Narrative inquiry for teacher education and development: Focus on English as a foreign language in China

Teaching and Teacher Education 25 (2009) 219–227

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Narrative inquiry for teacher education and development: Focus on English as a foreign language in China Shijing Xu a, *,1, F. Michael Connelly b, 2 a

National Research Center for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University; Faculty of Education, University of Windsor, 401 Sunset Avenue, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4, Canada b Department of Curriculum Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1V6, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 27 February 2008 Received in revised form 29 September 2008 Accepted 23 October 2008

Teacher education and development takes place within an encompassing local system of education and ongoing forms of school improvement. Critical to successful teacher development when Western ideas are being adopted in other cultures is narratively linking development programmes to this local education system, such as in China, and to its culturally established ways of knowing and being. This paper presents a narrative inquiry approach to teacher development that builds on the existing educational system, ongoing school reforms, and culturally established ways of knowing and being. The paper concludes with the potential of teacher development to shape global values that may be shared among cultures. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Teacher development Narrative inquiry Teacher education Cross-cultural education Teacher knowledge English as a foreign language

1. Introduction The theme of this paper grew out of a consideration of teacher education and teacher development for the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) in China. China is undertaking a national reform of EFL teacher education. Michael was invited to give keynote addresses to two national conferences on EFL teacher education and to discuss the application of narrative inquiry to the Chinese situation. Shijing, who taught English as a foreign language in China, and who works collaboratively with Michael in Canadian school-based studies of Chinese immigrants, also spoke at these conferences. These conferences were designed with speakers from abroad who were expected to bring forward outside, international, views and knowledge. Local Chinese speakers brought forward internal Chinese knowledge, views and problems (e.g. Wang, 2007; Wu, 2007a, 2007b; Zou, 2008). Shijing, having taught and worked

* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 519 253 3000x3828; fax: þ1 519 971 3694. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S. Xu), [email protected] (F.M. Connelly). 1 Shijing Xu is Affiliated Research Associate of National Research Center for Foreign Language Education, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. This work was sponsored by the Center. 2 Tel.: þ1 416 978 0254; fax: þ1 416 926 4769. 0742-051X/$ – see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2008.10.006

in both China and Canada, brought both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective. This dual stance is reflected in the fact that she holds a faculty position in a Canadian teacher education institution while also holding an affiliated Research Associate post in China’s National Research Center for Foreign Language Education. Our purpose in this article is to draw on this experience, and to think through some of the possible consequences of narrative inquiry for teacher development in settings where Western ideas are being adopted for use in other cultures. The specific tension that runs through this paper, and which explicitly shows up in the set of considerations for EFL teacher education and development that concludes the paper, is how to create balance and harmony between Western imported ideas and ideologies and Chinese cultural knowledge strengths. As Zongjie Wu (2007b), a Chinese language scholar, agonises while reflecting on the recent history of Chinese language reform, ‘‘The Western educational system that accompanied Western knowledge became the only acceptable system of study in schooling. Confucianism as a form of pedagogy was thoroughly marginalized’’ (p. 2). Based on her ‘‘New Basic Education’’ project initiated in the 1990s, Lan Ye (2006) discusses Chinese cultural roots and strengths in education and sees the need for a balance between Chinese traditions and western ideas. Our specific focus in this paper is on EFL teachers in China though we believe the ideas presented herein are applicable

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elsewhere, and to teachers in other areas. We make the case that educational reforms in teacher education and development in English as a foreign language in China, and elsewhere, need to begin with local cultural knowledge before importing ideas from abroad. We develop two main threads to make this case: the place of teacher development in educational reform, and narrative inquiry as a way of thinking about teacher education and development. We develop this general stance by first discussing China’s educational reform context as a positioning frame for our discussion of Narrative Inquiry. We summarise the concept of narrative inquiry as it applies to English as a foreign language teacher education and development, and we conclude with a set of considerations for English as a foreign language teacher education reform in non-Western settings. 2. The reform context English as a foreign language in China is undergoing reforms in keeping with China’s overall development (Zuo, 2008). According to the Higher Education Department of the Chinese Ministry of Education (2007) ‘‘College English is not only a language course that provides basic knowledge of English, but is also a capacity enhancement course that helps students to broaden their horizons and learn about different cultures in the world’’ (p. 17). The focus on English is relatively recent and reflects a shift in the relative influence of Russia and America in the world and on China. Moreover, as Li (2006) observes, China’s emphasis on educational reform is part of China’s overall modernisation effort. Modernisation, some argue, is prerequisite to successful national development (Inkeles, 1975; So, 1990). Li (2006) points out that the People’s Republic of China has been focused on modernisation since the late 1970’s in an effort to catch up with the West. These developments in modernisation, and the emphasis on English, are directly connected with the events that brought us to the China language conferences and to the writing of this paper. It is well known that Confucian values place a high emphasis on education and that teachers have a special place in Chinese thought (Xu, 2006). The result is that teacher education, and its reform, is a high priority in China (China Ministry of Education & State Commission of Education, 1996; China Ministry of Education and Training, 1999; Wu, 2007a; Xie, 2001; Ye, 2006; Zou, 2008). The priority given to teacher education reform was enhanced by China’s curriculum reform policy in the face of internationalisation and globalisation of education (see, Li, 2006; Ye, 2006; Zha, 2003; Zou, 2008). The New Curriculum System for Basic Education is designed to replace a curriculum that was seen by Chinese authorities, as overemphasizing learning of disciplinary knowledge and being isolated from the needs of the times, social development and students’ individuality (Xie, 2001; Ye, 2006; Zou, 2008). There appear to be strong links between policy development, teacher education reform, and curriculum reform in the overall reform of education in China (Ye, 2006). To the extent that this is an accurate picture of the Chinese educational reform context it differs significantly from reforms in North America and Britain which have tended to be dominated by curriculum development, teacher development and, recently, achievement testing and accountability policies. What is different is that one or the other of these reform types has tended to be pursued aggressively and somewhat independently in the West while in China the reforms run in tandem. China’s teacher education and curriculum reforms are related and are part of a larger educational policy whole (Wang, 2007; Ye, 2006). Recent policy initiatives, particularly in the United States (US Department of Education, 2007), have focused on achievement and accountability with little emphasis on teacher education and curriculum though these matters, of course, were impacted and changes were made as a result of the achievement-accountability

