Critical Autoethnography in Language Teacher Education

This book explores the value and affordances of critical autoethnography, an established qualitative research methodology, for the construction of language teachers’ professional identities.

Bedrettin Yazan responds to calls in recent scholarship for the incorporation of practitioners in the construction of their own professional knowledge and identities, the use of narrative as a tool for knowledge generation and identity construction, and the integration of identity as an explicit goal in language teacher education practices. He showcases examples of teacher candidates’ autoethnographic work from three different groups of language teacher candidates in two university-based teacher education programmes. Through the narration and analysis of the researchers’ own stories, the author discusses the potential of autoethnographic activity for the reconceptualization of language teachers as active agents in their own professional learning. He also discusses how these methodological procedures might be enriched by collaboration with colleagues, by potentially writing collaborative autoethnographies.

Bedrettin Yazan is Associate Professor in the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA.