Abstract
Narrative approaches within the domain of social qualitative research claim to offer three advantages in comparison to traditional, nonnarrative approaches: (1) to take the subjectively lived dimension of personal experience serious and integrate this dimension into the research process; (2) to tap into the personal and communal lifeworld of our research participants (for instance, how collective identities are formed—such as professional identities of teachers, foreign language teachers, or teaching in a foreign country); (3) to be a particular form of an ethnographic methodology that investigates everyday storytelling practices—practices within which identities are interactively and communally/culturally ‘brought off’ and become empirically visible. In addition, narratives have been found to contribute significantly to the field of identity research, because they form exemplars of value stances in which the narrator (1) navigates how (moral) agency is attributed (e.g. who is in control and can be held responsible versus who is the victim and potentially blameless), (2) navigates the differentiation and integration between characters (along memberships in identity categories such as gender, age, race, or nationality), and (3) navigates the dimensions of change and constancy across time, for example, whether we are the same we used to be (remained stable) or whether we changed—matured, developed, regressed, and so on.
Patrick Kiernan conducted and analyzed life-story interviews of 42 interviewees: 21 native English-speaking and 21 native Japanese-speaking English teachers in Japan, in terms of who they are and what they do as Japanese/non-Japanese teachers of English. As such, his study explores the identity formation of a particular profession: where (and how) individuals decide to join (and stay in) this profession, what they value, how they differentiate and integrate themselves vis-à-vis others—and this includes how female teachers bring off their identities in relationship to males (and vice versa), what it means to be ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ (language-wise as well as with regard to Japanese citizenship), and how teachers form their identities vis-à-vis other professionals. In short, Kiernan successfully brings to light fascinating insights of the identity work displayed in the narratives of his participants—insights that not only illuminate the profession of being a teacher, a foreign language teacher, a language teacher who teaches English as a foreign language, and who does this in Japan, as a foreigner, and as a native. At the same time, his insights illuminate cultural and gender contrasts in storytelling and more general meaning-making practices that reflect differences in socialization and identity-formation processes that seem to be quite relevant for language acquisition, in general, and for language teaching, more specifically.
Instead of further specifying Kiernan’s contributions for applied linguistics and (language) teaching, let me play up his contribution to identity research, which lies in his original approach to narrative. Instead of taking the interviews holistically as representing the interviewees’ lives, Kiernan analyzes smaller segments: narrative episodes consisting of interactive moves using which the participants perform meaningful identity work. Selecting 77 smaller narratives from his 42 interviewees, Kiernan analyzes what these teachers characterize as significant moments, significant events, or whole periods (that can prolong for months or even years). Bringing a more fine-grained interactive/discursive lens to these narratives, the stories become showcases not only for how narrators navigate self–other differences, but also for how they are able to navigate continuity and change, that is, how they became who they are—and at the same time remained who they used to be. I consider this the most interesting and the more comprehensive and generalizable contribution of Kiernan’s book, and therefore, wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone in the new and exciting field of narrative identity research.