Marc Jones

New presentation: Using duoethnography to foster critical multiliteracies

At the weekend I presented at JALT 2024 International Conference in Shizuoka and it was really enjoyable although overwhelming, due to a bit of personal news. I met new colleagues though, and people that I enjoy meeting that I don’t get to see often enough.

Anyway, on Sunday at six o’ clock, when anybody sensible who teaches first period on a Monday was wedged on a sofa with a cup of tea winding down mentally, I was presenting about the duoethnography assignments that I’ve been setting for first-year undergraduate students over the last three years.

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Journal article: Exploring Duoethnography in ELT Research Ecosystems: Accessibility, Misuse, and Further Horizons

Recently, my friend and colleague Robert Lowe and I published an article in the International Review of Qualitative Research titled Exploring Duoethnography in ELT Research Ecosystems: Accessibility, Misuse, and Further Horizons. Basically, it’s a duoethnography about doing duoethnography, which could be silly and frivolous, but we are quite serious. We both really respect duoethnography as a research method: I have co-authored four duoethnographies including this one, and Rob has written a few, as well as having co-edited a book about it, which also contains some duoethnographies co-authored by him. Basically, we offer a critique of the method, look at how it can be used by researchers who do not typically use qualitative inquiry in their work, and express our ideas about where duoethnography, especially in English language teaching research, could go next.

A photograph of two medium-size pine cones side by side on brown grass. There are two much smaller pine cones by the one on the right, and they are not immediately obvious.

While we both appreciate the affordances of duoethnography the fact remains that it is subject to many of the same flaws as autoethnography. Essentially, in the wrong hands, it is a method of navel gazing introspection for the sake of it. The authorial partnership should be critical, but in too many duoethnographies there is only backslapping and sycophancy. We hope that is not what we have done in any of our own work.

We also puzzle over why so few quantitative researchers have taken up duoethnography. I have a bit of a fancy idea about it being part of a research ecosystem. I think everyone should either have a go with it or at least quantitative researchers should be actively reading and citing qualitative inquiry including duoethnography. We all need all kinds of research. I also question whether duoethnography needs to be purely qualitative or whether there can be quantitative elements included. This last idea is one that I hope comes to fruition, because I think that it could help make duoethnography more appealing to a wider range of researchers.

If you don’t have access to the paper, you can email me and I can send it along.

New Preprint: “What about teachers?”: a duoethnographic exploration of ADHD in ELT

Yesterday, my colleague at RMUTT in Thailand, Matthew Noble and I put up a preprint on Edarxiv in preparation for a symposium we will attend in November on Mental Health in ELT. Yes, it seems to be rather niche; however, we feel that there is less a gap in the literature on language teacher psychology and more of a yawning chasm regarding neurodivergent teachers. In our own way, we want to change this.

By exploring our own experiences of TEFL, we get to show how the profession impacts our lives and also how our lives affect our professional practice. We figure that if 7.1% (Thomas et al, 2019) of the population are estimated to have ADHD, yet one of the symptoms is being attracted to novel situations and being in the moment rather than considering past experiences or future implications, then there are likely a lot of colleagues with ADHD, potentially more than the 7.1%.

Update

This is now an article in JALT Teacher Development SIG’s Explorations in Teacher Development journal. You can find it here.

References

Thomas, R., Sanders, S., Doust, J., Beller, E., & Glasziou, P. (2015). Prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Pediatrics, 135(4), e994–e1001. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2014-3482

Reflections by a hermit on collaborative writing

I am fairly asocial. Not antisocial, but I tended, even before the current pandemic, not to go out very much. I geek out about SLA and teaching alone for the most part, but I do have chats with colleagues at work from time to time, and on Twitter.

I decided to work on a duoethnography with my colleague and former housemate Jon Steven last year as a way to try something a bit different to all of the quantitative work that I was reading about and basically immersing myself in as part of my MRes. I also noticed that part of the Vitae criteria that researchers are supposed to work toward (and as somebody looking toward getting a doctorate in the future, this is me), and Jon wanted to work on more publications. This seemed like a really good opportunity.

It really was, but it was also tough. Jon and I both worked as full-time part-time/freelance teachers, me in universities and at an orthodontic clinic teaching ESP, him at high schools, companies and an international supplementary school. I changed jobs in the middle of our big bulk of writing it, so finding time to write was difficult. We are both parents, so after work and being present with our families, finding time to check citations and page numbers was dependent upon how tired we were and how long we could procrastinate them.

A key quote from Jon: “Are we still doing that? I thought it had been abandoned!”

Oh yes, it took me best part of nine months to get down to checking two citations and making changes to a paragraph I highlighted “Drastically rewrite or cut”. When I was ‘in the zone’ it felt frustrating that Jon wasn’t, though I am also sure the same is true of how Jon felt when I should have been redrafting, filling out or pruning text.

In the end, though, we ended up with a duoethnography that is, according to our review, “rooted in the literature” and that we are both proud of, despite it being quite tiring to write at times. Despite being a bit of a challenge, it was quite fun to share our opinions and beliefs and explore them further in writing, boiling them down and distilling them, then egging each other on to explain ourselves further.

As with autoethnography being a bit ‘mesearch’, duoethnography can be a bit ‘wesearch’; it’s pretty much the whole point. It could have got fairly navel-gazing if it was only about us, but I think we did a decent job within our word count of situating us within a context and talking about how others might have similar feelings, anxieties and experiences as us. That, to me, is the value of autoethnographic research methods to the literature. While I am quite keen on quantitative studies, having qualitative studies to explain the human, emotional side of what happens to us in language teaching is also important, and also appears to be becoming a bigger part of my projects outside my MRes.

Given the right opportunity and circumstances, I would definitely write a duoethnography again. It was immensely rewarding to write it, and once I got myself sat down and prepared, even fun to revise it. I just wouldn’t ever consider writing one when in the midst of learning the ropes in a new job.

 

Publication: Duoethnography of Two EFL Teachers Developing Their Own Classroom Teaching Materials

My colleague Jon Steven and I have just had our article Duoethnography of Two EFL Teachers Developing Their Own Classroom Teaching Materials published in The Language Scholar (online first and it will be in the Autumn 2020 issue).

We talk about the motivations behind us developing our own materials and some of the challenges of materials development. We cover working conditions briefly, commercial issues of coursebooks versus classroom issues of teaching, originality, marketability, guarding against precarity, values and skills we aim to develop in learners.

It is open access, so anyone can read it. I certainly look forward to any comments or questions (and would be happy to pass any on to Jon as well).