TESOL and TESD in Remote Aboriginal Australia: The “True” Story?

TESOL and TESD in Remote Aboriginal Australia: The ‘‘True’’ Story? KATE CADMAN University of Adelaide Adelaide, Australia JILL BROWN Monash University Clayton, Australia It is widely recognised that teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) and teaching English as a second dialect (TESD) in remote Indigenous Australia have a history of repeated failure of both policy and practice National language testing has been been forcefully attacked by TESOL specialists, producing strong debate amongst politicians and educators Meanwhile, the teachers in these remote communities, usually female, non-Indigenous outsiders, are not consulted and rarely remain in these teaching locations This article tells the story of how we, as researchers, developed a narrative inquiry project to investigate the situated stories of three teachers Most immediately we noted how the stories we heard were as shocking for their silences as for what they told us, and the ‘‘truth’’ they offered lay primarily in the magnetism of narrative itself through the vitality of the ‘‘self’’ that came to life within the teacher’s story Unpredictably, however, and of greater significance for our understanding, our project confronted us with our own complicity in the silencing technologies effected by both the methodological processes and textual products of narrative study We came to conclude that there is an inherent paradox at the heart of narrative inquiry which must be addressed in all its complexity if its emancipatory and voice-releasing goals are to be realised doi: 10.5054/tq.2011.256794 ot long ago in October 2009 a respected Australian Aboriginal leader, Noel Pearson (2009a, p 1), announced in the Australian national press that ‘‘Aboriginal disadvantage in employment, housing and, ultimately, life expectancy can be removed only if education is fixed up.’’ In making this statement, Pearson, Director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, was affirming yet again the N 440 TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 45, No 3, September 2011 prevailing picture of remote Australian education as one of consistent educational failure and student degradation With respect to English language education in particular, there has recently been little coherence in policy or practice that can afford us, as researchers, teachers, and trainers of TESOL practitioners, any clarity or confidence in the way forward Despite the paralysing muddledom of governments and social commentators, there have been some areas of scholarly consensus It is recognised as imperative for Indigenous Australian children to have specially designed access to high-quality mainstream education and to learn standard Australian English It is also firmly believed that Aboriginal peoples need to be institutionally supported to own their own languages and heritages if they are to resist assimilation and cultural extinction However, how much, how, and when, TESOL and teaching English as a second dialect (TESD) should be implemented for remote Aboriginal children are issues that are heatedly debated What is known, though, is that by far the largest majority of TESOL/TESD teachers in these contexts are non-Indigenous outsiders who may or may not have the motivation and skills needed to deal with the realities of teaching in these remote Indigenous communities The facts are bleak Pay rates and conditions of service are attractive, with high rental subsidies, additional annual leave, tax and travel incentives, and good promotion and transfer arrangements (Harrison, 2008) Yet, despite these incentives, schools have difficulty retaining staff, and there is little public understanding or acknowledgement of the challenges of working in these schools Our goal in this research project was to interrogate the complexities inherent in this situation through the lens of a narrative inquiry methodology, following Hayes’ (2010) recent call for individual life stories that will ‘‘contribute to an increased understanding of teachers’ lives within their specific contexts in order that the knowledge base of TESOL in its multiple professional realisations might be expanded’’ (p 58) Through teachers’ narratives we felt that new light could be thrown on White teachers’ experiences, and thus on some of the generally obscured challenges of teaching and learning in these remote schools However, our scholarly explorations did not lead us in the directions, nor to the conclusions, we had anticipated In this article we describe our research journey and the issues it raised for us We begin by focussing on recent developments in Australian remote TESOL/TESD practice that create the context for teachers’ experience and that provoked our desire to learn more We then describe the challenges we found we had to engage with, which for us, seemed at the heart of the narrative inquiry methodology we were employing We met serious questions of researcher and narrator TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 441 responsibility in relation to both the methodological processes and the textual products of the research we were undertaking The issues that emerged disturbingly problematised our understanding of TESOL/ TESD research in academic contexts and led us to realise that we would need to rethink the contributions that would be possible for us from a narrative methodological approach RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN TESOL/TESD FOR REMOTE AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS SCHOOLS One highly contentious issue in Australian educational policy and practice has centred on recognition of Indigenous students’ rights to an educational curriculum that supports their home language and maintains their cultural knowledge and skills In one state, the Northern Territory (NT), which has a high proportion of remote Indigenous community schools, sudden policy changes in 2008 shocked the education community and provoked immediate and acrimonious debate The (then) NT Minister for Education, Marion Scrymgour, announced a directive that all NT schools would thenceforward provide at least hours of English instruction each day, thus effectively closing down the last remaining NT bilingual teaching programs Direct results of this directive were that qualified Indigenous educators were reduced to the status of teacher aides and translators, and bilingual curricula and materials developed collaboratively over 30 years were lost or destroyed (Adoniou, 2008) Scrymgour’s decision has subsequently been ratified by the incumbent Federal Government, and across the country conflicting arguments have been developed to justify diametrically opposing attitudes to these policies Advocates were provided with evidence to support their agreement with