Bedrettin Yazan, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA

Emerging from ethnographic research traditions, autoethnography is now an established qualitative research methodology which has been adopted in educational research. In the broader literature of research methodology, autoethnography is a contested terrain with an ongoing scholarly conversation about what an autoethnography should do and how it should be used and written (see Gannon, 2017). Despite the contention, I think that autoethnography has methodological affordances in our critical work in TESOL. Therefore, in this article, I attempt to discuss this question: what does autoethnography offer us when reclaiming and advancing criticality in language education? Below is a brief discussion of a set of parameters that tend to define autoethnography. Just know that these parameters are very much interconnected.

What Is Autoethnography?

Autoethnography as a research methodology enables the researcher to narrate and analyze their own experiences situated in cultural discourses to understand the intricate relationship between the self, the other, and the context. The main goal is to make sense of the ways in which these cultural discourses, representing the dominant power in societies, operate in our lives and attempt to shape our identities, practices, and future aspirations. It does not have to be a strictly individual endeavor; multiple researchers can gather to write their collaborative autoethnography. Also, the data does not have to be gleaned only from the researcher’s memory, diaries, field notes; they can include conversations with others, such as colleagues, students, friends, and family. It is focused on the researcher’s own story, but we need to keep in mind that this story is already intertwined with the stories of others around us. Scholars used several descriptors to make the case for their version of autoethnography, like evocative, analytical, interpretive, and performative (see Gannon, 2017). However, each descriptor foregrounds one aspect of autoethnography, while backgrounding the others. This divergence affords the autoethnographers the flexibility to fashion their own version for their own stories, given that there is no replicable, prescribed way of doing autoethnography (Gannon, 2017).

Where Is Autoethnography Situated in Our Field?

Since the 1990s, the field of language education has experienced paradigm “shifts” and multiple “turns,” through which the approaches to what research should be and do have evolved tremendously. These developments have prepared our collective consciousness as a research community, or I would like to believe so, to better receive the offerings of autoethnography. Leaders of this community have opened up new directions in research, mostly qualitatively oriented (that I am aware of): identity (Norton), ideologies (Blackledge), agency (Deters; Duff), narrative (Barkhuizen; K. Johnson), emotions (Benesch; Pavlenko), race (Kubota; Motha), gender (Lin), class (Block), translingual literacy (Canagarajah), and translanguaging pedagogy (Garcia), among others. New perspectives started moving from “the peripheries” into “the center” of language education research: social justice (Hawkins), critical applied linguistics (Pennycook), sociocultural (Lantolf), poststructural (Morgan), and ecological (Van Lier). Considering this evolution in the field, I do not want to think that autoethnography is such a revolutionary methodology for us to adopt as part of critical research endeavors. There are actually a variety of solo and collaborative examples of autoethnography, published as theses (e.g., Donnelly, 2015), monographs (e.g., Choi, 2017), edited volumes exclusively composed of autoethnographies (e.g., Yazan, Canagarajah, & Jain, forthcoming 2021), book chapters (e.g., Warren & Park, 2018), and journal articles (e.g., Sánchez-Martín & Seloni, 2019; Yazan, 2019), all of which are from the past ten years. The interest is growing exponentially, and I believe that more and more colleagues will choose to write autoethnographies.

How Does Autoethnography Stand Out as a Method/Genre?

There are several interconnected parameters that help us see how autoethnography literally (and intentionally) stands out from the so-called mainstream research methodologies (see Chang, 2008). These parameters can be roughly named as follows: criticality, identities and intersectionalities, emotional engagement, agency, vulnerability, self-reflectivity and transformation, and potential resonance with the reader.

Autoethnography Is Critical

As I do in the title of this piece, a group of autoethnographers explicitly identifies their autoethnographic approaches as critical (e.g., Boylorn & Orbe, 2014). However, all autoethnographies should be critical. They should make “the personal political” to accomplish “radical democratic politics” in research methodology (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 765). Mostly as members of minoritized and marginalized communities, autoethnographers unpack and examine the issues around societal injustices and asymmetrical power relations that keep plaguing our societies. Their subaltern positionality affords them the authorial lens and vantage point to “break the colonizing and encrypted code of what counts as knowledge, redefining silence as a form of agency and positioning local knowledge as the heart of epistemology and ontology” (Spry, 2011, p. 500). Autoethnographers’ new ownership for and contribution to knowledge generation can also denaturalize, subvert, and upend the dichotomous categories that maintain the socially constructed hierarchies and ideologically patrolled borders.

Autoethnography Is Self-Construction

Opening up their identities for themselves and the readership, autoethnographers construct and reconstruct their self via storied experience. They not only analyze their identity negotiations from lived experiences, but also they negotiate identities as they do this analysis. That is, doing autoethnography is an intensive way of engaging in identity work. Autoethnographers are interested in understanding the interaction between their identities and the discourses in their own stories. They excavate for the ways in which certain identity positions are contextually and circumstantially made available/unavailable, desirable/undesirable, imaginable/unimaginable, and valuable/valueless. Thereby, they can shed light on the intersections and liminalities of their identities as well as the corresponding tensions, dilemmas, contradictions, and conflicts.

