Duoethnography in English Language Teaching

Research, Reflection and Classroom Application

Robert J. Lowe, Luke Lawrence, Robert J. Lowe, Luke Lawrence

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781788927178
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788927208
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book sets out duoethnography as a method of research, reflective practice and as a pedagogical approach in English Language Teaching (ELT). The book provides an introduction to the history of duoethnography and lays out its theoretical foundations. The chapters then address duoethnography as a research method which can be used to explore critical and personal issues among ELT teachers, discuss how duoethnography as a reflective practice can aid teachers in understanding themselves, their colleagues or their context, and demonstrate how duoethnography can be used as a pedagogical tool in ELT classrooms. The chapters are a range of duoethnographies from established and emerging researchers and teachers, which explore the interplay between cultural discourses and life histories with a focus on ELT in Japan.

1An Introduction to Duoethnography

Luke Lawrence and Robert J. Lowe

Luke:	I’m trying to think how the idea for this book came about.
Rob:	I think it all began when we both found ourselves engaging in research projects which were in search of a method. My first forays into duoethnography came when a fellow teacher and I realised that an examination of the differences in our career trajectories could be valuable, but we had no idea of how to express that academically. Duoethnography seemed the natural way forward.
Luke:	Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it. I was just starting to plan a project with a colleague and I can’t remember if I had seen the duoethnography you had published or not. Either way, I hadn’t quite connected the two, or if I had I wasn’t sure if it was something that I would be able to do, and secondly, I wasn’t sure if it was something that would be publishable. After we chatted about it at a conference, talking to you gave me the confidence to turn the research I had done with a colleague into a full duoethnographic research paper (thank you!) and I think we both realised that there were probably a lot of people like us, in similar situations.
Rob:	That led us to work on a research project together using the method, and during the discussions we had at that time, I think we gained a greater appreciation of the ways duoethnography might be useful for teachers and researchers in our field. We also began to experiment with the method in our classrooms.
Luke:	And I think that made us realise the diverse potential of duoethnography, I mean, how it could be used in different ways. I remember thinking: ‘why isn’t everybody doing this?!’

Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world – is naively and subjectively idealistic. There is nothing, however, more real and concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans. (Freire, 1970: 102)

Introduction

We begin this book with a dialogue and a quote from Freire to make the point clear from the start that dialogue and conversation are at the heart of what this book, and the duoethnographic method, is about. Through dialogue with others we can gain deeper insights and understandings of ourselves and the world around us. When we engage in dialogue, we are not only communicating with our conversation partner, we are also communicating with ourselves and with the wider world. It is only through dialogue that we can come to understand who we are, what we do and why we do what we do.

Duoethnography is a qualitative research methodology in which two researchers utilise dialogue to juxtapose their individual life histories in order to come to new understandings of the world. Our main purpose with this book is to introduce duoethnography as a method of research, reflective practice and as a pedagogical approach in the field of English language teaching. In this chapter we will define what duoethnography is and give an introduction to the history of duoethnography and its theoretical underpinnings, as well as situating it within the historical development of qualitative enquiry. We then go on to give a descriptive guide as to how to conduct a duoethnographic research project and provide some examples of how duoethnography has been used in the fields of ELT and applied linguistics to date. Finally, we discuss some of the ways that the duoethnographic approach to research, reflection and pedagogy could be adapted or employed for future use in ELT.

Following this introductory chapter, the book goes on to explore each of these themes by providing a selection of duoethnographies from both established and emerging researchers and teachers. The chapters in Part 1 of the book focus on duoethnography as a research methodology in ELT and applied linguistics, exploring critical and personal issues among English language teachers. Part 2 of the book provides examples of reflective practice conducted through duoethnography. Each chapter demonstrates how duoethnography can benefit teachers in learning to understand themselves, their colleagues, or their context through the exploration of personal and jointly-constructed narratives. Finally, Part 3 of the book explores the ways in which duoethnography can be adapted for use as a pedagogical tool in English language learning and teaching which provides opportunities for practice of the four skills, for language development, and for experiences of positive group interaction.

Duoethnography is principally a method of research which, while gaining some traction in various areas of social science, has yet to make a substantial impact in the fields of ELT and applied linguistics. However, within applied linguistics, in recent years there has been a move towards more qualitative approaches to research, particularly sociocultural viewpoints and issues concerning identity (Lei & Liu, 2018), and this has involved experimental forays into subjective methods of enquiry, such as autoethnography (see Canagarajah, 2012, for example). Narrative inquiry has also been developed by a number of researchers, and forms a strong strand in the language teaching and learning literature (Barkhuizen et al., 2014). Against this backdrop, duoethnography with its innovative and inclusive approach to ethnographic enquiry and qualitative research, seems perfectly poised to assume a place in the current landscape of ELT and applied linguistics research. Over the previous two or three years, beginning with a paper by Lowe and Kiczkowiak (2016) a steady trickle of duoethnographies have begun to appear in the ELT literature (see Gagné et al., 2018; Lawrence & Nagashima, 2019; Rose & Montakantiwong, 2018, for example). This book represents the first attempt to introduce this methodology to the field of ELT and to establish duoethnography as a credible and effective way to engage in qualitative research for novice teachers, teacher educators and experienced researchers alike.