these severe measures for restructuring language curriculum by the introduction of a federal National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) An independent report entitled ‘‘Revisiting Indigenous Education’’ (Hughes & Hughes, 2009) used NAPLAN statistical results to conclude that ‘‘Literacy and numeracy have not improved in 20 years’’ (p 2) and that ‘‘Indigenous bilingual programs have failed to deliver literacy and numeracy in any language’’ (p 9) In contrast, Simpson and colleagues in the Research Program at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) have presented a critical historical analysis defending the equity considerations that influenced bilingual policy directions (Simpson, Caffery, & McConvell, 2009) More recently, educational linguists have strongly argued that NAPLAN statistics are skewed and inappropriate for English as a second language (ESL) or English as a 442 TESOL QUARTERLY second dialect (ESD) students,1 and a recent study carried out by an economist in a specific remote location made the same point (Taylor, 2010, pp 27–28) Pearson himself, recognising the inherent tension between the necessary priorities, came down on the need for curriculum priority of English literacy (Pearson, 2009b); some scholars agreed with him (Clendinnen, 2009), whereas others disagreed (Owen, 2010) And so, in what have been turbulent political times in Australia, the debate continues Remote Indigenous communities themselves are quite diverse both in their educational histories and in their attitudes to the political decisions that are forced upon them (Robinson, 2008) Meanwhile, from the one group with whom we work most closely, the White, usually female teachers whose professional and personal lives are volcanically affected by these issues, there has been a deafening silence We came increasingly to notice the missing voices of the teachers whose daily work and lives are at the centre of the implementation of whatever the politicians, scholars, and community stakeholders require And as we talked further with them, our unanswered questions developed focus: N Who are the teachers responsible for TESOL and TESD in remote Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory of Australia? N What they experience? What they know? N What can their stories of their own experience tell us about TESOL/ TESD teaching in these remote communities? What is it like to be a teacher there? N How can narrative inquiry help us to understand the situations for these teachers? The opening for narrative inquiry to provide crucial insights to inform the continuing debates seemed especially relevant and fertile for us NARRATIVE INQUIRY RESEARCH The special potential which narrative inquiry offers research opportunities in TESOL/TESD is well established (see Bell, 2002; Pavlenko, 2002) It draws for its confidence on the late 20th century narrative turn in the social sciences as explained, for example, by Czarniawska (2004, p 1) citing Barthes (1977): ‘‘Narrative begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a A submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Administration and Reporting of NAPLAN Testing by the combined scholars of three Australian applied linguistics organisations presented detailed evidence for the claim that ‘‘NAPLAN tests yield inaccurate, inconsistent and invalid data about these [EAL/EAD] students’’ (Australian Council of TESOL Associations, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, & Australian Linguistics Society, 2010, p 3) TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 443 people without narrative narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.’’ Bruner (1990, 1991) famously identified the essential satisfaction of narrative understanding for both teller and receiver: ‘‘meanings are sought for, not imposed ex hypothesi by an outsider but arrived at by indigenous participants immersed in the culture’s own processes for negotiating meaning’’ (1991, p 17) Therein lies the verisimilitude of narrative and its magnetism for researchers Much earlier, Hardy (1968) had opened the way for such an analysis in her foundational statement: Narrative is not to be regarded as an aesthetic invention used by artists to control, manipulate and order experience, but a primary act of mind transferred to art from life (p 5) This remarkable insight was subsequently developed by Carr (1986) into a coherent theory of historical interpretation in which he argued: ‘‘Narrative form is not a dress which covers something else but the structure inherent in human experience and action’’ (p 65) In Carr’s extension, ‘‘the temporal-narrative organisation’’ is the organising principle ‘‘not only of experiences and actions but also of the self who experiences and acts’’ (p 149) In this way, as both creators and receivers of narratives, we humans recognise a fundamental guiding principle through which our subjectivities are formed, and we come to ascribe meanings and values to the events and actions of our lives The measure of narrative ‘‘truth’’ cannot be ascertained by empirical or positivist standards but by ‘‘the power of stories to evoke the vividness of lived experience’’ (Berger & Quinney, 2004, p 1) in all its messy, subjective, and idiosyncratic detail The life force of storying opens up a process not only for understanding and structuring the world we humans experience, but, as suggested earlier by Carr, for understanding and structuring oneself in that world Thus the act of storying itself allows us to get closer to a sense of who we are in the story we create, and this is the key to its truth In education, as a result of the narrative turn there has clearly been a resurgence of scholarly confidence in teachers’ narratives for generating theoretical as well as practical insight, and teachers have generally become more confident in articulating professional and personal perspectives Collections of energetic teaching stories that flesh out the daily experiences of classrooms along with the emotional realities which permeate them have become more and more accessible (Johnson & Golombeck, 2002) Thanks notably to the work of Clandinin and Connelly (1995, 2000), Johnson and Golombeck (2002, 2003), and others, it has been agreed that ‘‘Teachers’ narrative inquiry has come of age , finally becoming a legitimate source of teacher-generated 444 TESOL QUARTERLY knowledge and a viable tool for teachers’ professional development’’ (Cheng, 2003, p 182) The very messiness of grass-roots educational knowledge-building has increased our trust in the narrative for ordering and analysing professional teaching insight (Elbaz, 1991, in Johnson, 2006, p 242); in fact, as Jalongo, Isenberg, and Gerbracht (1995) note, The good teacher’s life is not an orderly professional pathway; rather, it is a personal journey shaped by context and choice, perspective and values Narrative is uniquely well suited to that personal/professional odyssey It is primarily through story, one student at a time, that teachers organise their thinking and tap into the collective, accumulated wisdom of their profession (p xvii) This is nowhere more true than in TESOL, where narrative inquiry has seemed intellectually, educationally, and emotionally satisfying Johnson (2006, p 238) argues strongly that the epistemological stance of the ‘‘sociocultural turn’’ opens up a legitimate way of knowing and coming to know, if we clearly account for individual positioning in relation to social context And these complex interrelationships among context, individual perspective, and knowledge have been enthusiastically taken up and developed by TESOL practitioner-researchers across the world: Hooley (2009) in Australia; He (2002) in Canada; Xu and Liu (2009) and Tsui (2007) in China; Barkhuizen and colleagues in South Africa and New Zealand (Barkhuizen, 2009; Barkhiuzen & de Klerk, 2006; Barkhuizen & Wette, 2008), among many others And the approaches taken in these studies are as varied as their contexts For TESOL, Pavlenko (2002) made a distinction between narrative inquiry and narrative study2 to highlight the distinction between those researchers who elicit and explore a specific focus through the teaching stories of others and those teacher–researchers who analyse their own stories in the form of autoethnographic reflection (Ellis, 2004; for TESOL examples, see Cadman, 2008; Hewson, 2006) Clearly, considerations of both process and product are central to any evaluation of narrative inquiry as a methodology for TESOL In this project our purpose was to research the teaching situations of others In this we were particularly influenced by a widespread belief that rewarding, dialogic relationships can be the ground for generating knowledge and insights in contexts traditionally marginalised by mainstream research McEwan (1997) shows how feminists such as Nel Noddings (1991) have developed research principles of fidelity and caring, and prioritises what he calls ‘‘an ethics of caring, connectedness Pavlenko (2002) points out that ‘‘Narrative inquiry is usually understood to be an ethnographic approach to eliciting understandings, whereas narrative study has a greater focus on narrative construction from a variety of perspectives’’ (p 213) TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 445 and collaboration’’ to create narrative as ‘‘an expressive form that conveys a distinctive and undervalued way of knowing’’ (p 89) Researchers such as Schulz, Schroeder, and Brody (1997) stress the importance for mutual trust and collaboratively created safe spaces in order to generate research relationships in which all parties feel cared for and nurtured in the development and telling of their stories It was primarily for all these reasons that narrative inquiry became a convincing and salient methodology for our research with teachers in remote Australian Aboriginal communities We were aware of the theoretical work of other academic researchers in this narrow field (Connelly, 2002; Schulz, 2007), but we were not ourselves motivated to advance theory or develop abstracted understanding Perhaps naăvely, through narratives we saw the potential to flesh out teachers’ lived experiences—the living dynamics, the kaleidoscopic detail of the teacher’s idiosyncratic professional, intellectual, and emotional experience, informed by their professional training, expertise, and personal disposition, in their own context, tapping into the complexities of motivations which are engendered and played out in the process of storying METHODOLOGICAL DANGERS IN AIM, PROCEDURE, AND TEXT As we progressed our project, however, we developed a growing recognition of the methodological hazards that have been associated with narrative inquiry The most obvious of these, an aspiration to gain some true understanding of real events, people, and institutional situations, has been vigorously problematized in debates among oral historians and historiographers An informed evaluation by Layman (2010) left us with the sobering reminder that, although the moral imperative to collect and record the interpretations of individuals is now stronger than ever, as researchers we must act on the knowledge that ‘‘memories are subjectively shaped and are expressed in particular ways in situated dialogue’’; narratives alone will not allow us to ‘‘uncover the real truth about the past through ordinary people’s transparent recollections’’ (p 150) And as we delved deeper, further complexities came into view In a special edition on narrative perspectives in teaching, McEwan (1997) clearly defines what he called ‘‘diametrically opposite’’ views of narrative research, in that, as well as ‘‘emancipatory,’’ such research is also necessarily ‘‘coercive.’’ McEwan’s resolution is to ascribe these opposing capacities to the distinct operations of methodological process and textual product, respectively: ‘‘The coercive function focuses on the social 446 TESOL QUARTERLY effects of the narrative form; the emancipatory function concerns the effects of the process of storytelling and meaning making’’ (p 89) However, the coercive manipulations of process have also been strongly highlighted (see Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) From one perspective, ethically committed narrative researchers working within the process require an emancipatory methodological procedure which is ‘‘collaborative involv[ing] a close relationship akin to friendship, which joins the partners in a new narrative unity’’ (Schulz et al., 1997, p 474) and demand ‘‘dialogical processes that assist story-givers in untangling the complex meanings of their own lived experiences’’ (Larson, 1997, p 456) From another, this process is inevitably coercive Steinar Kvale (1996), author of an early and extremely influential guide to qualitative research interviewing, puts the coercive view most damningly in his subsequent appraisal of qualitative interview practice Kvale (2006) denies all possibility for ‘‘dialogic’’ interview in research contexts and argues that ‘‘a research interview is not an open and dominance-free dialogue between equal partners—the interviewer’s project and knowledge interest set the agenda and rule the conversation’’ (p 484) His concluding recitation of the entire narrative of Little Red Riding Hood, ends with this quite shocking message: ‘‘And saying these words, this wicked wolf fell upon Little Red Riding Hood and ate her all up.’’ There are many kinds of wolves Today we may perhaps include some qualitative interviewers, who through their gentle, warm and caring approaches may efficiently circumvent the interviewee’s defences to strangers and invade their private worlds Their big eyes and ears sensitively grasp for potential consumption what the multiple interview voices tell them ‘‘And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.’’ (Kvale, 2006, p 498) In our view such a construction of the social researcher as predator is too homogenised and gendered to be convincing, and seriously underestimates the agency of both the researcher and the participant in a dialogic interview process Nevertheless, it raised our awareness of the potential for predatory behaviour in qualitative inquiry and kept us mindful of the asymmetries of power in our own research conversations Interestingly, and quite distinct from these issues of methodological process, narrative research scholars such as McEwan (1997, pp 87–88) have pointed to the ‘‘coercions’’ and ‘‘seductions’’ of conventional narrative texts According to McEwan, story genres, from ‘‘Grand Narratives’’ through to popular myths, are culture specific and both ‘‘limited and limiting’’ in terms of their content and their form, especially in educational settings: ‘‘These implicit genres are a sort of TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 447 prefabricated line of scaffolds or templates, and we tend to sort our perceptions and experiences into those that we recognise as comfortable and familiar structures or plots’’ (pp 87–88) Even more forcefully, Mink (1970) had earlier contradicted Hardy’s philosophical position (1968), asserting that ‘‘stories are not lived but told Life has no beginnings, middles, or ends; [these] belong to the story we tell ourselves later’’ (p 557) In this view any tale told, even one’s own story, is seen as ‘‘the imposition of a pattern on a life’’ (Jelinek, 1986, p 2), marked as much by what is not included or emphasised, as by what is Stories are then seen as reinforcements of existing power structures—texts which, even allowing for their emancipatory goals, ‘‘give voice to a celebration of scripts of domination’’ (Goodson, 1997, p 114) Such culturally embedded personal narratives are readily available in our own TESOL contexts Even in personal, autoethnographic storytelling the patterning is evident, as manipulations of vocabulary, phrasing and syntax, and rhetorical effects are engineered to appeal to an Anglo-Celtic audience Particularly revealing for our immediate study was a glossy paperback entitled Seven seasons at Aurukun3: My unforgettable time at a remote Aboriginal school In a fairly typical example, the teacher–author narrates the scene at a school fair: Teacher Melissa and I sit at a school desk in the shade of a tall mango tree, with boxes of black T-shirts for sale Kids clamber on us, lean on us, make bunny ears, posing for photos The sun’s rays are angling now to tint the light a burnished gold in the steam of the afternoon It is a good light for this happy scene I haven’t seen a crowd this big outside the tavern, or barracking for fights (Shaw, 2009, p 117) The sustained present tense here, the ‘‘kids’’ play, the idyllic elements of landscape in the archaic vocabulary of angling rays and burnished gold, engineer a discursively stark contrast with the drunken crowd barracking for a fight, at least for those of us readers reared on romantic novels in English And in such ways, as we story the world, it stories us and we are constructed for our readers in its telling Even more potentially distorting is what Denzin and Lincoln (1995, p 1) have identified as the academic ‘‘colonisation’’ that occurs when, as researchers, we try to represent the lived experiences of others in our scholarly texts Goodson (1997) refers to this as a ‘‘representational crisis’’ in which ‘‘[t]he other becomes an extension of the author’s voice The authority of their ‘original’ voice is subsumed within the larger text and its double-agency’’ (Denzin, 1995, as cited in Goodson, 1997, p 112) And indeed, in our own scholarly and professional contexts, this kind of 448 A remote Aboriginal community in Northern Australia TESOL QUARTERLY theoretical analysis is required for recognition and publication so that, for institutional acceptance, the researcher’s ‘‘story’’ must be the dominant one; the authoritative ‘‘voice’’ of the scholar–storyteller subsumes that of the teacher–storyteller (which of course itself subsumes the voices of the students at its heart) A typical example from the abstract of a successful nationally presented research paper4 demonstrates the convention: Abstract This paper [entitled ‘‘Investigating whiteness: Whiteness processes: Enigma or reality in disguise?’’] reviews the debates on whiteness To exemplify the use of whiteness as a means to understand these issues the paper presents extracts of research recently carried out in an Australian all-Indigenous educational setting It recounts the experiences of Theressa, a first year out teacher, as she self-reflects on responses she makes to her teaching context (Connelly, 2002, p 1) It is not difficult to appreciate the positions of both Connelly, the researcher, and Theressa, the teacher here, as they risk reproducing the processes of Kvale’s (2006) social science predator in the discursive formations that emerge In our own work we felt the serious danger in narrative inquiry of privileging the perspectives and interests of researchers through the textual performance of theoretical analysis The result for the original storyteller is so often no observable outcome, no action, no change, no return for them or their context We, as researchers, easily become agents of silencing the true stories that we most want to hear, learn from, and tell IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR OWN METHODOLOGY Thus, in all these ways our learning journey raised significant implications in relation to three clear aspects of the study we were engaging in (1) method of data collection, (2) principles of data analysis, and (3) how we would re-present the stories that were generated in order to represent the voices and perspectives of our participants Data Collection Perhaps as a result of our feminist and emancipatory goals we strengthened our resolve to try to work collaboratively with our Presented at the 2002 annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, a prestigious Australian scholarly association, and published in the proceedings on their web site TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 449 participants through the power issues we were all involved in as we undertook the ‘‘journey that researchers and story-givers must take together’’ (Larson, 1997, p 469) We recognised that this meant trusting in our ability to generate authentic and sincere relationships with our story-tellers, relationships that might be successful or unsuccessful but ones that would represent our real feelings and that we would be comfortable with later We found guidance in an insightful