policy. For a comprehensive general discussion of this educational reform literature see chapters by Apple (2008), Cochran-Smith and Demers (2008), Pinar (2008) and Welner and Oakes (2008) in The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction (Connelly, He, & Phillion, 2008). Westbury (2008) provides a comprehensive overview in which he discusses reform from the point of view of central governments. 2.1. What works? The literature on educational reform is somewhat discouraging. Chinese educational reforms and studies, those in EFL curriculum and teacher development in particular, tend to be conducted mostly within Western research and development norms and drew heavily on the Western literature for its discussion. On the other hand, the overwhelming impression left from reading reviews of American and European reform implementation (e.g. Fullan, 2008) is that nothing works as planned. It may be that, like stories in the popular media, bad news sells. But it is deeper than this. Education, in its deepest philosophical sense is, as Dewey (1938) said, the other side of the coin to life. Life is education; education is life. In practice, of course, education and life may seem far apart. Western reforms in recent years have often seemed to separate life and education, for example, the accountability and achievement testing oriented reforms of the No Child Left Behind Act in the United States (US Department of Education, 2007). When life and education stray apart, or collide, Dewey wrote that the effect would be ‘‘miseducative’’ (Dewey, 1938, p. 25), something that Valenzuela (2005) says has occurred for dispossessed groups in the United States. In the Chinese educational context, as Wu (2006, p. 343– 344) points out, ‘‘students are constantly tested and compared to make them aware of their ‘weaknesses’ in comparison to standards of evaluation. Various public terms are invented to differentiate students, and put them into relationships of competition. Many students are thrown into an inner struggle to make sense of themselves according to these terms’’. When educational change and improvement is thought of in terms of life and living, it is not surprising that an educational intervention does not change life as expected. This is especially true when planned changes appear to be distant from life. Life is complex and much of what we value is hardly measurable. The richness and complexity of these matters led Eisner (1994) to write that schools teach three curricula; the explicit, the implicit, or ‘‘the hidden’’ (Jackson, 1968), and the null (things excluded from the explicit curriculum). Educational reform is inevitably focused on the explicit. But the implicit, hidden, curriculum of unanticipated effects and learning are also inevitably influential in student lives, as are the assumptions built into leaving things out of the explicit curriculum i.e. Eisner’s null curriculum. This is so because of the fundamental truth in Dewey’s equation of life and education. A reform programme may be designed with little regard for how learners, and teachers, experience schooling but, regardless of preestablished reform plans, learners and teachers live out school lives. Life goes on with unexpected results. Life, in Eastern views, is a continuity of being. With discrepancy between theory and practice and discontinuity in our educational programmes, reform plans may go awry and programmes may be poorly implemented, as Fullan and Steigelbauer (1991) and Zou (2008) show, or lives may be damaged with miseducative consequences as Valenzuela (2005) and Wu (2006) show. This way of thinking about educational change helps explain why teachers are often blamed for failed education reform. Policies and curriculum programmes have built in explicit expectations for students. When the implicit overwhelms the explicit and expectations are not met because educational life is more complex than can be imagined ahead of time by policy makers and other reformers, teachers are seen as the culprit.

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The extreme response to this tension between life and education is the attempt to develop ‘‘teacher proof’’ curricula. In this view teachers are not so much teachers as they are transmitters of external purposes and materials (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Darling-Hammond, 2006). Teachers are at the human-to-human curriculum and teaching intersection, at the point where formal curriculum, students, teachers and culture intersect into. They are, as the idea of teacher proof curriculum ironically implies, vital to educational success and reform. But instead of teacher proofing the process, it is important to understand how teachers relate to external forces like policy and curriculum materials as they teach. Educational reform comes down always to teachers and students acting together in curricular settings. It is during the teaching act and in follow-up to it that the explicit, hidden and null curricula take shape in learner’s lives. Learning how teachers experience and narrate the teaching act, and the reform intentions they are expected to teach, says much about education as a form of living. The most extensive programme of research linking teachers, reform and narrative inquiry in North America is Craig’s (2003a, 2003b, 2004, 2006) school-based work. She documents a nuanced picture of teacher development amidst imposed educational reform. In China, Wu (2006) illustrates his understanding of practitioner research as a form of life with an Eastern interpretation. He draws on Taoist worldview to understand teachers’ life in the classroom, ‘‘a world where the deepest concerns of life are often reduced to abstract words’’ and he is concerned that ‘‘the very insights of life may be obscured by inflated words’’ (Wu, 2006, p. 332). This brief account of educational reform reveals the centrality of teachers and teacher development to educational reform and improvement. Both those who favor enhancing the professional role of teachers, and those who wish either to train teachers for specific tasks and/or reduce their influence through teacher proofing, recognise this centrality. Schwab (1962) recognised this centrality by naming ‘‘teacher’’ as a commonplace of curriculum planning. But there are distinctly different, even opposing, views of this teacher commonplace in reform. In the following section we briefly discuss these different views.

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attempts to improve programme implementation by knowledge and skills training programmes for teachers. Teacher knowledge refers to the ways teachers know themselves and their professional work situations. Teacher knowledge is a narrative construct which references the totality of a person’s personal practical knowledge gained from formal and informal educational experience. In a review of three programmes of research on teacher knowledge Fenstermacher (1994) referred to teacher knowledge as the knowledge that teachers generate as a result of their experience as teachers. Teacher knowledge includes what teachers are formally taught in knowledge and skills training programmes, but also includes much more than this. The concept refers to everything that a teacher brings to bear on any particular situation. When a teacher responds to a student or designs a particular lesson, their actions and plans are based on the totality of their experience. They respond holistically as persons. It would be a rare and unusual teacher who stopped in the middle of a lesson to consult a list of learnings from a knowledge-for-teachers workshop before taking action. The three teacher knowledge research programmes reviewed by Fenstermacher (1994) were identified by three sets of researchers: Shulman (e.g. Shulman, 1987), Munby et al. (e.g. Munby, Russell, & Martin, 2001), and Connelly and Clandinin (1988). These three programmes of research have somewhat different theoretical starting points but all share the view that it is what teachers know as persons, more than what they are taught, that is central both to understanding teacher action and to the design of programmes for school reform. Connelly and Clandinin’s work grows out of narrative inquiry and is the line of work discussed in this paper. Craig’s work, noted above, is an important complement to this line of work because of her focus on a narrative approach to understanding school reform. In the following pages we define narrative inquiry as both phenomenon and method, describe, historically, steps in the development of a narrative idea of teacher development, explain the general features of narrative as method, and present a set of considerations of importance in a narrative approach to EFL teacher education and development. We conclude with a short postscript on community development and the intersection of ways of knowing and being. 4. What is narrative inquiry?3

3. Teacher knowledge versus knowledge-for-teachers Three main ways of responding to the centrality of teachers are teacher proofing of curriculum, emphasizing knowledge-forteachers, and emphasizing teacher knowledge. Teacher proofing refers to the detailed writing of curriculum materials in such a way that teachers merely transmit curriculum content with minimal modification. The purpose is to minimise, even eliminate, teacher effects. This view has been largely dismissed in the literature, though examples show up from time to time. The distinction between knowledge-for-teachers and teacher knowledge refers to knowledge taught to teachers versus what teachers know through life experience, including what is taught to them (Connelly & Clandinin, 2000). The most common response to the centrality of teachers in reform is knowledge-for-teachers by which is meant teaching teachers the knowledge and skills needed for certification or to implement particular curriculum programmes. An Internet scan reveals hundreds of such activities. For instance, a description of the Teaching Knowledge Test (TKT), Cambridge ESOL (Ashton & Harrison, 2007) refers to ‘‘the core professional knowledge needed by teachers of English as a second language (p. 1). As noted above, there is an extensive Western literature primarily from England, the United States, Canada and Australia (e.g. Apple, 2008; Fullan, 2008; Levin, 2008; Welner & Oakes, 2008; Westbury, 2008) documenting the limitations of educational reform in general and, specifically, the limitations of

Narrative inquiry is a way of thinking about life (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, 2005). Learning how to think narratively is more important than learning definitions, steps and methods. The reason for this is that narrative inquiry is a conception of the phenomenal world in which experience is mediated by story. Philosophically, narrative inquiry is less about method than it is about the phenomena studied via method. For this reason we define narrative inquiry as both phenomenon and method. Narrative is the phenomenon of inquiry because everything, including teacher development, is a phenomenon narrated through stories. The phenomena of narrative inquiry are, themselves, narrative in nature. In this, narrative inquiry differs from other methods. It would make no sense, for instance, to say the phenomena of factor analysis or ethnography were factor analysis and ethnography. But it does make sense to say that the phenomena of narrative inquiry are narratives. As Connelly and Clandinin (1990, p. 2) put it, ‘‘It is equally correct to say ‘inquiry into narrative’ as it is ‘narrative inquiry.’ By this we mean that narrative

3 In a review of the formalistic boundaries of narrative with other forms of inquiry Clandinin and Rosiek (2007) describe several alternative lines of narrative inquiry that answer to the question what is narrative inquiry? Our discussion in this paper refers to the line of inquiry associated with Connelly and Clandinin and, more specifically, to narrative inquiry for school-based research (Connelly & Xu, 2008a, 2008b).

