Negotiating ‘ares,’ ‘cans,’ and ‘shoulds’ of being and becoming in English language teaching: two teacher accounts from one Japanese university

Abstract

This study, utilizing narrative inquiry underpinned by poststructural theory, explores the lived experiences of two university-level English language teaching (ELT) professionals negotiating ‘borders’ of essentialized and idealized being and becoming, in seeking to account for the movement, hybridity, and diversity characterizing identity and interaction in and beyond ‘Japan.’ These borders relate to essentialized and idealized ‘ares,’ ‘cans,’ and ‘shoulds’ of ‘Japaneseness,’ juxtaposed against ‘Otherness’ predicated on ‘nativeness’ in English. In negotiating positionality, the two teachers choose to both discursively ‘trouble’ and not trouble who they, their colleagues, and their students ‘are,’ ‘can,’ and/or ‘should’ be or become, in complex and seemingly ‘contradictory’ ways. The study notes that the creation, limitation, and elimination of space for identity in ELT is sociohistorically, contextually, and fluidly connected to the local’global construction, maintenance, and/or challenging of borders of identity and community membership in the settings in which learning, use, and instruction take place.

Keywords:

• Teacher identity
• privilege–marginalization
• criticality
• narrative inquiry

Notes

1. Both names are pseudonyms. 光 [hikari] means ‘light’ in Japanese, while Saoirse (pronounced Sair-sha) is a name of Irish origin signifying ‘liberty/freedom’ that became popular during Cogadh na Saoirse [Irish War of Independence] occurring between 1919 and 1921.

2. ‘We’ is employed to reveal our positionality and contributions to shaping the study as researchers.

3. Scholarship positioning itself, and/or positioned, as ‘poststructuralist’ is characterized by ontological and epistemological diversity, in its approach to ‘self.’ In this article, we draw on poststructural theory and scholarship that conceptualizes ‘self’ as discursively constructed, while not doing away with ‘self’ entirely.

4. In the interest of protecting Hikari and the identity of the student, elements of this quote and corresponding story cannot be included. We have used parentheses () to denote this.

5. Yamato nadeshiko is a term for essentialized, idealized, and traditional womanhood in Japan, where the individual is passive, subservient, beautiful, silent, and yet strong.