2. Recurrent restorying: a tool-and-result methodology
Our theorizing of recurrent restorying as a methodology for language teacher narrative inquiry begins with two critical points that Vygotsky made concerning the development of higher mental processes and the methods used to research them. First, by highlighting that "social activity is the process through which human cognition is formed" (Lantolf & Johnson, 2007, p. 878), recurrent restorying foregrounds how sustained and mediated engagement in external social activities (interpsychological) during learning-to-teach experiences (i.e., writing a reflective teaching journal, engaging in mentor-mentee debriefing sessions, etc.) creates the potential for becoming internalized (intrapsychological) psychological tools for reasoning about teaching and enacting teaching. Recurrent restorying enables teachers to develop conscious awareness over the pedagogical rationale for instructional activities and the ability to self-regulate both their thinking (reasoning) and the doing (activity) of teaching. By design, recurrent restorying asks teachers to return to previously storied experiences and make sense of them in new, more theoretically informed ways. As we document in the cases presented here, the processes of recurrent restorying highlight the interdependence of cognition, emotion, and activity (Golombek & Doran, 2014), as well as the dramatic contradictions that often emerge when previously storied learning-to-teach experiences differ from teachers' idealized image of teachers (person) and teaching (activity).
Second, through critiquing the experimental approaches available during his time, Vygotsky (1978) elaborated his research methodology to study the development of higher cognitive processes:
The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study. (p. 65)
This difference in method has been characterized by Newman and Holzman (1993) as the difference between "tool-for-result" and "tool-and-result" (p. 37). Vygotsky argued that method is something to be practiced, not applied. Tool-for-results are tools that are constructed with a particular purpose or goal in mind. For example, a teacher might give a vocabulary quiz to determine if her students can recall a set of new word meanings. The tool (quiz) is created for a result (assess learning). However, tool-and-result are tools that are constructed and used as part of the results. For example, a teaching portfolio can function as a tool-for-result activity when teachers compile a portfolio to showcase their learning. However, a teaching portfolio can also function as a tool-and-result activity since the very process of creating a portfolio (tool for learning) is also the result of the learning experience (tool and learning). Ultimately, the very act of conceptual reflection constitutes the tool for learning and the results for development (see Negueruela, 2008).
Distinguishing tool-for-result and tool-and-result activity in terms of narrative analysis informs our conceptualization of recurrent restorying. In our work, we have also used language teacher narratives as a tool-for-result, and as the object of analysis, and advocate its value for theorizing and explaining various aspects of teacher professional development (Golombek & Johnson 2004, 2017; Johnson, 2007; Johnson & Golombek, 2002). Other researchers have likewise used teacher narrative as a tool-for-result activity, such as narrative frames as a tool for data gathering (Barkhuizen & Wette, 2008); collecting and analyzing narratives in research on language teaching and learning (Barkhuizen, Benson, & Chik, 2013); and teacher narratives as ways to give voice to local instructional practices throughout the globe (Cadman & Brown, 2011; Harbon & Moloney, 2013; Hayes, 2013; Kalaja, Menezes, & Barcelos, 2008). A profusion of research, too many to cite, has used written and oral narratives to explore language teacher identity; thus, the following scratches the surface of the range of topics being explored: nonnative-English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) identities (Park, 2012; Wolff & De Costa, 2017)); gender and age of English teachers in Japan (Simon-Maeda, 2004; Mason & Chik, 2020); queer English teacher identity (Lin, Trakulkasemsuk, & Zilli, 2020; Nelson, 2005); restorying of previous narrative for teacher-scholar identity (Vandrick, 2013); and development of early career teachers' identity (Jiang, Yuan, & Yu, 2021; Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2013). In each of these cases, language teacher narratives are the crucial data for researchers to analyze and then theorize about how past, present, and future experiences, beliefs, identities, conditions, etc. have shaped and continue to shape teacher professional development—tool-for-result. Even though the act of narrating can change the narrator as part of a research study given the nature of storying (Feryok, 2020), it remains a tool-for-result.
Recurrent restorying embodies tool-and-result activity experienced by and for language teachers. Central to Vygotsky's genetic method is the notion that educational practice is a form of scientific research; a theory is not designed to simply explain psychological development but to deploy specific principles and concepts of the theory to change it intentionally and fundamentally through appropriately organized activities. In our methodology of recurrent restorying, language teacher narrative inquiry is a tool-and-result activity in that the intentionally organized, variously storied learning-to-teach experiences within a teacher education program are the narrative data, or "sites of development" (Swain, Kinnear, & Steinman, 2011, p. viii), and the teachers themselves are the data analysts who trace their own professional development. These narratives can thus be understood as (auto)biographical (Benson, 2005) in that teachers story and restory using both first-person and third-person data and methods. Recurrent restorying engages teachers as researchers using narrative inquiry to both trace and understand their own professional development as language teachers over time and place. Furthermore, the original reflections, expressed as narratives, in response to specific learning-to-teach experiences have been argued as enabling "[F]or a very brief moment, in words if not fully in activity" the creation of "a proleptic, or future self" (Verity, 2018, p. 118). Recurrent restorying buttresses prolepsis because language teacher narrative inquiry connects these distinct experiences, activities, and moments in time, restorying the past and imagining the future in what was then their present time. By engaging in recurrent restorying teachers can re-experience and re-conceptualize their professional development as it is unfolding, a microgenetic analysis (Vygotsky, 1981) of themselves as developing professionals. As a narrative inquiry methodology, in recurrent restorying, it is the teachers themselves who are organizing their previously storied experiences, systematically analyzing them, identifying the external social interactions, activities and emotional experiences that foster their development, and then tracing how these become internalized psychological tools that capture their professional development as language teachers.