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is both phenomenon and method. Narrative names the structured quality of experience to be studied, and it names the patterns of inquiry for its study.’’ Narrative is the method of inquiry because the inquiry is itself a narrative process. Let us now unpack this concept drawing on Connelly and Clandinin’s line of work. 4.1. Narrative as phenomenon: a brief history 4.1.1. Reform and school improvement context During the last half century, school reform in North America and Great Britain was mainly through curriculum development, though accountability and achievement testing have been the recent focus. Curriculum development reform results were poor, and the United States Office of Education launched a grants programme to understand why. A Connelly (1980) grant was designed to study the implementation of school board policies in Toronto. The focus was on teacher development as the key to successful curriculum development. An important outcome of this research was the development of the idea of narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). According to Clandinin, Pushor, and Orr (2007), the 1990 entre´e marked the first appearance of the term in the literature. The relevant context for the development of this programme of narrative inquiry research was, accordingly, school reform and improvement. Narrative inquiry, at least in this line of work, grew out of a motivation to improve life through education. 4.1.2. Development of a narrative idea of teacher development There are important intellectual resources and four main stages in the development of a narrative idea of teacher development based on this line of work. 4.1.2.1. Intellectual resources. Two intellectual resources were critical: Joseph Schwab (1970, 1971, 1973, 1983) and his ideas on the ‘‘practical’’ nature of curriculum, and John Dewey (1938) and his theory of experience. Schwab makes a sharp distinction between theory and research in the pure disciplines, and theory and research in practical, professional, fields like teacher development. A misguided practice in educational inquiry, for Schwab, is that researchers tend to think and act theoretically. Schwab’s work is theoretically grounded in the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical, practical and productive disciplines, especially as that work was interpreted and extended by McKeon (1952). Schwab’s critique was directed to curriculum studies but his ideas apply to any educational field where educational practices and practitioners are concerned. Schwab observed that rather than directly entering into and participating in curriculum practices in schools and elsewhere, curriculum scholars undertook theoretical exegeses and applications to those real world curricular practices. Basically, he made a similar argument about educational research to that made above about educational reforms that separate life and education. Schwab (1969, p. 3) called the overemphasis and overuse of theory a ‘‘flight from the subject of the field’’. At the time when psychology was much in evidence in educational theory, Schwab pointed out that instead of studying how people experienced teaching and learning, educational researchers borrowed psychological theories and applied them to ways of thinking about teaching and learning situations. Following this wrong, for Schwab, logic of theory application means that teacher education and development is often treated as the application of theories, for instance, the application of theories of language learning. Theory to practice, following Schwab’s thinking, is upside down. For Schwab, research should begin amidst actual practices. Theory should be referenced and applied only after documenting practice and its limitations. Dewey’s work is important because through him, and others such as Polanyi (1958) and his concept of personal knowledge, it is

possible to gain a theoretical understanding of what it means, personally, to know and how that knowing is developed through experience. Though both Dewey and Polanyi’s work is philosophical and theoretical, it provides an alternative way of thinking about practice. Working with Dewey’s ideas, a school-based, practiceoriented researcher is compelled to think about the actual experience of practice rather than an idealised form of theoretically defined practice. Moreover, Dewey’s terms provided an analytic framework for studying practical experience. These ideas are developed later in this paper. Polanyi’s work was particularly important for grounding experiential studies of practice in the educationally defensible language of knowledge; a term that Deng and Luke (2008) point out is the central question of curriculum studies. Polanyi argued that for persons, all knowledge is personal and intersubjective. Polanyi drew a distinction between knowledge as it is thought of as appearing in libraries, archives, and books, and knowledge as it exists in a person. A person experiences their knowledge. Therefore, for Polanyi, personal knowledge has aesthetic, emotional and moral qualities. Knowledge is not merely logical and objective. This notion was important for the line of work discussed here because for an understanding of practices such as teacher education for foreign language teaching and learning, it is not enough to know the objective, logical, parameters of linguistics and teaching methods to be taught to teachers. It is necessary to know what teachers already know when teacher education begins in order to understand the narrative context shaping a teacher’s learning. How teachers know and experience their knowledge is important to understanding the process. Thus, Schwab, Dewey and Polanyi are important intellectual resources in the move from the ‘‘flight’’ to theory, to the implicit, intimate, experiential, personal, practical, features that drive practice. The practical via Schwab, and the experiential via Dewey and Polanyi, are key intellectual resources in our theoretical approach to both the phenomenon and the method of narrative inquiry for teacher development. These resources led to four stages in the development of our concept of narrative: origins, personal practical knowledge, professional knowledge landscapes, and the narrative intersection of ways of knowing and being. 4.1.2.2. Origins. Disciplinary knowledge was the principal concept driving curriculum development in North America in the middle of the last half century (Pinar, 2008). Connelly (1968) worked in plant ecology. His research team started with curriculum materials, and then moved to work with teachers where it was found that it was teachers, rather than theoretically sound curriculum materials, that made a difference to teaching and learning (e.g. Finegold, 1974). Connelly undertook a study of teacher deliberation and choice (Connelly & Dienes, 1982), the idea being that teacher thinking would bridge the gap between curriculum materials and teachers’ practical classroom implementation. But this idea of teacher thinking had limited application. Instead, more fundamental matters were at stake than deliberation, choice and decision making. Teacher knowledge, rather than teacher deliberation or disciplinary knowledge taught to teachers, was the critical point. What teachers did depended on what they knew as persons, more than it did on their deliberative decision making steps or on the knowledge they were taught in teacher development exercises. The basic insight that teacher knowledge overrides and is more important than knowledge-for-teachers is behind everything else in a narrative approach to teacher education and development. 4.1.2.3. Personal practical knowledge conceptual stage. Working in the teacher deliberation and choice project, Elbaz (1983) developed a widely referenced concept of teachers’ practical knowledge. Practical knowledge refers to the practical things that teachers