psychotherapy model of ‘‘dialogical conversation,’’ a way of talking with rather than talking to, in which ‘‘new meanings—different ways of understanding, making sense of, or punctuating one’s lived experiences—emerge and are mutually constructed’’ (Anderson, 1997, p 109) Anderson provides a set of key criteria for a successfully ‘‘dialogic conversation,’’ and, without any aim to be therapeutic ourselves, or emotionally manipulative, we could see their value for us: N creating a safe space, for sharing (not interpreting) issues and goals; N researcher approaching from a caring yet ‘‘not-knowing’’ position (because we don’t know!); N problems seen as socially constructed, linguistic events, not personal attacks; N participant as conversation partner and teacher; N researcher as welcome guest and learner; and N story development as internal and external dialogical conversation— an authentic interpersonal encounter (pp 109–112) Following these principles, we set out to generate dialogues out of warmth and genuine interest, just as we in everyday life Remaining mindful that we are outsiders and learners, we sustained our aim to work as democratically as possible through the whole process and to maintain that ethic of caring in which our teacher subjects, and we, could trust Data Analysis and Representation Today, issues of data analysis and textual representation continue to present us with ongoing and unresolved challenges We feel we still need to revisit our dialogic conversations so that they include greater opportunity for the storytellers to identify what has emerged in their narratives that is important for them and their professional contexts We are conscious that we have perhaps relied too much on our initial explanations of the goals of our project, and our performing of (albeit sincerely) shared values, without explicitly addressing broader possibilities for collaborating—in analysing the stories, in selecting readers and contexts for their publication, and in creating texts So now, even here, the requirement that we represent them confounds our present 450 TESOL QUARTERLY ideological position Yet, as Goodson (1997, p 117) has pointed out, teachers’ voices not ‘‘speak for themselves’’ without great danger of becoming disenfranchised, reduced to the personal and the practical, divorced from the ‘‘vernacular of power.’’ Finally then, in terms of answering our own contextual research questions we must accept that, as research outcomes, our teachers’ narratives cannot help us to ‘‘know’’ the ‘‘realities’’ they experienced Their stories may not be taken as probing truth to experience, events, and conditions, because such truth is always partial, constructed, contextual, contingent, possibly conflictual, morphing, and everunfinished Our narrators can, however, give us glimpses into their own narrative shaping of the ESOL teaching they have been involved in, however partial, culturally derivative, and refracted we acknowledge it must be in the telling Above all, in their narratives we can begin to hear their voices, hear how they construct themselves discursively, in imaginative interpretation of the lives they want to tell OUR STORY—RE-PRESENTING NARRATIVE VOICES At the centre of our researchers’ story are three anonymous narrators, Alice, Barbara, and Carol, who agreed to join us in our growing understanding of the narrative research journey and to tell us their stories of teaching in remote Australia Alice is a teacher with many years experience in White middle-class primary schools in southern Australia before she moved to a remote community with a focus on ESD language development Her story is a continuing one in that, of the three participants, she is the only one still engaged in teaching in a remote community Barbara was teaching ESL and music in an intensive language centre in Sydney before electing to work in a remote community school She has since moved overseas to work in a tertiary institution Carol spent most of her working life teaching adult literacy, ESL, and numeracy classes with the Council of Education and has returned to this position All three women are highly qualified: Alice is currently enrolled as a postgraduate research student; both Barbara and Carol have specialist postgraduate qualifications in addition to their initial teacher training All of them came to teaching in remote areas after years of teaching experience, and in this they are unusual Many teachers employed in remote community schools are first-year graduate teachers whose lack of experience, especially in TESOL, is very often used to explain the high staff turnover in these schools In our representation of these teacher–narrators and their narratives, for reasons given earlier, we have chosen not to conduct social– theoretical analysis but rather to try to bring to life here the speaking TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 451 personae that Alice, Barbara, and Carol create in their stories, as simply and authentically as we can To this we focus on traditionally recognised features of English language narratives—plot, character, and setting—before bringing together our final impressions of what we have learned Narrative Structure and Plot A starting point for trying to understand the women at the centre of their stories is a consideration of plot, that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end of the narrator’s story To start at the beginning: Why did these three women leave comfortable, ongoing employment in large cities to work in remote community schools? Alice describes herself as being ‘‘at the end of career stage’’ and wanting to ‘‘put something back.’’ Barbara wanted to ‘‘get out of Sydney, to see other places.’’ Carol thought she’d ‘‘give it a go’’ because she was ‘‘desperate for a change.’’ Although motivation is always more complex than these simple statements suggest, there is in all cases here a combination of the desire for adventure, for something different, and a concern to be of service, to something worth doing For each narrator the middle of the story involves a series of endlessly spiralling complications, only a very few of which can be discussed here The complications for Alice initially take the form of a ‘‘filthy classroom’’ and ‘‘no resources—literally nothing.’’ This is combined with a Year class of 28 students, none of whom is able to speak English or is accustomed to the education that Alice represents The result is ‘‘total chaos—kids running everywhere, throwing chairs at each other and at me, going to the toilet in the corner of the room—just unbelievable.’’ For Barbara the complications are ‘‘deep culture shock’’ and the isolation of being the only teacher and the only non-Indigenous person on a remote out-station where ‘‘every night there was yelling and fighting and screaming.’’ Carol arrives in the community to teach ESD to adults as part of the intervention strategy, to find her classroom is under a tree in the grounds of the local pub where ‘‘a bird shat on the test paper in the first class.’’ In addition to the ‘‘total lack of organization’’ there are other challenges presented by the local fauna Her job requires a midday drive from one community to another—this involves ‘‘a wet crossing which is croc-infested.’’ How are these complications resolved? What are the resolutions, the story endings, made available to the storytellers as they develop their understandings through narrative? Alice locates a scrubbing brush and gives her classroom ‘‘a decent clean.’’ Barbara ‘‘stuck it out for two years’’ until, overcome by ‘‘this incredible desire to play a team sport,’’ leaves the community Carol is forced by lack of job security—‘‘I would have had to 452 TESOL QUARTERLY give up my permanent job for a three month contract’’—to return to her city job Setting An almost palpable way that these women take form in their narratives is through their creation of the settings in which they bring themselves to life and to which they are forced to respond First, there is the immediate physical setting of teaching and living Alice’s classroom is ‘‘surrounded by a cyclone wire fence like a cage to keep the children in like a prison or a zoo.’’ Her accommodation is also behind a high cyclone fence Even her car is ‘‘in a cage’’ to prevent it being ‘‘trashed or stolen.’’ Barbara lives out in the desert in a portable building, part classroom, part teacher accommodation—‘‘they put in a dividing wall so I’d walk out one door and into the next.’’ Carol teaches under a tree and lives in a donga which is ‘‘a bit like a shipping container so not the best.’’ Then there is the wider setting of community, which is both physically and culturally confronting For Carol, there are the immense distances, the isolation, the extremes of poverty where ‘‘nearly everybody is unemployed,’’ the heat which is ‘‘unbearably hot sweat just dripping.’’ She describes one remote community as being ‘‘like something out of Africa just appalling.’’ Barbara experiences the differences from what she’s known before as being those of ‘‘two different worlds’’: in the world of western education, knowledge is organised, linear, and logical; in the world of the remote communities ‘‘it’s all about sacred trees and spirits and medicine men and you’re sitting around and the old men are singing the clouds away so it rains on someone else.’’ What comes across from all the narratives in their respective settings is the vast alienness of the landscape in contrast to the powerlessness of the teachers and the seeming irrelevance of the curriculum and language they are there to teach Central Character—Self in Story As in all autobiographical narratives, these three women construct a version of themselves within their stories, which is accessible to us as listeners and readers (with our awareness that this is a researcher– narrator’s version of the selves constructed by the participant– narrators) The Alice that emerges in her narrative is a determined woman, who both loves and hates her job—‘‘it’s wonderful and it breaks your heart at the same time.’’ She ‘‘hates’’ keeping the children locked in to teach them She ‘‘struggles’’ to get a scrubbing brush She spends ‘‘over $3,000 of my own money buying books and other equipment because why TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 453 shouldn’t they have what other children have?’’ She argues with the Principal, the other teachers, and the community elders, but sees herself as achieving little—‘‘the worst is when you see the terrible things that happen and you can’t anything to stop it or to help.’’ Despite all this, Alice is the only one of these narrators still teaching in a remote community school Barbara describes herself as an experienced, competent, and confident ESL teacher, at ease with different nationalities—‘‘I’ve worked with Vietnamese and South American and Chinese and Lebanese and all the rest.’’ She prepared for her new job by doing ‘‘all the normal teacher stuff some notes and ideas ready to go’’ but finds that ‘‘everything is totally different and everything I knew in terms of motivating a class does not work here.’’ The community violence which surrounds her is extreme and she is ‘‘really really shocked and didn’t have any strategies to cope with it.’’ Like Alice, there is passion in the persona who comes alive in the story—Barbara ‘‘rants and raves’’ in her attempts to control student behaviour However, she wants to understand herself and reflects deeply on her inability to cope with the isolation and the cultural differences—‘‘the problem is you don’t have a point of reference—is it me being too White and neurotic?’’ Carol is a complex mix of confidence and confusion She describes herself as ‘‘a city girl’’ who struggles to cope with the challenge presented by, in particular, close encounters with crocodiles—‘‘I thought, I can this, not bad for a city girl, turned around and there was a bloody big croc checking me out for breakfast.’’ Like Barbara, Carol’s ‘‘Whiteness’’ features in her understanding of herself: lack of effective program organization results in her having to leave a class without warning or notice, and she sees herself as positioned ‘‘just another idiot White person [part of] one more lot of seagulls coming in, scratching around and flying out.’’ After many years’ experience she approaches the task of teaching ESL and literacy to adults secure in her ability to so successfully—‘‘I’ve got the skills, I know how to it, I know I can it I know what I’m doing.’’ The students react very positively to her teaching—‘‘The adults were very keen when they found out I knew what I was doing.’’ Despite this endorsement of her skills, Carol’s reflections, like Barbara’s, show her sensitivity to the deeper issues in her context: She is afraid that her lack of understanding of cultural matters may result in her causing offence, of being part of the problem, rather than an attempt at a solution—‘‘I don’t know if there are culturally intrusive issues in equipping people with literacy and numeracy but I’m scared that there are I never knew if I was doing the right thing in terms of the cultural stuff.’’ She is infuriated by the lack of administrative support she experiences for her program, by the total lack of infrastructure and institutional organization, the implicit lack of respect for both teachers and students—‘‘it was a bloody disgrace basically’’—and it is hard not to be convinced by this simple directness 454 TESOL QUARTERLY Despite the differences, it is the need to ‘‘do the right thing’’ which is a common concern for all three women For Alice it is ‘‘right’’ that the children in her care have a clean classroom and the same equipment and choices available to them as ‘‘other children.’’ Barbara never ‘‘gets it right’’ in her own estimation; none of the skills she has seem to be appropriate, and, despite all her best efforts, she ‘‘felt like I was trying to change something that was beyond me and I didn’t even know what it was.’’ Other Characters—Students, Elders, Administrators As in all autobiographical narratives, the secondary characters in these stories play a significant role in throwing light on the persona of the central character And here, as with all teachers, students are the primary focus of much of the discussion For Alice the students are both ‘‘the best and the worst’’ of working in a remote community school The best are the teaching moments when ‘‘you see that they understand’’ and ‘‘when they say something like I feel safe here.’’ She describes the worst experiences in graphic detail These are not, as might be expected, related to student behaviour but to the horrors she knows are inflicted on so many of the children she teaches and which she feels powerless to prevent One little girl came in early with her clothes ripped, her hair matted, covered in dust and crying and she wouldn’t speak to me I got the [Indigenous teacher] aide, who said she was making a fuss She [the little girl] disappeared and I never saw her again Something really bad happened to her and I couldn’t anything and no one else seemed to be concerned or to care Another child, a little boy, attacks her with ‘‘a heavy wooden stick covered in nails.’’ He spends days hiding inside one of the large floor cushions Alice has in the reading corner His drawings show ‘‘very clear signs of sexual abuse’’ but again Alice feels herself to be powerless—‘‘I kept reporting this to the Principal but she did nothing.’’ These stories bring to life not only the abused children as characters but also Alice’s representation of the unsympathetic aide and the uncaring principal Other characters who emerge in Alice’s narrative are community elders who ‘‘want to be paid’’ for their contribution to the school program, the politicians ‘‘who throw money’’ at the problem, the school itself which is ‘‘the symbol of what has been done to this community.’’ Through Alice’s eyes there is so much going wrong: The school was set up as part of the Catholic missions program which ‘‘made seven tribes live together and they don’t get on and they don’t like each other.’’ The students in Barbara’s narrative seem unlike any of her previous students Rather than being motivated by individual achievement, ‘‘they TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 455 want to move together as a group it’s all about group unity.’’ Teacher praise is a negative—none of the students ‘‘want to be pointed out and made special by the fact that they’ve done well.’’ The boys leave school to ‘‘go through the law’’ [of Aboriginal initiation] and never come back because ‘‘now they’re men.’’ Barbara is allocated a ‘‘skin group’’ so her students will know how to place her in the community, how to relate to her in the classroom.5 The school in which she works is an independent Indigenous community school, and the elders have made their expectations clear: Barbara is to give the students the skills they need to ‘‘deal with government fellas, to be literate, to be able to read the agreement and deal with government people.’’ To Barbara the unspoken but nonetheless clear reference here is to a past where the community lacked these skills and was at the mercy of untrustworthy government officials One of the elders is a regular in Barbara’s classroom; old and almost blind, he is a self-assigned assistant teacher, and Barbara finds his presence difficult Carol’s students are also unlike any she has previously taught Once it has been established that Carol is competent, the number of students in her classes increases, and she is amazed by the speed with which adults who have never been to school acquire basic literacy She describes one student: There was one fellow who couldn’t read at all, had never been to school before and he was just so quick We had the whole language experience thing going and he made his own stories, had all the phonics going; this great big fellow, six foot something and he had this big beam on his face because he could read these stories within a month He went from nothing to very basic literacy, just learning sight words, just basic, but he was learning way way quicker than anyone I’d had before and yet he’d never been to school before Eagerness to acquire literacy in English and the ability to so both quickly and successfully are not characteristics normally associated with adult members of remote Indigenous communities, and Carol’s warmth and admiration for this adult student reveal her own irrepressible commitment and integrity The Struggles and the Silencings Despite our increasing unwillingness to make overarching theoretical claims in relation to the three ESOL teachers’ narratives we have presented here, taken together they made some powerful impressions 456 In Aboriginal communities skin groups act as a system of social classification, establishing each person’s place within the group They assign kinship relationships and determine the ways in which group members interact with each other For example, a person of the same skin group, of the same generation, is called brother or sister TESOL QUARTERLY we were unable to ignore Of greatest significance for us, and ironically most demanding in its call for notice, is the overall conspiracy of silence that the narrative inquiry research process itself both revealed and created At the simplest level, these narratives abound with silenced voices Perhaps loudest and most piercing here are the silenced voices of the abused children in Alice’s story At a deeper level there is Alice’s own voice which goes unheard by those who, notionally at least, have the power to hear and protect these children In Barbara’s story there are the silenced voices of the community in which Barbara works, who lack the skills needed to overcome their own historical disadvantage and be heard by the ‘‘government fellas.’’ Then there is Barbara’s voice which is silenced both by her own self-doubt and questioning, and by the possibility of being heard by others as she tries to find support via shortwave communication with the outside world Carol is institutionally silenced, her achievements extinguished, by her sudden removal from the community when the program on which she is teaching is terminated She has no chance to explain or even to say goodbye to her students She is also silenced by administrative refusal to hear her complaints or to care about the quality of the programs for which their institutions are responsible Then, in the context of this scholarly study, the final silencing implicates us all As scholarly researchers and readers, we are all complicit in the extent to which all three women are silenced by the text that we are writing and you are reading The narratives that have been re-presented here are tiny fragments of much longer, more complex stories They have not been told or moulded by the women to whom the stories belong but by us as narrative researchers; as such, they have become our stories, and the voices heard are ours This is the inescapable paradox we found at the heart of narrative inquiry It is not possible to fulfill the conventional goals of academic research without engaging the technologies of silence that are required for a successful outcome: methodological rigour in the performance of theoretical analysis; demonstration of formally referenced, authorevacuated, rhetorical style; the recasting of story to gain acceptance in a scholarly journal For us, the challenge now is to find better ways of working with gifted storyteller participants to bring their stories to voice in ways and places of their choosing, for their purposes, using our knowledge, skills, and power CONCLUSION In this article we have presented our own narrative research story as a scholarly analysis in order to highlight the insights, rewards, and TESOL AND TESD IN REMOTE ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA 457 complexities that we met as we developed this methodology for our research context in the remote Indigenous schools of Northern Australia Our research journey began with a perhaps naăve desire to learn something of the realities of the personal and professional lives of ESOL teachers in these Indigenous contexts What we glimpsed through the journey, however, caused us to rethink our initial expectations of the possibilities for truth in the narratives we heard; in fact, the closest truth to life we came to trust lay within the potential of the narrative to bring to life ‘‘the self who experiences and acts’’ at its centre (Carr, 1986) For us, Alice, Barbara, and Carol live resoundingly in the stories they tell; the vividness, the ‘‘messiness,’’ the magnetism of their tellings opens up multiple dimensions in our understanding of these women and their worlds, and confirms for us the potential of narrative inquiry in TESOL However, and of greater significance for us in this project as we have shown earlier, the narrative inquiry process itself led us to interrogate the potentially self-serving implications of academic dialogic storytelling, as well as of the analysis and presentation of participants’ narratives as text We came to recognise an inherent tension between our responsibility as scholars, to theorise what these stories might mean for a TESOL community, and responsibility to our narrators whose voices we had hoped to release This tension sustains an insoluble paradox, because, as we have suggested with Goodson (1997), without such academic publication and its technologies of silence, there is no institutional, power-based audience for the stories our communities need to hear Today, as the situated researchers we are, we know we have much further to go in articulating the implications of this paradox If we really want to make a difference for education in the remote TESOL/ TESD contexts of Northern Australia, we will need to grapple more wisely with the inherent problematics of narrative inquiry In particular, we know we must work more closely with teachers like these to engage their agency in speaking to the mainstream; we must open up for them new purposes for recounting their often shockingly unpredictable experiences, as well as wider, more targeted, and more flexible audiences for their narratives ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge here the wonderful work of all those who take their teaching skills to remote Australian Indigenous communities, and most sincerely to thank the real-life Alice, Barbara, and Carol for sharing their stories with us and our readers 458 TESOL QUARTERLY THE AUTHORS Dr Kate Cadman: I am presently employed as Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia My interest in narrative began with my family’s life stories set within the industrial north-of-England context which was my childhood home As I progressed from the role of teacher of English literature to TESOL academic and migrated to Australia, I began to see how life narratives were able to generate social insight inaccessible by other analyses As part of my work as Coordinator of an integrated research education program, I employed narrative methods for researching into the experiences of international research students My own PhD study was an autoethnographic narrative inquiry entitled ‘‘The Kings’ English in global research education: A teacher’s tales.’’ I have published autoethnographic research writings on English for academic purposes classroom teaching, and have become increasingly interested in the potential for narrative research as an inclusive methodology for Indigenous and periphery scholars to develop research contributions for the dominantly White, Anglo-Celtic global academy I am currently part of a collaborative research project at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where I am conducting narrative research into the connection between research writing and new knowledge in postgraduate research education Dr Jill Brown: I am a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Clayton, Australia My work involves teaching preservice, in-service, and postgraduate classes, supervising research at honours, master’s, and doctoral level and working with colleagues on a wide variety of research projects, including my particular love—narrative research My first involvement with narrative research was in the mid-1970s when I interviewed long-term unemployed men as part of my work with the Brotherhood of St Laurence Their stories formed part of the Henderson Report and helped give voice to the experiences of Australians living in poverty During my many years teaching I found narrative to be a powerful way of connecting with refugee and migrant children as they struggled to find their place in a new society Later, as a teacher educator, I advised my students to make a place for student narrative in their teaching as the most effective way of identifying and responding to learner need My own doctoral research was on English as a second language teacher identity and work, and this was largely based on teacher narratives Since then, most of my research has involved listening to narratives—those of teachers in remote community schools in Sweden and Australia, refugee, migrant, and Indigenous children in Australia and elsewhere, beginning and experienced teachers, students involved in language study abroad, and many others These narratives offer an 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