30.2154, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Park (2017)

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Subject: 30.2154, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Park (2017)

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Date: Wed, 22 May 2019 21:31:07
From: Sahar Ahmadpour [Sahar.ahmadpour33 at gmail.com]
Subject: Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English

 
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http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36412517


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-4035.html

AUTHOR: Gloria  Park
TITLE: Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English
SUBTITLE: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization
SERIES TITLE: New Perspectives on Language and Education
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Sahar Ahmadpour,  

SUMMARY

“Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets
Marginalization” is authored by Gloria Park and is devoted to the examination
of the negotiated identities of East Asian women teachers of English
accumulated and written by an East Asian female teacher of English herself.
The book consists of six individual accounts of the female immigrant English
teachers in the United States, including the writer. The aim of the book is
the narration of the teachers’ crossing of geographical borders between the US
and the East Asian homelands (Korea and China) together with historical
prospects covering nearly two decades. The present book brings to light
identities according to gender, class and ethnicity and seeks to provide an
answer to the question of where privilege meets marginalization, since it is
evident from all of the six chapters that the non-native English speaker
(NNES) female teachers of English simultaneously experienced both the
privilege and marginalization of involvement with TESOL programs, although to
different degrees.  

The first Chapter, “Rendering my autobiographical poetic inquiry”, refers to
Park’s own story of becoming and realizing the numerous ways in which her
identities began to shape her life; these, according to Park, helped her make
sense of the other women’s lives in this book. The subjective qualitative
orientation to research that was embraced in this book leads to more
interactive, impulsive and dialogic interview procedures, which contribute
greatly to eager and authentic self-revelation of participant viewpoints,
particularly when the researcher is individually involved in the project. The
arrangement of the chapters reflects the perspectives of the participants
impeccably as specialists of their personal insightful accounts are the
threads weaving through the examinations and connecting the similarities and
differences of the experience of their contextualized identities. 

The second chapter, “Exposing our Discourses of Privilege and Marginalization:
Gender, Race and Class Connections to Teaching English”, is focused on the
notions of gender, race and class relation in teaching English, which further
illuminates the ways that the discourses of privilege and marginalization
could impact the teachers’ lives. Park attracts attention to the fact that
socially and discursively developed gendered identities, together with
racialized and classed discourses, have reformed our language teaching
identities considered as transnational multilinguals. 

In Chapter 3, “Writing Is a Way of Knowing’ in Promoting Evocative Genders of
Inquiry: Methodological Choices”, the methodological framework of the whole
book is presented. Here, Park considers her ‘autobiographical self’ as the
research tool since she assumes that her perspectives shape the interpretation
of the narratives. The logic behind this position, in line with Pinnegar and
Daynes (2006), is that being a reflective and political researcher underpins
the capability of battling the concepts of power, privilege, marginalization
and access which are connected with the authoring of the stories. According to
Park, stories not only underline an existing relationship between the narrator
and the audience, but also expose issues related to identity and cultural
belonging. Through storytelling, we engage in a process of identity
development; we construct who we are and how we want to be known. Through the
words and the narrative structures that we use in the crafting of our stories
and through the very content of these, we identify with other members of
society and show our affiliation to a particular cultural group. These
viewpoints all shaped the authors’ inclination towards the use of narratives
as a framework for the compilation of the ideas. 

Chapter 4, “Where Privilege Meets Marginalization in Han Nah’s Lived
Experiences: Navigating her Multiple Gendered Identities”, as the title
implies, refers to the revelation of the ways that the author presents Han
Nah’s journey in grappling with her several gendered identities. In other
words, this chapter focuses on the question of how gender could make a
difference in teachers’ lives as women navigating different contexts (Higgins,
2010).  It is postulated that women’s family experiences are shaped by the
structures of the society and the family and are in fact closely associated
with their gender preferences (Lee & Park, 2001). 

The fifth chapter, concerned with “Where Privilege Meets Marginalization in
the Narratives of Liu, Xia and Yu Ri: Exploring their Linguistic and Teacher
Identities” allows the author to illustrate these teachers’ engagement with
English in their homelands, their experiences in working for professional
organizations, their experience in being involved with TESOL programs and
finally to their recently established teaching communities. This chapter
therefore engages with the stories teachers tell about their work and lives
and the impact of the changes they have undergone in their practice. As Shelly
et al. (2013) emphasize, a narrative inquiry approach offers an accessible
means of researching the experience of teachers who have been required to make
significant changes in the way they teach.Accordingly, narrative research
clearly motivates a change in the relationship between researcher and
participants. However, it also implies a change in the type of data collected,
the analysis conducted and the research formats chosen to represent the
experience of the researchers and the researched. What constitutes the focus
of the inquiry and how narrative data are analyzed and represented in studies
are often discussed under the construct of narrative analysis.