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know through their teaching experience. The critical feature of teacher knowledge is that it is tacit (Polanyi, 1958), an idea which led to expansion of the concept of practical knowledge to the idea of personal practical knowledge (Clandinin, 1985; Connelly & Dienes, 1982). The critical feature of teachers’ personal practical knowledge is that it is, following Polanyi (1958), tacit. This means that teacher knowledge is not organised and coded according to any of the traditional disciplinary and cognitive ways of organizing knowledge and skills. People are mostly unaware of this knowledge which carries cultural and social qualities originating in a person’s life narrative. Tacit knowledge refers to the background knowledge people carry in their minds and bodies, a form of personal practical knowledge that governs how people approach the practical world. Disciplinary knowledge is subsumed under tacit knowledge. Rather than logically determined practical application, tacit knowledge is expressed variably, depending on the practical situation. This helps explain why educational reforms are so difficult to achieve. Tacit teacher knowledge overwhelms prescribed policies and memorised formal knowledge as teachers work with students. Teacher knowledge is more critical than knowledge-for-teachers. Though teachers may not be able to say what they know, they feel – emotionally, morally, and aesthetically – their knowledge. This knowledge is central to what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) call ‘‘metaphors to live by’’ and which Johnson (1987) later called ‘‘the body in the mind.’’ As such teacher knowledge is at the heart of teacher identity (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). On these grounds it is clear that what is taught to teachers goes beyond testable lists of intended outcomes and is, in the end, a small part, perhaps even a ‘‘miseducative’’ part, of what teachers know. To return to Eisner, at the very least teacher knowledge consists of the hidden and null curricular knowledge associated with the intended curriculum of knowledge-for-teachers. But, more than this teacher knowledge is a holistic rendering of teacher experience in and out of teacher education settings. A teacher education reformer may think that what is intended is value neutral and therefore easily learned by teachers. But teacher knowledge is personal knowledge and anything taught to teachers as knowledge-for-teachers becomes teacher knowledge and touches the very heart of who teachers are by touching their identity as teachers and as persons. This is one of the reasons why teacher education reforms which divorce education from life may, as Valenzuela says of disenfranchised groups, be harmful rather than helpful. Teacher identity expresses personal practical knowledge gained in experience, learned contextually, and expressed on landscapes of practice. 4.1.2.4. Professional knowledge landscapes conceptual stage. A potential misunderstanding about teacher knowledge flows from the idea that teacher knowledge is tacit, personal and practical. It may be argued that such knowledge is idiosyncratic, and that paying attention to it ignores the cultural and social setting in which people work. But sociality is a key part of one’s knowledge. The idea of professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) is designed to recognise sociality in teacher knowledge. This term focuses on how specific environments in which teachers work serve as contexts which influence the development of personal practical knowledge and, reciprocally, of how this knowledge shapes teacher’s response to their environments. When educational reforms are imposed on educational systems they enter a landscape with its own narrative qualities. These qualities, as with teacher’s personal practical knowledge, need to be taken into account in planning for teacher development. 4.1.2.5. Narrative intersection of ways of knowing and being conceptual stage. The third major stage in the development of the idea of narrative as phenomenon is an outgrowth of student work

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on changing, multicultural, landscapes, (e.g. Conle et al., 2000; He, 2003; Li, 2002; Phillion, 2002; Phillion, He, & Connelly, 2005). The idea of interaction of ways of knowing and being is developed in Xu’s (2006) work with Chinese immigrants in Toronto. In this work the idea of landscape takes on a global quality (Connelly & Xu, 2008a, b, in press). We focused on changing landscapes in Toronto as immigrant newcomer cultures changed Toronto. What is significant in this work is that Xu reconceptualises the immigrant process from one of cultural adaptation of immigrant narratives to one of cultural intersection of immigrant and host narratives. Using Deweyan and Confucian ideas Xu conceptualises the meeting of cultures as the interaction of different narratives of knowing and being. In this narrative view, teacher development consists of working with teacher narratives in interaction with student narratives. The ideas are central to the immense potential of community development as a framework for conceptutalizing teacher development noted in the Postscript. To summarise, narrative as phenomenon is one of the broad frames within which we understand teacher development and its place in educational reform. In the preceding section we briefly outlined the intellectual resources and four main stages in the development of the idea: origins, personal practical knowledge, teachers’ knowledge landscapes, and narrative intersection of ways of knowing and being. It is important to note that each of these constructs is a narrative construct; they are ways of thinking about the world in narrative, storied, terms. Let us now briefly outline the second part of narrative inquiry, narrative as method. Once narrative as phenomenon and narrative as method is built up, we will be in a position to explore the uses of narrative inquiry for foreign language teacher development. 4.2. Narrative as method: narrative as a way of thinking One could study the details of how to do a narrative inquiry, and of how to apply narrative inquiry to teacher development, and still miss the fundamental point. Anyone interested in using narrative to study foreign language teacher education needs to begin by learning to think narratively (Connelly & Clandinin, 2005). Their first task in an inquiry is to imagine their topic or phenomenon as an ongoing life space. If, for example, we decide to study science achievement we first need to put aside thoughts of science concepts and testing methods and think of science learning as a small part of a student’s classroom life. Imagining this life space takes precedence over the details of knowledge and skills lists teachers are often taught. But what does this mean? How can such a space be imagined? We now turn to ways of imagining a life space. 4.2.1. A three dimensional life space Drawing on Dewey’s idea of an experience as being the intersection of a personal and social dimension over time, and using Schwab’s practical notion, we think of a life space as a three dimensional space (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) defined by a temporal continuum (past–present–future), a personal–social continuum, and place. The concepts are simple. But bringing these concepts to life in actual research and teacher development settings is difficult. They must all be taken into account at the same time. Let us briefly describe each of these in turn. As readers think along with us try to imagine the life space as a sphere within which life activities take place. 4.2.2. Temporal continuum Things tend to be studied, and seen, as fixed in time. In teacher development teachers are said to be this way or that way; the environment is this way or that way; students have these abilities or those abilities. But, thinking narratively means that everything needs to be seen in temporal flow. Narrative phenomena are not

