The concept of narrative

inquiry and the impact for

teacher identity

Gary Barkhuizen
Professor of Applied Linguistics
University of Auckland, New Zealand

British Council/ TEFLIN

27 June, 2020
1. Narrative inquiry is for:
• Teachers
• Teacher educators
• Researchers

2. Narrative inquiry means different things to different

people
• Find out what it means for you!
Johnson & Golombek (2002)

“Inquiry into experience enables teachers to act

with foresight. It gives them increasing control
over their thoughts and actions; grants their
experiences enriched, deepened meaning,
and enables them to be more thoughtful
and mindful of their work” (pp. 6-7).

Johnson, K., & Golombek, P. (Eds.). (2002). Teachers’ narrative inquiry

as professional development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Narrative inquiry
“Narrative inquiry has as its central concern
the stories narrators tell about their life
experiences“.
“Narrative inquiry is much more than the
telling of stories” (p. 21).

Clandinin, D.J., Pushor, D., & Orr, A.M. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry.
Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 21-35.

It is also about making meaning of life

experiences in the process of telling stories.
Narrative inquiry in language
teaching and learning

• edited books
• book chapters
• journal articles
• dissertations and theses
• teachers’ exploratory action research
• teacher reflections
• graduate student assignments/assessments
Barkhuizen, Benson & Chik (2014)
Dealing more with the fundamentals of
narrative inquiry, this introductory text draws
on a data-base of more than 175 studies to
present concrete examples of narrative
methods used to collect and analyse oral,
written and multimodal data,
and to report findings.

Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2014). Narrative inquiry in language teaching
and learning research. New York: Routledge.
Five core dimensions

Barkhuizen, G. (2020). Core dimensions of narrative

inquiry. In J. McKinley & H. Rose (Eds.), The Routledge
handbook of research methods in applied linguistics (pp.
188-198). London: Routledge.
Analysis of narrative Narrative analysis
• conventional thematic or • configuring data content
content analysis and into a coherent storied
involves searching or whole; i.e., the outcome
coding data for themes, of analysis is a story
categorizing these, and • the researcher turns data
looking for patterns of into a story.
association among them
• further thematic analysis?
 Story
1. They narrate experiences from the past or the imagined future. They tell about something
that happened or will happen in the life of the person telling the story.

2. They include reflective or evaluative commentary on those experiences – comments which

portray emotions and beliefs associated with the experiences.

3. They typically have a temporal dimension. In other words, something happens over a
period of time.

4. They embody ‘action’. Something happens in the story in some spatiotemporal context.

5. Stories always make reference, implicitly or explicitly, to who was involved in the story
action (characters in the story world), when the action took place (time), and where it
happened (place and space).

6. Tellability (high or low) refers to the extent to which an account conveys a sequence of
reportable events and makes a point in a rhetorically effective manner (novel, unusual,
unique) (Ochs, E., & Capps, L. 2001. Living Narrative. London: Harvard University Press).
(1) - Content

What the story is about: who, where, when

Who? And what happened/will
happen together?

• the narrator

• others in the story

• their relationships
 Where? And what
happened/will happen there?

• places and sequences of places in the story

When? And what
happened/will happen then?
• past

• present

• future
when
wh
er
e
who
(2) – Context

Three interconnected story contexts

Barkhuizen, G. (2008). A narrative approach to exploring context in language

teaching. English Language Teaching Journal, 62(3), 231-239.
story (all small letters)

• personal experiences of narrator

• close social interactions with students and

other teachers

• e.g., in classrooms

• shorter time scales

Story (with a capital S)
• meso-spaces in school, staffroom, neighborhood, and
local community

• medium-term time scales

STORY (in capital letters)
• the broader ideological spatial contexts of teaching
experiences: sociocultural, political, historical,
economic

• macro context

• longer time scales

 story

Story

STORY
when
wh
er
e
who
STORY

e
er
wh
Story

story who

when
Bigger stories of
teacher identity
Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research
“Language teacher identities (LTIs) are cognitive,
social, emotional …

LTIs are being and doing, feeling and imagining, and

storying. …

they are contested and resisted, by self and others …

and they are also accepted, acknowledged and valued,

by self and others. …

And LTIs change, short-term and over time —in social

interaction …

and in material interaction with spaces, places and

objects in classrooms, institutions, and online.”
(Barkhuizen, 2017, p. 4)
Constructing and negotiating language teacher identities

moral stance
emotions
personal and desires
identity materials
professional
identity practice

institutions experience/history
roles
theories/
beliefs
Communicating Identities
(Barkhuizen & Strauss, 2020, Routledge)

- Briefly theorizes identity research for language teachers

- 48 communicative activities for teachers to use in the

language classroom, that focus on exploring identity in
language learning

- 48 opportunities for teachers to reflect on their own

identities as language teachers in the classroom and
beyond in relation to the topic of the activity

- Guidelines for exploratory action research and narrative

inquiry for exploring teacher learner and identity.
Gary Barkhuizen
g.barkhuizen@auckland.ac.nz

Thank you!