Welcome to the May/June edition of TLT Interviews! For this issue we are happy to bring you a fantastic conversation with Dr. Gary Barkhuizen. Dr. Barkhuizen is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of language teacher education, teacher and learner identity, study abroad, and narrative inquiry. Originally from South Africa, he obtained his MA from Essex University in the UK, and his doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has recently served as editor of the book, Language Teachers Studying Abroad: Identities, Emotions and Disruptions (2022). Dr. Barkhuizen was interviewed by Michael Ellis, coordinator for the EFL program at International Christian University High School in Tokyo. Michael holds an MA in TESOL from Teachers College, Columbia University. His research interests include reflective teaching practice and the use of CLIL to amplify marginalized voices.
An Interview With Dr. Gary Barkhuizen
Michael Ellis
International Christian University High School
Michael Ellis: In your plenary presentation, you talked about the power of narrative inquiry to explore our teacher identities and the passive role it can have for teacher development. Could you summarize those ideas again for the readers?
Dr. Gary Barkhuizen: What I tried to do in the plenary was to frame the idea that the work that language teachers do is a narrative experience. That’s because as a narrative experience, we have a time dimension to the work we do, like characters of a story interacting over time. These are aspects of story. That was the overall thread running through the whole talk, and one aspect of that was short story analysis, which is a form of narrative analysis I’ve been using in my work for a long time. I find it to be a very nice way to get into dealing with story for people starting out with narrative inquiry and with research in general. It was published as a methodology article in TESOL quarterly in 2016, where I introduced this approach to analyzing story data. I call it short story analysis, which means you analyze the content of the story by asking who is in the story, where does the story take place, and when do the events of the story unfold. You also focus on the context of the story at micro, meso, and more macro levels.
I then presented short stories of teachers and analyzed them very, very briefly to introduce this framework of teacher practices. Finally, I developed the framework into teacher mindsets and related it to teacher identity, and then looked at how those three complex dynamic systems interact with each other to form a larger network. The stories that I shared enabled me to show how, as teachers, we live stories. Of course, you can use other lenses to examine what teachers do, but I find that using narrative inquiry as an approach to describe our identities as teachers and to describe the work we do is one very effective way.
That resonated with me because you say as teachers, but I’d say maybe as humans, we’re really sensitive to stories and the powers that they have to illustrate larger phenomena, but I’ve never seen it simplified in such an easy-to-understand framework.
The work done with narrative inquiry in language education draws on work from sociology, from philosophy, and from general education, particularly. The philosophical roots and psychological roots are based in those other disciplines. So, it’s about human life, but what I spoke about today was teacher life and teacher—researcher life.
Narrative inquiry is quite accessible to novice researchers, but also to anyone researching. I wonder if some might view this as dangerous because the bar for entry could be too low leading to weak research models in the field. How would you respond to such concerns and what are the differences between narrative inquiry and something like a teaching blog? How can we maintain high standards of this research?
This is a question that often pops up when I talk about narrative inquiry. In fact, when I do talks on narrative inquiry, one of the very first slides I put up is, “Narrative inquiry is more than just telling stories.” Narrative inquiry is a research methodology. If you are using narrative inquiry as a research methodology, then you need to be rigorous in the way that you go about doing the work. Keeping a blog, telling stories about what happened at work, telling stories about what to do in your classroom are fantastic things to do, but it’s not a rigorous, systematic approach to doing inquiry—to doing research. Narrative inquiry needs three major elements. There needs to be focus on a topic, illustrated by an experience, with analysis informed by theory. It’s not just descriptively telling stories about people’s experiences. It is that, but it’s also much more.
Can you think of any common mistakes that people new to the approach might make and how you would advise them in order to maintain that high rigorous standard?
Similar to what I said, researchers often remain at a descriptive level. When I was an editor of Language Teaching Research, a very high-impact journal, we used to reject so many articles, not only narrative inquiry, but more qualitative research articles, which were fabulous articles, but remained very much at a descriptive level. They didn’t incorporate the theory or weren’t clear about exactly what topics were being examined. You need those research questions, the issues, the problems, the angle that you’re looking at. There needs to be some systematic inquiry.