Duoethnography is a relatively new method of research that has so far mainly focused on fields such as education, health and social science. While it can be classed as an ‘emerging’ rather than as an ‘established’ methodology, duoethnography’s growing influence has recently been recognised through the publication of a special issue of the International Review of Qualitative Research in 2015, featuring a retrospective article from the method’s progenitors (Sawyer & Norris, 2015), as well as a variety of studies demonstrating the diverse ways in which it is being used. However, because of its emergent status, some explanation may be required of what duoethnography is, where it came from, and how it is generally used by researchers. To this end, this chapter will focus on introducing duoethnography, situating it within broader trends in qualitative research and examining how it developed from previous approaches to research such as autoethnography and narrative enquiry. An explanation will also be given for how duoethnography has traditionally been conducted by scholars in the fields of social, health and educational research, before describing the tentative steps that have been taken by researchers working in applied linguistics and ELT.

As well as its more traditional use as a research approach, duoethnography has also been employed as a form of reflective practice for educators, taking advantage of its dialogic format to contrast views and perspectives in order to help teachers develop as critically engaged practitioners. This aspect of duoethnography will also be discussed in this chapter, again situated within the literature on teacher reflection, and with a specific focus on ELT. Finally, this chapter will briefly address the most recent use of duoethnography: as a form of project-based learning within the field of English language teaching.

The Emergence of Duoethnography

Duoethnography was initially conceived of as a method of qualitative research in which two researchers contrast and juxtapose their life histories in order to provide multiple understandings of a topic or a phenomenon. The method was first conceptualised by Norris and Sawyer (2004), and has since developed in a number of directions, both theoretical and methodological. Our aim here is to situate duoethnography within its historical context, both in terms of social theory and approaches to qualitative research.

Theoretical background

Qualitative approaches to research are well established in social science and related areas such as education and healthcare. In particular, ethnography formed a basis of much early work in anthropology and other fields which sought to understand the functions and behaviours of societies and social groups. Early ethnographic work, as with other approaches to social scientific research from the late 19th century to the first half of the 20th century was strongly influenced by the natural sciences, and was focused on efforts to establish a ‘science of society’ (Halsey, 2004). As a result of this influence, much sociological research was carried out using quantitative approaches such as surveys, and a great deal of effort was expended in attempting to make precise and robust measurements of phenomena and populations in society. Qualitative researchers, including ethnographers, followed this natural science model by advocating a ‘naturalistic’ approach based more on observational branches of the natural sciences such as biology (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Understanding that the subjectivity and the influence of the researcher is perhaps more problematic in the social than natural sciences, over time qualitative researchers developed procedures which could be used to make their data more reliable and minimise their subjective biases. One influential procedure of this type was grounded theory, an approach to data analysis developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) in which, through a rigorous and comprehensive process of coding, confidence in the conclusion of the researcher’s analysis may be increased and justified. Another long-standing procedure developed with this goal in mind is bracketing, in which researchers seek to acknowledge and set aside their assumptions and suppositions in order to analyse their data with a more objective eye. While these researchers conceded that it was not possible for their research to reflect reality with complete accuracy and objectivity, they did nevertheless assume that there was an objective social reality that was discoverable, observable and describable with some degree of confidence. This theoretical orientation is generally known as postpositivism, as it assumes some of the ontological principles associated with positivist research, but without the belief that true objective certainty in investigation or description was possible.

While postpositivism is still a popular research paradigm in qualitative inquiry in general, its realist assumptions (that is, assumptions based on the belief that social science can get close to describing an objective existent reality, if not to describe it entirely) have been strongly questioned. This is true both in general sociology (in which the influence of critical sociology led to what Halsey (2004: 119) describes as ‘the onslaught of anti-positivism’), and in the specific case of ethnography. Influenced by poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of social research, ethnographers have been compelled to consider foundational questions about the ways in which they conduct their research. One example of this is the nature of ethnographic writing and the objectivity of research reports. Whereas such writing was intended to be objectively descriptive, researchers influenced by Derrida’s concept of deconstruction (see Stocker, 2006) have argued that the research report is itself a construct which serves, through various rhetorical strategies, to create a reality as much as it is a means of describing one (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Likewise, the influence of the philosopher Michel Foucault’s work has led researchers to evaluate ethnographic accounts as one element through which ‘regimes of truth’ are constructed, and how therefore power, and power relations, in society are upheld (see Gutting, 2001 for a more thorough discussion).

Another criticism levelled at the nature of ethnographic writing has been the tendency for ethnographers to adopt the present tense in their writings. This ‘ethnographic present’ implies a timeless, unchanging, state without past or future, within which all there is to know about a given group or society has been captured by the researcher (Davies, 2008). In addi...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• 1. An Introduction to Duoethnography
• Part 1: Duoethnography for ELT Research
• Part 2: Duoethnography for Reflection and Teacher Education
• Part 3: Duoethnography for Language Teaching
• Epilogue: New Directions for Duoethnography in ELT
• Index