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seen as existing in the here and now but, rather, are seen as flowing out of the past and into the future, as we observe. Our imaginary sphere is always moving and floats through time. Xu (2006) uses a beautiful explanation drawn from Tu (1985), speaking of the Chinese painter Tao Chi (1641–1717), in which mountains are said to flow like rivers. The proper way of looking at mountains is to see them as ocean waves frosen in time (Tu, 1985). Traditionally, researchers see a mountain as a mountain. A narrative inquirer sees the mountain as ocean waves, frosen in time, ultimately flowing like a river. Narrativists even apply this notion to the physical environment so that a school is not seen as a particular fixed structure but as a building with its own narrative history and future. Let us return to this flowing sphere and imagine a teacher inside the sphere. 4.2.3. Personal–social continuum A mistaken notion in narrative inquiry is that since it focuses on the personal it is therefore idiosyncratic and unique. But persons are always in social interaction. The personal conditions of feelings, hopes, desires, aesthetic reactions and moral outlooks are always in interaction with a landscape environment consisting of people, policies, things and programmes. It is impossible to understand a teacher’s professional development in this landscape without understanding his/her personal qualities. Likewise, it is impossible to understand this person without understanding the social landscape contexts within which the person works. Narrative inquirers are required, when thinking of a life space, to think about persons in both personal and social dimensions; to think of them as persons with feelings, emotional and aesthetic reactions, and who are always interacting with other people and things in a larger environment. Context and environment are crucial. This imagining is difficult to do because it means that in a teacher development setting one cannot focus merely on what it is that one wants developed but, rather, one needs to take into account, at one and the same time, teachers’ personal qualities, their social qualities, the environment and teacher interactions between the personal and the social. A narrative inquirer sees the personal as an expression of the social and, vice versa, the social as an expression of the personal. Moreover, these qualities, the personal, the social, and their interaction, need to be thought of temporally, that is, as shifting and changing over time. A flowing, changing, life space means that minute by minute, day by day, teachers are in continual personal and social interaction. Expressions of the self relative to the teaching of, say, English as a foreign language, change depending on the dynamics of the life space. Experience changes teacher identity, changes the social landscape, and changes their interaction. Nothing stands still in Confucian continuity of being (Tu, 1985). Once again, let us return to the person in our flowing sphere and imagine that the sphere exists somewhere, or in a sequence of somewheres. 4.2.4. Place The first two dimensions of the three dimensional narrative inquiry life space are derived from Dewey’s concept of an experience. Schwab’s practical point leads to the idea of place. The specific places where phenomena unfold make a difference. A person may be one kind of person in the classroom, another kind of person in the staffroom with other teachers, still another kind of person in the principal’s office, and yet another kind of person meeting with parents during parent/teacher interviews. Place is a determining factor and changes a teacher’s identity as she/he moves from place to place. Teaching in a North American school, where low socioeconomic conditions may contribute to low achievement, and where safety in the school and community may be a public concern is different than teaching in a wealthy private school surrounded by fences, gates and guards. To return to our example of science

achievement, the space dimension means that we cannot simply measure science achievement. We need to ask questions about students’ experience of science at home, in the community, with parents and with other students. Let us return one last time to our imaginary life space sphere. Anything of interest in this sphere – science achievement or English as a foreign language teacher development – is now an immensely complicated, difficult to pin down, phenomenon. The sphere flows temporally, like a river, changing as we watch it. Events and persons in the sphere interact personally and socially, in different ways at different places, and at different times. Coming to grips with this life space is the task of a narrative approach to teacher development. To summarise, narrative as method requires that teacher development begin by imagining life spaces. These spaces vary over time with the interactions of teachers’ personal and social knowledge, and with place. These life spaces are fluid and dynamic and change as we work with them. A narrative approach to teacher development is something like a tai-chi movement where one gains balance by harmonizing and responding to shifting, changing, factors and forces. 4.3. What is narrative inquiry? A summary Let us briefly summarise what we have said. Teacher development has a pivotal role in all forms of educational reform. A narrative inquiry approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education and development entails consideration of narrative as phenomenon and narrative as method. Narrative as phenomenon entails three aspects: teachers’ personal practical knowledge, in which the personal and experiential is important; teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes, in which the context in which teachers work is important; and the intersection of different ways of knowing and being, in which the intersection of cultural narratives is important. Narrative as method is a way of thinking about phenomena as a life space consisting of the dimensions of time, the personal–social, and place. All of these matters play a role in thinking through a productive teacher education and development exercise. Let us now turn to the consequences and possibilities of this view of narrative inquiry for planning and researching English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher education and development. We remind readers that though the occasion that gave rise to this paper was EFL teacher education and development in China, we believe that our theoretical discussion, and the considerations discussed below, applies in other settings and to other subjects. 5. Considerations in a narrative approach to teacher education and development We have presented two main threads in this paper: the place of teacher development in educational reform, and narrative inquiry as a way of thinking about teacher education and development. In this section these threads come together as we outline a set of practical things to consider when taking a narrative approach to foreign language teacher education and development. The considerations follow directly from the more general discussion of school reform and narrative inquiry presented in the paper. We present these considerations with a minimum of discussion on the assumption that the paper provides adequate background. Following the outline of this paper, there are three basic things to consider: educational reform, narrative inquiry as phenomenon, and narrative inquiry as method. 5.1. Reform considerations 5.1.1. First, teacher development is part of educational reform Teacher education and development is best thought of as part of a larger organic whole consisting of other reform processes: policy