Autoethnography Is Emotionally Engaged

Identity work is inevitably charged with emotions. Given the pressures from the dominant discourses, autoethnographers as subaltern speakers experience a wide variety of emotions as they grapple with their identity negotiation vis-à-vis these pressures. These emotions could be reflective of the ones that they experienced in their stories, and they could also emerge in the process of doing autoethnography. Sorting through these emotions could be reflexive in some cases, leading to transformative learning and rich analysis, or disruptive in some others, perhaps leading to pauses in the writing. Later on, efforts to publish autoethnography may bring about further emotional challenges, in the peer review process. However, study completion and publication do not mean that these emotions are all sorted through; they are part of the evolving self-reflexivity.

Autoethnography Is Agentive Researching/Writing

Autoethnographers assert agency when making a decision to construct their stories to share with the scholarly communities and beyond. They need to be agentive to engage in such storytelling and opening up or portraying their inner world through public introspection. Selecting what to include in the autoethnography and determining how to recount and analyze various elements involve series of other acts of agency that require continuing commitment/investment. (Re)claiming ownership of their voice as the researched, in the process of writing/doing autoethnography, authors engage in agentive identity work.

Autoethnography Is Vulnerable

Autoethnography attempts to invert the binary of personal/professional and open up liminalities between the two, by narrating and analyzing personal experiences to explore cultural discourses. Authors provide the reader with multiple windows into their personal lives via their stories, which puts them in a vulnerable position. Particularly if authors are members of minoritized and marginalized communities, their writing of autoethnography might involve doubly intensified vulnerability. Moreover, sharing their personal stories might risk jeopardizing their future relationships with others, whether or not they are part of these stories.

Autoethnography Is Self-Reflective and Transformative

Doing autoethnography requires researchers to engage in deep introspection into their past experiences. This introspection involves continuous reflection when narrating and analyzing these experiences. Therefore, the research process in autoethnography is expected to lead to more self-reflective researchers. Similarly, anchored in authors’ identity work, autoethnography becomes a transformative learning experience with the development of a renewed interpretative lens or frame. Making interpretations of cultural discourses, autoethnographers develop the ability to better examine their situatedness in the context and corresponding identity negotiation.

Autoethnography Resonates With the Reader

Autoethnography is a reader-friendly genre that defies the stringent, impersonal academic discourse conventions. It lets the reader in the author’s inner world via stories and their analysis for cultural interpretation. The self-reflective analysis in autoethnography acts like an example for the reader with similar or pertinent experiences. Thereby, autoethnography invites the reader “to reflect critically upon their own life experience, their constructions of self, and their interactions with others within sociohistorical contexts” (Spry, 2001, p. 711). That potential resonance with the reader makes autoethnography an engaging reading experience.

Conclusion

As a critical research tool, autoethnography’s uses are boundless in the TESOL field. Research in language learning and teacher education suggests an explicit focus on identity and autoethnography could be a great tool to intentionally integrate identity in language education and teacher preparation. We, as TESOL practitioners, can use autoethnography to excavate the intricate relationships between our professional identities and other social identities we bring into the profession. In closing, I believe autoethnography will be adopted more by TESOL practitioners in the coming years, since it affords a discursive and experiential space for us to better understand the situatedness of our identities and practices within the surrounding cultures.

References

Boylorn, R. M., & Orbe, M. P. (Eds.). (2014). Critical autoethnography: Intersecting cultural identities in everyday life. Routledge.

Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Left Coast Press.

Choi, J. (2016). Creating a multivocal self: Autoethnography as method. Routledge.

Donnelly, H. (2015). Becoming an ESL teacher: An autoethnography (Unpublished master’s thesis). Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Gannon, S. (2017). Autoethnography. In G.W. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford research encyclopedia of education (pp. 1-20). Oxford University Press.

Holman Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 763–791). SAGE.

Sánchez-Martín, C., & Seloni, L. (2019). Transdisciplinary becoming as a gendered activity: A reflexive study of dissertation mentoring. Journal of Second Language Writing, 43, 24-35.

Spry, T. (2001). Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 706–732.

———. (2011). Performative autoethnography: Critical embodiments and possibilities. In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 497-512). SAGE.

Warren, A. & Park, J. (2018). “Legitimate” concerns: A duoethnography of becoming ELT professionals. In B. Yazan & N. Rudolph (Eds.), Criticality, teacher identity, and (in)equity in English language teaching: Issues and implications (pp. 199–218). Springer.

Yazan, B. (2019). An autoethnography of a language teacher educator: Wrestling with ideologies and identity positions. Teacher Education Quarterly, 46(3), 34-56.

Yazan, B., Canagarajah, S., & Jain, R. (Eds.). (forthcoming 2021). Autoethnographies in English language teaching: Transnational identities, pedagogies, and practices. Routledge.

Bedrettin Yazan currently works as assistant professor of educational linguistics in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He has experience in teaching English as a foreign language in Turkey and educating teachers of English as a second language, secondary content areas, and world languages at the University of Maryland and the University of Alabama. His research interests include language-teacher learning and identity, collaboration between ESL and content-area teachers, language policy and planning, and world Englishes.