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Mara Cristina Sarasa

Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

Facultad de Humanidades

Departamento Lenguas Modernas

Grupo de Investigaciones en Educacin y Estudios Culturales

NARRATIVE INQUIRY WITHIN ARGENTINEAN

EFLTE:

CRAFTING PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIESAND KNOWLEDGE THROUGH STUDENTS

TALES

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Elucidating students insightsinto these class activitiesinvolving their family andacademic existences .

Appraising the educationaloutcomes of studentcreated

stories.

1) Describing narratively textualinterventions and biographical

narratives written by Overall

Communication students in theEFLTEP, UNMDP.

2) Examining undergraduatesproductions and their reported

observations on these experiences.

3) Discussing some implicationsthese pedagogical interventionsbear forEFLTE.

NARRATIVE INQUIRY WITHIN ARGENTINEAN EFLTE:

CRAFTING PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES AND KNOWLEDGE

THROUGH STUDENTS TALES

Aims Ancillary

Goals

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RESEARCH RATIONALE

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Narrative inquiry in education involves a way of thinking about

experience(Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Clandinin & Murphy, 2009).

Adopting a narrative methodology means embracing a particularnarrative view of experience as phenomena under study (Connelly &Clandinin, 2006, p 477).

In EFLTE narrative inquiry includes research and development toenhance teachers personal practical knowledge (Johnson & Golombek,2011).

In this research, the narrative process and analysis are in themselvesforms of inquiry in the phenomenal world in which experience ismediated by story(Xu & Connelly, 2009, p. 222).

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RESEARCH DESIGN

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Small scale ethnographic study (Wilson & Chadda, 2010). Undertaken during 2007-2011.

Involved sophomores attending the subject Overall

Communication,EFTEP, UNMDP. OC endeavors to boost awareness of the global status of

English (Canagarajah, 2006) through exploring print andmedia texts, striving to rendercontents relevant to EFLTE(lvarez, Calvete, & Sarasa, 2012).

Naturalistic research (Bowen, 2008), OC syllabus second unit onIrish Studies(Calvete & Sarasa, 2007).

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Context (1)

2007-2010.

30 undergraduates (S1S30, 4 smallcohorts totalling 56).

Voluntarily responded in writing to essay IAm One of the People(Patterson, 2006b).

Glenn Patterson (2006b) defined his identityembracing his private Belfast domain withinthe public European realm.

Roots and routes forge individual andcommunal trajectories (Clifford, 1997; Patterson,2006a, 2006c) .

Undergraduates composed parallel textual

interventions (Pope, 1995).

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Context (2)

2011.

Students explored films MichaelCollins (Jordan, 1996) and The Windthat Shakes the Barley (Loach,2006).

Representations of Irish heroes( Giollin, 1998).

Undergraduates narrated commonpeoples praiseworthy lives

orally.

19 (SISXIX, 30 in large single

cohort) freely wrote theircontributions.

Provided feedback on classexperience.

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a) Problematization ofundergraduatesidentities.

b) Exploration of itineraries theywished to follow as students andprospective educators.

c) Finding sustenance alongdemanding course ofstudy.

d) Life-writing encouraged life-learning (Pope, 2002).

e) Discovery of professionalknowledge landscape (Clandinin &Connelly, 1996).

f) Desired teaching identity.

g) Preferred stories they wanted toenact as future educators(Clandinin, Downey, & Huber, 2009).

Purposive sampling:

students textualinterventions andbiographical tales incontext of production andreception (Pavlenko, 2007; Teddlie &Yu, 2007).

Conceptualinterpretation of writtenproductions, uncoveringemerging themes (Corbin &Strauss, 2007; Polkinghorne, 2007) by

drawing on theoreticalliterature (e.g. Clandinin, Steeves &Chung, 2007).

Categories of Analysis Results

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TEXTUAL INTERVENTIONS I AM ONE (PATTERSON,

2006B): RICH IMMIGRANT ORIGINS

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I am one of the descendants of thethree hundred thousand European

immigrants who flocked into

Argentina during the late nineteenthcentury and the first half of thetwentieth (S4).

I am one of the great great-granddaughters of an Italian

immigrant who arrived in Argentina

together with a large number ofItalian, German, and Spanishimmigrants in the 1880s (S19).

I am one of the many people whofind themselves lost in a melting-potof identities. I am neither Italian, norSpanish, nor Uruguayan, nor Native

American, nor English, nor Arab,nor Argentinean, but somehow I am

a bit of all that (S18).

I am one of the people who, born ina melting pot and speaking three

languages, find myself torn amongthree cultures: a mother culture

which is already a mixture of manyothers (S3).

I am one of the people who are

extremely proud of her Italiangrandfather, who fought in WWI

(S25).

I am one of the million people who live ina country that has officially welcomed

other peoples since 1853 and hasabsorbed these peoples culture sincethen. I am one of the people who live in acountry where everybody is proud of their

foreign lineage (S28)

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NARRATIVES OF UNHEROIC LIVES:

PRIDE IN FAMILIES BACKGROUND

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SVIs and SXVIsgreat-

grandparents hadfought the twoWorld Wars and

had immigrated intoArgentina to build afamily life based

on hard work.