In the final Chapter, “Juxtaposing my Autobiographical Critical Identities
with Meaning Gleaned from the Women’s Narratives: Where Privilege Meets
Marginalization”, the writer shifts away from the conventional summary of the
previous arguments in the book to the illumination of her own autobiographical
stories and her critical reflections of the world. This chapter is particular
pertinent to the 45th presidential inauguration and the Women’s March in DC in
January 2017. Her own narratives, in fact, mirror in one way or another the
narratives of other women teachers (Han Nah, Liu, Xia, Yu Ri and Shu-Ming) to
underscore the mutual relationship between privilege and marginalization. 

EVALUATION

In summary, this book shows that narratives are based on people’s life
experiences and chosen parts of their lives; they are not an objective
reconstruction of life— [they are] a rendition of how life is perceived
(Webster & Mertova, 2007, p.3). As Riessman (1991, 2008) believes, every time
an account takes place, speakers select and evaluate those events they
perceive as important and connect them sequentially so as to allow listeners
to take particular meaning away from their story. This action reflects the
power of memory to remember, forget, neglect, and amplify moments in the
stream of experience (p.29). By means of describing the six narratives, the
writer of this book integrates a large number of cross-disciplinary
educational notions consisting of but not restricted to perspective/silence,
language relativity and language statements, covering multi-social,
multi-institutional, and multi-cultural aspects. Such discussions,
nevertheless, could have been further corroborated to provide readers with an
additional glance into the ways that the distinct powers are at play.  

This book has some deficiencies which might make it difficult for those
readers of limited expertise in the area of narrative study. One issue is that
because definitions of narrative and narrative research differ according to
the disciplines in which they are embedded, these methodological choices vary
from study to study. For instance, studies can investigate narratives as their
research object, where the focus of analysis is on the narrative itself, or
they can take narratives as a means of studying other questions. This variety,
as also observed in this book, presents challenges for readers unable to grasp
the fundamental meaning of the chapters because of the complexities of the
methods of inquiry. Researchers can attend to the formal dimensions of the
narratives, such as the structure of the story or language use or they can
turn their attention to the content of the narratives. In applied linguistics,
research aiming at understanding the content of participants’ experiences, and
with a focus on autobiographical stories, is considered as narrative inquiry,
whereas the inquiry into  the interpretation of the language and structure of
narratives is specified as narrative study (Barkhuizen, 2011). This
distinction, however, is not noted in the book. The book on the whole offers
plenty of discussion regarding the opposition between fictional versus real
teacher and professional identities, privileged/marginalized female
identities, coupled with authorized/entitled ethnic (minority) identities.
However, more analysis of the ‘mama scholar’ identity might have been
expected, particularly as it was established as one of the substantial
subjects of focus in the initial parts of the book. Because this project is a
longitudinal description of the female immigrant teachers’ experiences in the
United States, it would have been more motivating and intriguing to figure out
in more detail the ways that being a wife and then a mother subsequently
modifies female non-native teacher identity during a teaching career. 

Despite these drawbacks, however, the book also has some strengths that make
it appealing for those interested in narrative research. The Narratives of
East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization is
not really a book for the general public; rather, it aims at representing a
different category of stories from East Asia. On the whole, the book is a
valuable contribution to summarizing life as the Other in an unknown place; in
suppression the Other is still capable of discovering the authorization
mechanisms, be they perspective, or quietness, or both. As the writer
predicted, the book is an instrument that gives voice to silence with the
purpose of enabling the East Asian women teachers of English to follow their
own depiction of the American dream.

REFERENCES 

Barkhuizen, G. (2011). Narrative Knowledging in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly, 45(3),
391414.

Higgins, C. (2010). Gender identities in language education. In N. H.
Hornberger and S. McKay (eds), Sociolinguistics and language education (pp.
370-397). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. 

Lee, J. K., & Park, H. G. (2001). Martial conflicts and women’s identities in
the contemporary Korean family. Asian Journal of Women’s Study, 7(4), 7-28. 

Pinnegar, S., & Daynes, J. G. (2006). Locating narrative inquiry historically:
Thematics inthe turn to narrative. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of
narrative inquiry:Mapping a methodology (pp. 3–34). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Riessman, C. (1991). When gender is not enough: Women interviewing women. In
J. Lorber & S. Farrell (Eds.), The social construction of gender (pp.
217–236). Newbury Park,CA: Sage.

Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Los Angeles,
Calif.:Sage Publications.

Shelley, M., Murphy, L., & White, C. (2013). Language teacher development in a
narrative frame: The transition from classroom to distance and blended
settings. System, 41(3), 560–574. 

Webster, L., & Mertova, P. (2007). Using narrative inquiry as a research
method: An introduction to using critical event narrative analysis in research
on learning and teaching. London; New York: Routledge.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am Sahar Ahmadpour, a PhD candidate in TESOL. I am interested in FLA, SLA,
cultural studies , and teaching issues.





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