A teaching narrative: my growth as a foreign language educator through teaching diaries

The aim of this paper is to share my perceptions and reflections on the experience of introducing elements of autonomy in a constrained educational setting in Argentina. I recorded these perceptions in teaching diaries written weekly after each class for the academic year 2005 (over 35 weeks). These teaching diaries are part of a larger, long-term, qualitative action-research study aimed at introducing some elements of autonomy in my University-based classroom for the first time, and diary writing as a vehicle for channelling my reactions to the innovation. The teaching diaries portray my feelings, emotions, values, and beliefs and offer testimony of my professional growth as I struggled to modify my classroom practices to make my teaching more responsive to my beliefs about good pedagogy within the constraints at my University.     

Linguistic and Cultural Appropriations of an Immigrant Multilingual Literacy Teacher Educator

This autoethnographic self-study describes my interpretations of multicultural awareness, with special attention to multilingual awareness (MLA), based on my interactions with 52 students in the context of two literacy courses over a period of one year. An autoethnographic self-study provided an avenue to harness my reflections on practice and to study the ways in which my practice reflected awareness of my role as an educator. Findings from my teaching videos, written responses to students, and student evaluations suggested that my communication patterns with students reflected certain elements of multicultural awareness, as displayed by my attention to individual predispositions, cultural practices and personal stereotypes. The findings also appeared to indicate that multicultural and MLA interacted to reflect facilitation and symbiosis. Facilitation seemed apparent in my awareness of differences among students’ cultures and my own as I monitored my linguistic processing. Symbiosis appeared to emanate from the recognition of how my response to individual predispositions facilitated my application of conversational strategies based on feedback. This, in turn, heightened my attention to stereotypical attitudes and behaviors. Implications for multicultural teacher education include the benefits of using autoethnographic self-study to scrutinize educators’ awareness in practice as they determine the impact of this awareness on their instructional roles in multicultural teacher education. By extension, the study suggests that autoethnographic self-study research can provide additional lenses through which to interrogate monolithic perceptions of diversity in multicultural teacher education.     

Researching 'my people,' researching myself: Fragments of a reflexive tale

The paper investigates my positionality as a Pakistani Muslim researcher, affiliated with a U.S. institution, conducting ethnographic research with Pakistani Muslim immigrants in California. Three vignettes reconstructed from field-notes and a reflective journal illustrate the tensions and contradictions informing the research process. The first vignette details my shifting subjectivities in relation to a segment of the Muslim community in Northern California. Although my perceived disempowerment of Muslims motivated my research, my failure to subscribe to the Muslim Student Association's version of Islam cost me their disapproval. The second vignette highlights my relationship with one particular research participant. Although I shared the same ethnic background as this participant, my inability to conceive of her empowerment in terms other than those of Western feminism led to tragedy. The last vignette focuses on my interaction with the ethnographic data at my desk and becomes an analysis of the forces in my life that feed into my research.     

Horse Riding 101: The role of experience in reframing teacher education practices

For this self-study of my teacher education practice, I positioned myself as a novice in the unfamiliar context of learning to ride a horse. This gave me an opportunity to re-experience being an authentic learner and thereby to deepen my understanding of how an individual learns to teach. I recorded my experiences in an electronic journal and analysed what happened over many months of weekly horse-riding lessons. Central to my learning process was feeding key ideas, insights and tentative analyses into discussions with my students and critical friends. As I analysed their responses further, two themes emerged through pattern analysis. First, being a neophyte in horse riding allowed me to empathise strongly with my students' novice status. Second, permitting them to see the development of my expertise through horse riding was helpful to my students. Re-positioning myself as a learner challenged my view of myself as a teacher educator and transformed my teacher education practice.     