SXV`s grandfather hadhad to settle in a

country which was nothis homeland and adaptto it, witnessing how hissiblings and wife passedaway but being strongenough to survive andlive without them.

This gave us a kind of

family feeling, ourfamilies had all gonemore or less through the

same things, allormostof us are

immigrant descendants

and our stories meltedinto one... (SVI)

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NARRATIVES OF UNHEROIC LIVES:

SUCCESSFUL FAMILY TIES

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All of the stories were

teachings of

courage, endurance

and most important of

love (SVII).

Students told true stories of ordinary

peoplemainly our grandparentswhohad suffered because they underwentmany hardships, mainly because theyhad had to flee from their country, hadfought a war, had worked very hard sincethey were kids, but who had been

happy too because they got marriedand had kids, succeeded in life, (or)accomplished their goals (SVIII)

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TEXTUAL INTERVENTIONS: NON-ESSENTIALIST

HERITAGE + INFUSION OF VALOUR

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NARRATIVES OF UNHEROIC LIVES:

MESSAGE OF HOPE

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We are now convinced thatalthough ourcourse ofstudy getsharder and harder, experiencessuch as the ones we gained in{this subject} make students reflectupon theirfuture as teachers. Andin spite of all adversities, we canmake it happen (SIV).

What mattered was creating abond, a human perspective so manytimes absent at University which Ifeel is so much necessary if we are towork teaching people I hope(we) can understand that every timewe step into a class it is not only upto the teacherto make it memorable,it is also up to us (SXVII)

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NARRATIVES OF UNHEROIC LIVES

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As I finished talking I realized I had

felt comfortable I also realized thatmany other students unheroiccharacters, especially grandparents,

had gone through tough situations justas my grandmother had (SV).

It was marvellous to share these

narrations about great people, whowere close to us, and who touchedour hearts and changed our lives

forever (SXVII)

All of us were surely left ponderingnot just on grammar or on

pronunciation but on what is reallyimportant in life (SVII).

We were given the opportunity to speak about

something that we regarded as meaningful and wewere eager to share it with the rest of the class I

know that we are studying to be languageteachers so we have to pay a lot of attention to

how we say something instead of what we saybut this class was different because we were

paying attention to what we wanted to say insteadof how we said it (SXVIII)

Empowerment

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TEXTUAL INTERVENTIONS

UNHEROIC NARRATIVES

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This narrative inquiry evolved from a pedagogyof life-telling(Elbaz-Luwisch 2002, p.408) to a pedagogyof life-learning (Goodson, 2012).

Students elaborated not just their roots but theroutes by which they have been arrived at(Patterson, 2006c, p. 171).

They also discovered that their families roadswere connected.

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CONCLUSION

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Within education in theliquid-modern setting,students need

counsellors who showthem how to walk ratherthan teachers who makesure that only one road,and that alreadycrowded, is taken.

These counsellors

should help studentsto dig into thedepths of theircharacter andpersonality, where

the rich deposits ofprecious ore arepresumed to lie(Bauman, 2009, pp. 157-163)

This EFLTE classstrived for linguisticand culturalauthenticity by

working withstudents own expertNNSE productions(Canagarajah, 2006; Morris,

2001) unearthing

stories asexperiential lifeprocesses (Bathmaker,2010; Huber, Caine, Huber, &Steeves, 2013).

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Instructors and students created knowledgefrom class-generated texts (Trahar, 2009).

A narrative pedagogy interventionfacilitated the encounters to produce theseaccounts constructing identities whichshape consecutive teaching practices.

Understanding derived from life-stories and identity papers

constitutes narrative learningproper, suitably meaningful when

sustained during scaled-upinquiries (Goodson & Gill, 2011).

Undergraduates experienced narrativeresearch while working towards agency

development (Bruner, 1996), acting upon thefamily roots revealed in their texts to envision

academic and professional routes. This occurredwhen students became aware of how theirand

their familieslives plots (Biesta & Tedder, 2008)

helped them imagine a hopeful future.

Students came to own the Englishlanguage to voice their meaning(Bakhtin & Holquist, 1981; Pope, 2002)

translating themselves away fromNSE-NNSE dichotomies(Rushdie,

1991).

appropriating the language byconfidently using it to serve ones

own interests according to ones ownvalues, helps develop fluency in

English(Canagarajah, 2006, p. 592).

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This paper highlighted thecentrality of attending to livesand experiential knowledge inEFLTEPs. Students bring to

class rich linguistic andcultural existences and family

storieswhich areundergraduates tales too.

These narratives embodyroots and routes, fixed and

entrenched in one sense andon the move in another

(Friedman, 2002, p. 22). Future EFLteachers can learn the

language while learning fromlives and fortheir

professional lives(Biesta &Tedder, 2007) within a reflexive

teaching and learning

context.

This was an occasion forbalancing family

identities, understanding

origins, projectingexpectations, andrepresenting identities to

others meaningfully(Mosselson, 2006).

These results also suggestthe emancipatory significance

(Nelson, 2011; Nunan & Choi, 2010;Smolcic, 2011) of sharing

biographical knowledge in

EFLTEPs to contribute toteachers development byimplementing scaled-upinterventions to supportnarrative inquiry in these

fields.