (with them), and then writing/presenting/ performing the research report And yet, as Canagarajah (1996) says, they are often conspicuously absent from these reports, ‘‘looming behind the text as an omniscient, transcendental, all-knowing figure This convention hides the manner in which the subjectivity of the researchers—with their complex values, ideologies, and experiences – shapes the research activity and findings’’ (p 324) Norton and Early (this issue) address this inconsistency head-on in their report of their collaborative work with Ugandan teachers They this by explicitly investigating through the analysis of small stories how their researcher identities were negotiated and constructed with the teachers in the particular contexts in which they worked together And when it came time to write their research report, they exposed their research work, their goals and values, their ideological positions, and their identity work on the page for all to read As Canagarajah has said, however, this is not always the case in TESOL narrative reporting (but see the articles in this issue, particularly Bell, Cadman and Brown, and Menard-Warwick; see also Hayes, 2010) A third layer of representation, receptive representation, is evident when the research report is read or heard by teachers and researchers in the wider community Canagarajah (1996) comments that ‘‘narratives represent concrete forms of knowledge that are open to further interpretation’’ (p 327), meaning that they represent local, bottom-up knowledge which because of the nature of their representation 408 TESOL QUARTERLY (including the form they take in research reports) remain ‘‘open-ended for creative theorization’’; that is, they invite further narrative knowledging on the part of consumers of the research reports Nelson (this issue) agrees, saying that narratives are more than just a means of communicating ideas and research findings; they are a creative means of construing the ideas and findings—for both researchers and readers of research reports She acknowledges, however, that narratives ‘‘seem resistant to the simplistic and speedy summations often required in research.’’ This presents a challenge to authors, she adds, because they are caught up in the tension between advancing particular viewpoints and inviting diverse, alternative points of view In other words, presenters of narrative research reports aim to represent the stories of their participants, and they desire to make known their interpretations of these At the same time they invite their audience to engage in their own narrative knowledging, that is, to make sense of the stories, ‘‘bringing their positioned identities and cultural filters to interpretation’’ (Riessman, 2008, p 111) The point I am making here is that the readers of research reports are an integral part of the narrative knowledging process Narrative reporters have something to (re)tell and they keep their audiences squarely in mind during the (re)telling CONCLUSION: EXPLORING AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL SELF My own narrative research story has taken somewhat of a backseat in the last few sections of this article Instead, I have reported on the research work of others, describing their research topics, their methodological issues and challenges, and their narrative knowledging practices After introducing the concept of narrative knowledging, I discussed narrative (co)construction, analysis and reporting, and integrated into the discussion research issues related to TESOL narrative research interrogated by the authors in this special-topic issue Also, where appropriate, I included other literature from within and beyond the field of TESOL I organized this broad discussion in the form of a framework (see Figure 1) which delineates the generic, mutually informing stages and participants, and their interrelationships, in narrative research projects From what I have had to say, it is clear that narrative research means different things to different researchers For some, it means becoming involved in the big stories of their participants’ lives, opening up and exploring vast spatiotemporal landscapes For others, it means focusing on the here and now of narrative small stories generated in talk-in-interaction For some, reflections on the content of past experience are important, and for others, it is the form of emergent narratives in conversation that attracts analytical attention Smith (2007) NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGING IN TESOL 409 sums up this situation by saying that narrative research might ‘‘be best considered an umbrella term for a mosaic of research efforts, with diverse theoretical musings, methods, empirical groundings, and/or significance all revolving around an interest in narrative’’ (p 392) But where does this leave us as narrative researchers in TESOL? Where we fit in? These were questions a colleague and I asked about ourselves a few years ago We wanted to learn more about narrative research and our place within it In order to so we embarked on a project, a narrative inquiry project (see Barkhuizen & Hacker, 2008), to learn more about narrative inquiry Through multiple face-to-face and electronic conversations over an extended period of time, we were able to position ourselves tentatively within a broad narrative research paradigm, knowing that our positions would constantly change as we learned more and more about narrative inquiry Our investigation revealed four, what we called, variables (because what they represent are continuously shifting) which captured for us the core ingredients of our narrative research work, our narrative knowledging, at the time These four variables are narrative knowing (knowing about narrative research, particularly its theoretical underpinnings), narrative doing (knowing about narrative methodologies and research approaches to doing narrative research), narrative applying (knowing how to narrative research on a practical, procedural level, with a focus on methods), and narrative feeling (our affective responses to the narrative work we were doing) In sum, we were able to position ourselves in the complex matrix that these interacting variables created, and we found this satisfying and useful In a sense, within the world of narrative research we had temporarily discovered our epistemological and methodological selves, and the exploration continues To end this article, I invite readers, particularly novice narrative researchers, to explore their epistemological and methodological selves As has been noted, the field is wide open, especially in the diverse world of TESOL There is plenty of space to move, plenty of avenues to investigate, plenty of opportunity to ‘‘muddle around in this territory’’ (see opening quotation, Manguel, 2007, p 3) However, I hope that this article has provided some coherence to this territory, so that researchers are able to locate and re-locate themselves within it and thus give some purpose and direction (and hence less ‘‘muddling’’) to their narrative knowledging Narrative research has only fairly recently begun to gain traction in TESOL Researchers have drawn on narrative theories and research exemplars from other disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, health sciences, and particularly, general education In TESOL, early research efforts have been noted and have formed the foundation for further narrative knowledging The articles in this special-topic issue demonstrate this quite evidently 410 TESOL QUARTERLY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am very grateful to Merrill Swain, Sue Gray, Airil Adnan, and Takaaki Hiratsuka for reading and commenting on a draft of this article Putting together this special-topic issue involved numerous rounds of abstract and article reviewing Many people have given very generously of their time and expertise to ensure that this process has been thorough and systematic It has been a pleasure working with them I would like to thank the following reviewers for their excellent work, especially Ralph Adendorff, Zane Goebel, and Rosemary Wette: Dwight Atkinson, Kathi Bailey, Helen Basturkmen, Rob Batstone, Phil Benson, Zannie Bock, Simon Borg, Anne Burns, Suresh Canagarajah, Simon Coffey, Eton Churchill, Melanie Cooke, Averil Coxhead, Michel de Courcy, Anna de Fina, Zoltan Doărnyei, Liz Ellis, Margaret Franken, Donald Freeman, Xuesong Andy Gao, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Sue Gray, Penny Haworth, Christina Higgins, Adrian Holliday, Richard Kiely, Margaret Kitchen, Jim Lantolf, Angel Lin, Shondel Nero, Andrea Simon-Maeda, Stephen May, Kay McCormick, Vera Menezes, Jenny Miller, Suhanthie Motha, Jean Parkinson, Yvonne Reed, Keith Richards, Cristina Ros i Sole, James Simpson, Gillian Skyrme, Pat Strauss, Moyra Sweetnam-Evans, Steven Talmy, Lucia Thesen, Sheila Trahar, Christa van der Walt, Rachel Varshney, and Cynthia White THE AUTHOR Gary Barkhuizen works in the Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand His teaching and research interests are in the areas of teacher education, sociolinguistics, learner language, and language and migration He has published widely in a range of journals, including TESOL Quarterly, Applied Linguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, International Journal of Bilingualism, Linguistics and Education, and ELT Journal In 2010 he was guest editor of a special-topic issue of Language Teaching Research (with Simon Borg) on language teacher education He is author of Analysing Learner Language (with Rod Ellis, Oxford University Press, 2005) REFERENCES Anderson, H (1997) Conversation, language, and possibilities: A postmodern approach to therapy New York, NY: Basic Books Atkinson, P (1997) Narrative turn or blind alley? 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