To My Pen Pal

这是一封写给笔友的书信。作者通过两张照片形象生动地向笔友介绍了自己在海滩和在家里的两种场景。小作者还能简明准确地运用现在进行来描写这两幅画面。这样图文并茂的好作文，读后令人回味无穷，值得借鉴。[编者按]     

The Place of English Revisited

In this essay I explore the constraints and opportunities confronting me as a newly qualified teacher and how these affect my pedagogy. I have reflected on my own development from beginning to newly qualified teacher and considered how such forces have shaped my identity as a teacher, my values and my approach to the job. As part of my exploration of my practice and the values I hold, I have revisited ‘The Place of English’, an essay I wrote midway through my Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) year; I have reconsidered how the current climate of educational reform and my subsequent experience have altered or strengthened these initial perceptions. In what follows I have reflected critically on two episodes of teaching and learning with my Year 10 class, my most challenging group, in order to further understand the way in which I have responded to the responsibilities and pressures placed on a classroom teacher. These pressures, I suggest, are intensified by the preconceptions of age and gender within my school and implicit more widely in the traditional values of our culture. The fragments of my practice that I have explored reveal tensions that gesture at a gap between educational theory, first-hand professional experience and governmental policy. They present an argument to resist the temptations of oversimplified, linear conceptions of teaching and learning, and maintain the place of English as a subject of creativity, exploration and expression that, at its heart, values both individual and collective student voices and identities.     

“乌托邦”笼罩下的个人写作——在韩国外国语大学的讲演

“乌托邦”在这里有两层意义,一是我个人写作的“乌托邦”,另一个是中国历史与现实的“乌托邦”。前者是指我通过写作实现梦想和希冀,在小说中创造自己的理想之物：后者是指我们从一个“乌托邦”醒来又跌入了另一个“乌托邦”。而我的写作,我的语言、结构、叙述、故事、人物、形式,还有我对现实的认识等等,正是笼罩在这两种“乌托邦”下的个人书写。     

小升初面试：英文自我介绍范文2篇

范文一： 我叫莉莉，我即将从第一小学毕业。我们家有三个人，我爸爸在一家电脑公司上班，我妈妈是家庭主妇，我是家里的独生女。业余时间里，我喜欢看书，因为阅读可以扩宽我的视野。看小说的时候，我可以任凭自己的想象，比如说，一个著名的科学家或者是一个功夫大师。除了看书之外，我还喜欢玩电脑游戏。     

迷人的罂粟与本真人性的选择——关于铁凝小说《对面》的再论

铁凝的中篇小说《对面》讲诉了我"对5段爱情的逃离,认清了包裹爱情的种种欲望外衣,其中尤以性欲为重点叙述对象。"我"对"对面"的偷窥由单纯的欣赏转化为欲望的占有,对"对面"犯下的错误加速了自我反思的力度,意识到潜意识的罪恶感。自我的反省与走向自然的结局,既是主人公对纯真人性的追求,也是作者对人性寄予的美好愿望。     

To be Heard,to be Seen,to Matter: Consequences of/for self in utilizing one's narrative

This self-study describes the development and use in a preservice literacy course of the first author's narrative of her own schooling. The introduction to that narrative is included in this paper. The full text of the narrative also describes the impact of school readiness, resource placement, transience, poverty, and teachers' responses and expectations on my school experiences and my sense of self. Methods of data collection included students' anonymous responses to the narrative, in-class discussion, students' final course papers, my research journal, field notes, and retrospective re-analysis. The perspective of a colleague who is serving as a critical friend on my journey is incorporated in the paper as dialogical insets interrogating my practices and interpretations. Writing, analyzing, and using the narrative in my teaching served to clarify my understanding of how my childhood and schooling shape my current work. Sharing it with students was built on the belief that doing so would encourage their development of understanding for students who have histories and backgrounds unlike their own.     

Serving the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants the Rest of My Life

On February 10 this year, I was notified by Liaoning University to report for study. I could hardly suppress my excitement. Holding the admission notification in my hand and looking at the portrait of the great leader Chairman Mao, I could not help from shouting at the top of my voice: "Long live Chairman Mao!" With warm tears in my eyes, many past events came back to my mind.     

The role of data analysis in inclusion processes and practices

This article outlines BPRS funded investigations into my own school's and other establishments' practices and processes within data analysis, needs identification and tracking of children's academic progress. It describes the evaluation of my school's then current practices and policies and the use of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with my own staff, and assessment coordinators and senior leaders within exemplar schools. As well as outlining the main findings of my research this article assesses the introduction of new models of assessment for my own staff and pupils. This article also highlights how my research developed and the way my research process changed as it continued.     

