Using short-story narrative analysis to understand tensions in language education practitioner-research

Abstract

As language teacher educators and practitioner-researchers who support pre-/in-service teachers as they undertake classroom-based research in graduate programs, our work is poised between two ecologies: the classrooms where our students research their practice and the university-based programs where they study. At this research-practice nexus, a key problem includes the persistent gaps between these two ecologies. We ask: What do a language teacher educator's narratives about her students' practitioner-research tell us about the ecological nature of barriers and supports to pre-/in-service K-12 teachers' practitioner-research? How can these narratives inform our understanding of these barriers and supports at local, institutional, and societal levels? We employ critical collaborative autoethnographic approaches and Barkhuizen's scales of context framing. Data include narratives from April's 10 years of teaching graduate students who learn and conduct practitioner-research. We identified ecological tensions spanning supports and barriers: (1) Various constraints of university research do not always fit the realities of K-12 teaching. (2) Practitioner-research generally lies outside the responsibilities of any one position, but it can only be done because of the unique responsibilities that individuals have as K-12 practitioners and as university-based researchers. And (3) the aspects of practitioner-research that make it successful across K-12 and university settings can also contribute to its invisibility or marginalization. Learning how to bridge these ecologies is invaluable not only to practitioner-researchers themselves but also to the larger language teacher-education field. By better understanding these tensions between ecologies, the field can work toward systemic and institutional changes to truly sustain this work.