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development, curriculum development, and achievement testing and accountability. All these matters bear on a teacher’s life space and need to be taken into account as specific reforms are transmitted in professional development settings. The point of this observation for China is that Chinese EFL teacher educators and developers need to retain their traditional heritage view of holistic thinking and traditional educational practice that works for Chinese contexts. Marton, Wen, and Wong (1995), for example, study Chinese students’ interpretation of the roles of memorisation and understanding in their study habits and how repetition and variation play a role. Following their line of thinking, those who, from an outsider’s point of view, think that Chinese education involves excessive amounts of memorisation may want to rethink the process as one of the growth of understanding in variable situations and circumstances. Chinese education reformers in the 19th century had made efforts to modernise China’s educational system by adopting American models. Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946), after studying at Columbia School of Education during 1916–1917, returned to China and became an influential educator in Chinese history. He synthesised Deweyian and Chinese approaches to progressive education based on his experimental study and analysis of Chinese life and society. Current Chinese educational reformers and teacher educators and developers may want to revisit the paths paved by Tao and other earlier educators who attempted to modernise China’s education. They may need to keep the larger society, the organic whole, in mind and learn to work in harmony with the tradition in their efforts to modernise and internationalise China’s educational system. 5.1.2. Second, teachers do many things Teacher educators and teacher developers are inevitably so focused on the particular things they wish to teach teachers that they often forget that teachers’ life space is infinitely more complex than are the things they are asked to do in teacher education and professional development settings. Teacher educators and teacher developers are often disappointed at teachers’ responses because teachers have to fit knowledge-for-teachers into life spaces with many other demands. Zou (2008), for example, finds in his study that Chinese pre-service EFL teachers lack professionalism and the knowledge base needed for the teaching profession. However, life and education in the form of professional development go together. The point of this observation is that foreign language teacher educators and developers need to assess life spaces and listen to teachers in teacher education and teacher development settings. 5.2. Narrative inquiry as phenomenon considerations 5.2.1. First, begin at home in China Language teachers in China have ways of knowing and being, as do teachers everywhere, that reflect their personal narrative histories and the cultural narrative history of China. These ways of knowing and being reach back to ancient Chinese traditions of thought and need to be the starting point for teacher education and development. We do not mean to suggest that other ways of knowing and being should not be learned from abroad and taught to teachers. But the starting point needs to be the deeply embedded cultural narrative strengths that teachers and teacher educators already have. The point of this observation is that foreign language teacher educators and developers need to study, value, and build upon indigenous traditions and knowledge, and carefully preserve basic cultural attitudes, values and ways of thinking. There is a Western tradition of self-criticism, of holding assumptions, values, and starting points up for scrutiny. But this is not the central tension underlying this paper. This tension, as we earlier said, is the tension created by imported outside ways of knowing and being meeting inside ways of knowing and being. The colonialist

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potential of the Westernisation of Chinese EFL teacher education and development is, as Wu (2007) argues, too strong to be ignored. This is not only a problem for China. It is a global problem as Western intellectual colonialism in education threatens to wipe out educational traditions in other parts of the world. For an excellent review of this matter see Anderson-Levitt (2008). 5.2.2. Second, begin with teacher knowledge All learning is on a narrative continuum. When something new is taught, it is learned in the context of what the learner already knows. Chinese teachers are not blank slates when entering an English as a foreign language teacher development setting. They have experiential knowledge of children, families, schools, communities and Chinese cultural history; and they have experiential knowledge of teaching particular subject matters to learners of different ability levels. This knowledge needs to be respected and built upon, not dismissed or, worse, treated as an impediment. By not acknowledging what teachers and student teachers know, teacher educators may act with what Mark Johnson (1987) calls a God’s eye view, one in which the teacher is assumed to know nothing while the teacher educator knows all. The point of this observation is that foreign language teacher educators and developers need to assess, and build on, teacher’s prior knowledge. This is not, of course, a new insight. An excellent review of literature relevant to this point is presented by Craig and Ross (2008). 5.2.3. Third, teacher education and development is an education in teacher identity Because teacher knowledge is tacit and embodies all that a teacher has experienced, teacher knowledge and teacher identity are closely connected. The knowledge-for-teachers taught to teachers is never merely an increment in technological, conceptual or skill knowledge but reaches to the heart of how teachers experience themselves and their teaching situation. The point of this observation for Chinese EFL teacher educators and developers is to think of their teaching as a transaction with other persons; not an action upon other persons. As noted earlier in this paper, when knowledge-for-teachers is treated by policy makers and others as separate from teacher knowledge there is the potential for a rupture of education from life. 5.2.4. Fourth, imagine the flow of a life space Teacher knowledge and teacher identity unfold on teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes and do so as ever growing, ever changing, narrative constructions. Life and education are mirror images. New knowledge and skills in a teacher education and development programme are not bricks in a knowledge edifice; they are enrichment for a flowing river of life. Everything taught enters this flow and is changed as it joins in what teachers know and do. The first point of this observation for foreign language teacher educators and developers is that they need to imagine themselves entering into, and working within, the life flow of their students. Teachers of teachers are, conceptually, most educative when imagining, and acting, co-operatively with their in-service and pre-service teachers. A second point is that teachers need to think the same way about their students in schools. 5.3. Narrative inquiry as method considerations 5.3.1. First, the spirit of thinking narratively Narrative inquiry is first and foremost a way of thinking about life and research. Thinking narratively means using one’s mind to imagine life spaces that flow in time, that consist of personal and social interactions, and that move from place to place. The point of this observation is that EFL teacher educators and developers need to pay as much attention to imagining the characteristics and

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qualities of the life spaces of the teachers they teach as they do in thinking about the details of language and language teaching. This may create certain tensions for the teacher educators because of their level of specialisation. The demands of specialisation need to be shared with the broader demands of the life space.

the premises of an international company is different from teaching in a Chinese graduate school setting. Similarly, teaching in rural Northwest China is different from teaching in a major central city. In effect, whatever is developed by policy makers in a central location needs to be adapted locally.