3. Method: the assignment, epistemological orientation, and data analysis
The narrative inquiry methodology of recurrent restorying revolves around a deceptively simply course assignment. In essence, teachers are given the option to conduct a language teacher narrative inquiry into some aspect of their development as a language teacher. Rather than simple reflection, (i.e., this is what I learned), they are asked to analyze previously storied experiences that they have completed for different courses and/or teaching experiences throughout their two-year MA TESL program. The teachers have autonomy over which storied experiences they choose to analyze but most select course assignments that asked them to reflect on their learning-to-teaching experiences (i.e., reflective teaching journal entries, written teaching observations, recorded mentor-mentee debriefing sessions, reflections on digitally recorded teaching episodes, etc.). Teachers also have choice over which aspect of their learning-to-teach experiences they may wish to focus on, for example, how their questioning patterns have changed from their initial learning-to-teach experience to the final teaching practicum (see Kong, 2017). In the cases we offer here, the first teacher, Joy, analyzed all the required storied experiences that occurred during her 15-week practicum teaching experience. The second teacher, Mary, analyzed three post-teaching reflections that she wrote after teaching three different lessons at different points in time during the MA TESL program.
Another important feature of recurrent restorying as a methodology for language teacher narrative inquiry is enabling teachers to examine their previously storied experiences thoroughly and systematically. To do this, they must understand what it is that narratively storied experiences represent. Taking up a narrative epistemological stance (Bruner, 1990; Polkinghorne, 1983; Sarbin, 1986) teachers come to recognize that narratives inherently are not meant to describe phenomena objectively, but rather to connect phenomena and infuse them with interpretation. Thus, narratives situate and relate facts to one another, and the essence of 'truth' is how phenomena are connected and interpreted. Additionally, teachers come to recognize that the social context in which the narrative is related, the narrator's reason for telling it, the narrator's narrative competence, and the nature of the audience are all important elements in developing an understanding of the narrative. Through recurrent restorying, teachers seek to interpret a series of previously restoried learning-to-teach experiences, to reconcile what is known with that which is hidden, and to construct and reconstruct understandings of themselves as teachers and of their teaching with an eye to their future teaching selves.
Once teachers are fully informed of and comfortable with a narrative epistemological stance, they are then asked to approach their 'data' (a self-selected set of narratively storied experiences) based on the principles of ethnographic semantics, in which the meanings that people give to their verbal expressions are the primary focus of investigation (Spradley & McCurdy, 1972; Spradley, 1979). At this point teachers have choice over whether they will conduct a grounded content analysis where the themes/patterns emerge from the data or an a priori content analysis where they select a focus of analysis to be imposed on the data (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). They then read through their data multiple times, breaking it up into idea units, identifying key ideas, themes, patterns and underlining words and phrases that signal their understandings and/or interpretations of their narratively storied experiences. They also look for evidence of voice or multiple voices, attempt to name the key ideas, themes, patterns, and then find relationships among and/or between groups or categories. They are encouraged to highlight data excerpts from their previously storied experiences to support the themes they identify and the claims they make as the craft their narrative inquiry.
4. Data samples illustrating recurrent restorying
To convey how recurrent restorying is manifested in each of the teacher's narratives, we first identify how they selected their data and the problems/themes they identified as salient in their professional development. Trying to truncate the three problems/themes (their language) they detailed to trace their development over approximately fifteen-page narratives is not straightforward. As a result, we chose to focus on one problem/theme per teacher to illustrate how teachers' recurrent restorying of their previous experiences, as tool-and-method, enables teachers to trace how external forms of social activity serve as the source of internalized psychological tools for thinking; and how recurrent restorying mediates teachers to articulate their conceptual development as teachers (person) and their teaching (activity). We also want to showcase these teachers' voices in their (unedited) writing. We attempt to set up what the teachers wrote to show their analysis, not ours; thus, our comments structure the excerpts for ease of reading. We differentiate the font of the data, which includes the recurrent restorying of their language teacher narrative inquiry (regular font) and excerpts from their previously storied reflections (italics).
To link these excerpts to our theorizing, however, what we do interpret as happening through these narratives is that as the teachers step back to trace their development (third-person analysis), they are no longer in the midst of the very intense learning-to-teach experience (first-person experience). Instead, they are looking back at their own words, their own feelings, interactions with their mentor teacher and the students, and their own teaching practices. And now things look and feel different. The power for these teachers, of restorying their previously storied learning-to-teach experiences, is that they can stand back, re-think and re-see these multiple experiences and by doing so they are able to trace the development of their own pedagogical reasoning, highlighting the trajectory of their professional development as language teachers.
4.1. Recounting critical moments: Joy's narrative inquiry
"By recounting critical moments that capture exceptional experiences, novice teachers can gain a comprehensive view of their learning to teach experiences."
Joy, 4th semester Chinese MA TESL student
4.1.1. Joy's selection of data and analysis
In Joy's language teacher narrative inquiry, she traces her own professional development as a novice language teacher over the course of her 15-week practicum experience.