I can see how inquiry would be readily useful for stories that have a traditional structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Can you see inquiry as being useful for making meaning of stories that might be more complex or not follow that same traditional structure?
There are different definitions of what story is. Beginning, middle, and end is drawing very much on the more traditional idea, but story means different things to different people in different cultures. However, I think there is some commonality. They are about the experiences of people. There is typically a time dimension, whether that’s beginning, middle, end, or some circular way time unfolds in a story, or some back-and-forth sequencing. It’s some action over time in some way. Another aspect of story is that there’s some reflection or some commentary on what’s happening. So, it’s not just this happened, then that happened, then that happened. You reflect on it, react to it, and you offer some emotional or evaluative comments about those things happening. I think different cultures, different generations, different genders potentially, even individuals at different times may shift in the way they tell stories. They can be shaped differently and put together differently, but those elements are normally there in some way.
You’ve mentioned that there’s roots of narrative inquiry in social linguistics and sociology. Why do you think that it took so long for this to be seen as a valid approach for teacher researchers?
I think that narrative inquiry in language education has been around for quite a while actually, but we haven’t really called it that. In second language acquisition, for example, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, researchers were doing work using diary studies. Language learners would write their diaries about their language learning experiences, such as Kathy Bailey (1980). We would consider that narrative research now—self-narrative or autobiographical type work. Then, later on, there was a lot of ethnographic work done on social aspects of learning, looking at identity development and so on. This is theoretically informed with excerpts of data, stories of people’s learning accounts, but they didn’t call it narrative inquiry. It’s been there a long time. I think it was the work of Karen Johnson and Paula Golombek (2002), where they talk about narrative inquiry, using that term. Teachers, preservice teachers mainly, did their own narrative inquiry of their own teacher development.
I didn’t realize that it had been around for so long, I guess, because it’s only becoming more systematized recently. Could I ask you to make a prediction about the future? Do you think that the role of narrative inquiry in teacher development is going to grow?
I think it is. I put out a book with my colleagues, Phil Benson and Alice Chik, in 2013, on narrative inquiry and language teaching and learning research. The book did very, very well. In fact, the series editors have asked us to do a second edition of that book, and that will be coming out next year. In writing the second edition, we brought in all the multimodal and digital storytelling of narrative work going on. What really pushed that was the COVID-19 pandemic. All my Ph.D. students during that time had to do all of their work from a distance by using Zoom and other digital means to collect and analyze their data, which was quite a big shift. So the second edition of the book has a whole new section on digital methodologies in narrative inquiry. That’s one big change. Also, I think now with the growing emphasis on diversity and inclusion, narrative inquiry is proving to be particularly popular as a methodology to delve into those topics. Narrative inquiry has always listened very carefully to the voices of the participants, but now it’s growing more to focus particularly on voices that have been excluded in the past and to bring about change.
Right, that makes sense. It seems especially powerful because you’re literally amplifying the voices of those marginalized people themselves, not other people talking about them.
Yes, and another aspect is that with narrative inquiry, it’s not just going in as a researcher and collecting data from participants. You also bring yourself into the research as the researcher, what is called reflexivity. This means being a part of the research, saying what you did as a researcher, how you collected that data, what your role was, and how you co-constructed that data. Ultimately, it’s the participants’ experiences that we’re focusing on, but we also must consider how the researcher reflexively articulates what they did to contribute to the meaning-making of those experiences. There’s much more emphasis on the researcher’s role.
You spoke earlier about how the pandemic encouraged us to diversify our approaches to narrative inquiry, but there are already a lot to begin with, such as spoken, written, and multimodal. Could you give a brief summary of what you see as some advantages and disadvantages to the various methods?