A Teacher Educator's Fate: Seeking contexts to engage student teachers in thinking about learning to teach

Through self-study I believe I can gain a better understanding of myself, of my students, and of the process of teacher education. Exploring the ways in which I respond in writing to pre-service teachers helps me to better understand my practice and the learning-to-teach experiences of pre-service teachers. This paper reports on my written responses to 160 stories of learning to teach at four different intervals across an 8-month teacher education program. Importantly, writing about my learning through self-study has challenged me to represent the ways in which I plan to apply my newfound knowledge to my practice.     

25 A Criticism of the Bourgeois Thought in my Linguistic Work

During the Two-Anti movement the Party rescued me; with the forceful assistance of the Party and the masses I criticized my individual fame and profit thinking and my political position. More recently, the students in the senior class in the Department of Literature in Peking University, graduate students, and comrades in the Chinese Language Teaching and Research Institute and the Institute of Languages have criticized my bourgeois academic thought and made me realize that my academic idealism is a serious [problem], I have decided to trust the Party and the masses and to carry out a conscious revolution in myself. For me, this has been a more thoroughgoing revolution in thought, and the criticism of my academic thinking has been a more painful process; but to expose my bourgeois pseudo-science, and to become a promoter of the cultural revolution in linguistics, I will throw down the white flag with my own hands and follow my comrades under the banner of Marxism.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

Themes at the intersections of theory and practice in online and blended education

This is a reflexive account of my experiences teaching online and blended doctoral research methodology courses and seminars. Vacillating between skepticism and affirmation, my thoughts mirror the many issues that arise from my daily professional practice and from what I have discovered in my quest to better understand the nature and workings of online and blended education through scholarly discourse. The purpose of sharing my experiences and points of view is to test a set of my truths among the community of experts on the subject. I refer to these truths as evocative discourses – emergent themes at the intersection of theory and practice of online and blended teaching and learning.     

Parochial Schools for Jewish Children—An Adverse View

In the over fifty years of my involvement in Jewish Education, I had my share of undeserved frustration and sleepless nights, which I prefer to relegate to oblivion. Instead, let me recall some of the more pleasant aspects of my work since that marked most of my career in Jewish Education.     

‘Madam,are you one of them?’ ‘Reflexivities of discomfort’ in researching an ‘illicit’ subject

Informed largely by Affect theory (2004), this paper takes up ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ to reflexively engage with my affective struggles as a Christian, heterosexual, mother, educator, undertaking a study on homosexuality, which is a thorny issue in Uganda. It a methodological prologue, reflecting my thoughts and struggles before I undertake the study. My purpose is not to find solutions, but to lay bare some anxieties and ambivalences, also suggesting the limits of reflexivity. The paper begins with an autobiographical narrative about school in relation to (homo)sexuality. This is followed by an exposition of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill; my use of reflexivity and affect to inform my affective struggles; my background as it relates to sexuality, providing insights into my researcher positionality. I then engage with moments imbued with high affective/emotive intensity in my preparation to undertake the study.     

Professional identity and educational reform: confronting my habitual practices as a teacher educator

This essay explores my role as a teacher educator within a changing policy and curriculum landscape, including managerial attempts to define acceptable educational ‘outcomes’ and other globalising pressures to regulate education. I interrogate my professional knowledge and experience as a teacher educator, raising questions about the adequacy of my support for student teachers as they enter this new landscape. I conceive the key challenge facing me at the moment as a challenge to my professional identity that requires me to find new ways of understanding and talking about my work (cf. Teaching and Teacher Education 19(1) (2002) 5). The essay might be read as a ‘self study’, in which my ‘self’ is conceived as a function of the networks or relationships in which I operate as a teacher educator and the larger structures that shape my professional world.     

Confessions from the Performatively Confused

“Confessions” begins with an auto-ethnographic account of my learning-through-movement in a relationship that was intimate, therapeutic, embodied and instructive—with a teacher called Annie. It seems sensible to start with a choreographic teacher of Feldenkrais therapies and theatre-movement to think about the meanings I import from my roles as learner, therapist and performer to my roles as educator and feminist—and back again. My work with Annie, as her student, brought choreography back into the social science class rooms in which I teach, along with an acute awareness of my embodied self as a condition/centre of my pedagogical strategies in teaching the social. Amplifying this experience, I present ways of storying and reading my teaching praxis in conventional academic classrooms, as informed by the ways in which I theorise my learning that has occurred outside of them.