professional identities and knowledge through students’ narratives
4. Conclusion
What are some of the implications of this narrative inquiry into ties between EFLTE and academic identities (Tedder & Biesta, 2007)?Bauman (2009, pp. 157-163) argues within ―education in the liquid-modern setting,‖ students need ―counsellors who show them how to walk rather than teachers who make sure that only one road, and that already crowded, is taken.‖ These counsellors should help students ―to dig into the depths of their character and personality, where the rich deposits of precious ore are presumed to lie…‖ This EFLTE class strived for linguistic and cultural authenticity by working with students‘ own expert
52 NNSE productions (Canagarajah, 2006; Morris, 2001) unearthing stories as experiential life processes (Bathmaker, 2010; Huber, Caine, Huber, & Steeves, 2013).
Likewise, instructors and students created knowledge from class-generated texts (Trahar, 2009). Consecutively, a narrative pedagogy intervention facilitated the encounters to produce these accounts constructing identities which shape consecutive teaching practices. Understanding derived from life-stories and identity papers constitutes narrative learning proper, suitably meaningful when sustained during scaled-up inquiries (Goodson & Gill, 2011). Undergraduates experienced narrative research while working towards agency development (Bruner, 1996), acting upon the family roots revealed in their texts to envision academic and professional routes. This occurred when students became aware of how their—and their families‘— lives‘ plots (Biesta & Tedder, 2008) helped them imagine a hopeful future. Thus, students came to own the English language to voice their meaning (Bakhtin& Holquist, 1981; Pope, 2002) translating themselves away from NSE-NNSE dichotomies (Rushdie, 1991). Thus, ―appropriating the language by confidently using it to serve one‘s own interests according to one‘s own values, helps develop fluency in English‖ (Canagarajah, 2006, p. 592).
This paper highlighted the centrality of attending to lives and experiential knowledge in EFLTEPs. Students bring to class rich linguistic and cultural existences and family stories—which are undergraduates‘ tales too. These narratives embody ―roots and routes, fixed and entrenched in one sense and on the move in another‖ (Friedman, 2002, p. 22). Indeed, future EFL teachers can learn the language while learning from lives and for their professional lives (Biesta & Tedder, 2008) within a reflexive teaching and learning context.
53 This was an occasion for balancing family identities, understanding origins, projecting expectations, and representing identities to others meaningfully (Mosselson, 2006). These results also suggest the emancipatory significance (Nelson, 2011; Nunan & Choi, 2010; Smolcic, 2011) of sharing biographical knowledge in EFLTEPs to contribute to teachers‘ development by implementing scaled-up interventions to support narrative inquiry in these fields.
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