It’s a simple answer, really. You need to look at the design of the study, what the research questions are, and what’s feasible and accessible. Those are practical but important answers. It depends on the size of the project. Some people prefer working with paper. Having some paper with some colored pens is a great way to do a thematic analysis for a small project. If you’ve got masses of data, then well, that’s not going to work. I supervise a number of students, and they come in with ideas about what they want to do, often digital or multimodal. I need to say to them, “Well, how are you actually going to do that? And will it pass the Ethics Review Board?” That’s very important because with narrative inquiry, you are exposing these voices. You’re getting people to talk about their life experiences in story form. Some of these digital formats stay around forever, when using social media, for example. You’ve got to be really, really careful, more so than in the past, where you could record something with a recorder and then just download it, transcribe it, print it out, and that’s all. With automatic transcription, the data stays up there in the cloud somewhere. I think these practical and ethical aspects are important with these new tools.
I’m glad to hear you highlight the practical issues. I’m currently collecting data using a reflective teaching journal. Before I started, I read about robust research methodology and different approaches to this, but I realized early on that I needed to keep it simple in order to maintain it every week.
Yeah, it’s got to be feasible.
What about reflecting with other people, such as duo ethnography versus self-inquiry? Could you speak a bit to the advantages and disadvantages of each of those?
I’ve been in research teams that do narrative work. I think it’s just a matter of multiplying the tasks, having discussions about what the goals are, and how the analysis can take place, just like in any research. I think it’s the discussion that you need to do to be more or less on the same page.
I was in one research team where we had a huge project of 40 participants and just four researchers. We divided up the sets of data, so each had 10 sets of data. Then we wrote a 2,000-word narrative of that person’s experience relating to the topic that we were focusing on. They were all vastly different. One was quite literary, the other was almost like academic text, and others had bits of quotes and so on. We needed to meet as a team to decide how we were going to standardize it in some way, allowing a bit of flexibility.
If you can talk, discuss things, and work together, it’s very nice because you’ve got someone else to bounce ideas off. Duo ethnography is another thing that’s happening now with two people writing to each other, talking to each other, developing a set of data, and working it out. My concern with that is that they need to be done properly. As I said earlier, the analysis needs to be about a particular topic, and it needs to be theory informed. It’s not just sharing experiences.
The point about how different people bring different viewpoints to similar stories, I think, echoes back to the point you made earlier about how there are different traditions of structures of narrative.
I think that that can be really exciting, how different people can approach single stories with different structures. But it can also probably get quite confusing, so I can see why working in a team is an exciting but difficult approach.
At your workshop on Monday, you’re planning to guide participants through narrative inquiry and the process of it. For the benefit of the readers, could you give any general advice or approaches to this research methodology?
I’m going to ask the participants to articulate their questions. I want it to be participant-led, but I will give a very brief overview framework of some of the core dimensions of narrative inquiry. I published a handbook chapter on five core dimensions of narrative inquiry, and I’ll very quickly go over those. These dimensions are what help me be grounded in narrative inquiry because it’s such a big field. They include things like the meaning of narrative and the level of engagement of the researcher with the participants. Also working with story data and non-story data. You can still do narrative inquiry with non-story data. In that case, the researcher constructs stories from the non-story data.
I’ve got about three or four sets of data that I’ll put up on the screen, and we’ll just have a go at analyzing it. I may do some short story analysis because that’s quite a friendly way of going about analysis. We can’t cover all of narrative inquiry. We can just get a taste of it and answer some questions. I know a lot of people at the conference are already doing narrative inquiry or interested in starting. I’m looking forward to hearing their questions.
References
Bailey, K. M. (1980). An introspective analysis of an individual’s language learning experience. In R. C. Scarcella & S. D. Krashen (Eds.), Research in second language acquisition: Selected papers of the Los Angeles Second Language Research Forum (pp. 58–65). Newbury House.
Barkhuizen, G. (2016). A short story approach to analyzing teacher (imagined) identities over time. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 655–683. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.311
Barkhuizen, G. (Ed.). (2022). Language teachers studying abroad: Identities, emotions, and disruptions. Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781788929950
Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2013). Narrative inquiry in language teaching and learning research. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203124994
K. E. Johnson & P. R. Golombek (Eds.). (2002). Teachers' narrative inquiry as professional development. Cambridge University Press