5.3.2. Second, the spirit of inquiry versus an attitude of certainty A corollary to the idea of the narrative inquiry spirit is that teaching and learning situations, like research settings, are places of inquiry, not libraries of certainty. EFL teacher educators and developers are inquirers and co-learners with their in-service and pre-service teachers. The teachers they teach are likely to be more knowledgeable than they in the things that matter in the life space. Teacher educators and developers may have limited experience with different learners, schools, communities, cultures, and all the educational things that make up the teachers’ life space. What teacher educators do know, is a specialised field of English as a foreign or second language education research and theory and how best to teach particular topics. The point of this observation is that EFL teacher educators and developers need to be humble in the face of teacher knowledge, rather than certain about what it is they have to teach teachers. Often, when teacher educators and teachers meet in professional development settings, each has important knowledge spheres that need recognition by the other. It is important that teacher educators acknowledge and respect teacher knowledge.

6. Postscript

5.3.3. Third, teacher education and development is life-long The idea of a life space means that teacher education and development occurs on a flowing temporal, life-long, continuum of experience. From this point of view, the greatest teacher educator is daily, practical, life experience and reflection on it. The impact of pre-service teacher education and of teacher development workshop and education programmes, is, while important, only a small part of teacher development. The point of this observation is that foreign language teacher educators and developers need to focus on teacher narratives of experience, drawing on them as a key resource in foreign language teacher education. Craig’s (2003a) work demonstrates the power and relevance of teacher narratives to ideas and practices advanced in school reforms. 5.3.4. Fourth, teacher education takes place relationally English as a foreign language teacher educators and teacher developers sometimes focus on the logical and conceptual clarity of the content taught to teachers, treating it as if it had a kind of technical perfection in and of itself, the knowledge of which can be tested (Li, 2006). In this they reflect certain Western reform strategies that separate life and education. But teaching is a relationship activity and what is taught needs to be thought of in terms of teaching/learning relationships rather than as discrete units of knowledge transported from teacher educator to teacher and from teacher to student. The point of this observation is that foreign language teaching/learning situations need to be thought of as the intersection of teacher educator and teacher narratives of experience. Both bring an experiential and conceptual history to their encounter. 5.3.5. Fifth, teacher education takes place someplace Much research, and even much teaching, ignore or attempt to overcome the practical limitations of place. Researchers and teacher educators often try to be abstract and theoretical as if what they had to say applied everywhere. But place matters and influences everything one thinks and does in a life space. The point is that place needs to be carefully noted in English as a foreign language teacher education and development. Teaching teachers of English as a foreign language in a workplace environment such as

6.1. Community development: possibilities at the intersection of ways of knowing and being One of the commonplaces of language education is that language is a harbinger of culture. Language and culture are closely intertwined and the meaningful learning of a language constitutes the learning of a culture. All language learning, then, has features and qualities such as those described above with newcomer Chinese families in Toronto (Xu, 2006). Xu’s (2006) concept of family narratives and the ways of knowing and being brought by Chinese families to Canada, and through which they enter and interact with teachers and others in the school community setting, is relevant to the learning of a language. On these grounds teaching is not only embedded in local communities, it is embedded in the narrative, cultural, histories of the students taught. Foreign language teacher development is narrative community development in the broadest, global, sense. Policy makers, government officials, researchers and teacher educators are involved with the making of world cultural narratives through the mutual learning that takes place as different ways of knowing and being come together in language teaching and learning. Foreign language teacher development in the context of local and global community development is world making. A narrative approach to foreign language teacher development has the potential and power to help shape global values on the contributions and gifts that cultures have for one another. Acknowledgement We would like to acknowledge that an early version of this article was published in Chinese in Beijing University Education Review, 6(1), 51–69, 2008. References Anderson-Levitt, K. (2008). Globalization and curriculum (Chap. 17). In F. Michael Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The Sage handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 349–368). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Apple, M. (2008). Curriculum planning: content, form and the politics of accountability (Chap. 2). In F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The Sage handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 25–44). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Ashton, M., & Harrison, C. (2007). The development of the teacher knowledge test. Developingteachers.Com, a web site for the developing language teacher. Retrieved December 4, 2007, from. University of Cambridge ESOL examinations. http://www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/cambesol_tkt1.htm. China Ministry of Education, & State Commission of Education. (December 5, 1996). The opinion on the reform and development of teacher education. China: China Ministry of Education. State Commission of Education. China Ministry of Education and Training. (March 16, 1999). The opinion on adjusting the structure of teacher education institutions. China: Ministry of Education. Clandinin, D. J. (1985). Personal practical knowledge: a study of teachers’ classroom images. Curriculum Inquiry, 15(4), 361–385. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (1995). Teachers’ professional knowledge landscapes. In J. F. Soltis (Ed.), Advances in contemporary educational thought series, Vol. 15. New York: Teachers College Press. Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Clandinin, D. J., Pushor, D., & Orr, A. M. (2007). Navigating sites for narrative inquiry. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 21–35. Clandinin, D. J., & Rosiek, J. (2007). Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: borderland spaces and tensions. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 35–75). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Cochran-Smith, M., & Demers, K. (2008). Teacher education as a bridge: curriculum policy and practice (Chap. 14). In F. M. Connelly, M. F. He, & J. Phillion (Eds.), The

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