Two posts in a day! I must be ill or something.
Anyway, as with the post about teaching using duoethnography to foster critical multiliteracies, this also bears the influence of Robert Lowe, my friend and old supervisor when I worked at Tokyo Kasei University. Rob has written entire books on/using frame analysis, and so, having discussed things with each other when nerding out about research, it was probably inevitable that I would end up using frame analysis eventually.
This article is in a special issue of Fremdsprachen Lehren und Lernen on neurodiversity edited by the frankly wonderful Jules Bündgens-Kosten and my PhD supervisor Carolyn Blume. My co-author, Gretchen Clark and I conducted a questionnaire study into language teachers’ experiences and this article reports our quantitative findings and some qualitative analysis using some framing as mentioned above, although a combination of Goffman’s frame analysis and how Rob used frame analysis.
The most obvious way that our work matters is that there is hardly anything out there written about neurodiverse language teachers, and certainly not much in ELT (although I wrote a duoethnography with Matthew Noble that got published last year about English teachers with ADHD), and basically nothing on teachers with ADHD. This is despite the fact that people with ADHD are not necessarily underachievers, can go on to professional careers, but are likely to seek out new and novel situations which ELT overseas can dole out in spadefuls.
We give a platform to a lot of different ADHD teachers to share their experiences, beliefs and opinions about living with the condition, and it actually spurred us on to further work. In the pipeline are a paper reporting a much deeper analysis of the qualitative data that our participants shared with us and also an article about interviews conducted with a selection of the participants.
Both Gretchen and I would love to extend our thanks to the participants, because the work would not have been possible without them. Additionally, they rose their voices to talk about their experiences when maybe it would have been easier to just keep their head down and pretend everything is alright.