Language Centres at a Crossroads

This study employs a variety of semiotic fields of representations to portray the fluid and non-linear identity of language teachers who navigate between unstable professional domains and move in between different physical and symbolic territories.

Drawing from a post-qualitative methodological approach (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013;) grounded on New Materialism (Bennett, 2010) and Posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), the study makes use of verbal and visual narratives, of poems, of objects and artefacts to give voice to language teachers' nomadic professional identity.

The paper also explores the researcher's position in conducting research differently (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013) by actively engaging the participants as co-researchers within the study and by reflecting on her own transformative journey of becoming both a language teacher and a researcher. It also considers the impact academic writing has on the researcher and on those contributing to the research.

The findings of this study give evidence that language teachers' narratives, despite being marginal within the main academic discourse, can be regarded as powerful voices of negotiation and re-negotiation of one own's professional identity through migration, displacement and reterritorialization into new physical and symbolic territories (Braidotti, 2011). These auto/biographical stories indicate that language teaching is more than a profession; it is an emotional, embodied, social and political act by which personal and professional identities are re-positioned within new physical and symbolic domains. The multidimensionality of the self seems to find expression within the fluidity, the cacophony of voices and the non-linearity of these diasporic stories of migration, that allowed the participants, including the researcher, to be other and same. Language teaching, besides being a community of practice, seems also to become a territory where resistance to mainstream academic discourse can be performed.

The study hopes to inspire language teachers, not only those who have been active participants in this research journey, to embark into new professional trajectories and also aims at underpinning a different conceptual and practical attitude to language teacher training and professional development that would position identity at the core of its framework.

Questa presentazione esplora la posizione nomadica degli insegnanti di lingua all'interno del sistema universitario britannico. Lo studio presenta 10 narrazioni basate sull'incontro con 10 insegnanti di lingua, provenienti da diversi paesi e con formazioni diverse, con i quali la ricercatrice ha interagito durante una serie di incontri focalizzati sulle loro storie di vita e di formazione professionale. La presentazione discutera' anche la posizione della ricercatrice come insider all'interno del percorso di ricerca e si focalizzera' anche sul coinvolgimento attivo dei partecipanti nel contribuire all' analisi ed alla rappresentazione delle loro storie professionali all'interno del discorso accademico.

References:

• Bennett, J., (2010). Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Braidotti, R., (2011). Nomadic Theory. The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Hollway, W., Jefferson, T. (2013). Doing Qualitative Research Differently. A Psychosocial Approach. London: Sage.
• Lather, P., St.Pierre, E.A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 26:6, 629-633.

Donata Puntil is Programme Director at the Modern Language Centre, King's College London where she is responsible for internal and external staff development and intercultural training. Donata has an extensive teaching and research experience in Second Language Acquisition, Intercultural Studies and Applied Linguistics, with a particular focus on using cinema and literature in language teaching. Her main current research interests are on language teachers' professional development with a particular focus on identity and life narratives. She is currently studying for a Doctorate in Education at the Open University as part of the Language Acts and Worldmaking Project.