Beyond AI (2): Why and how I employ autoethnography …

This is an excerpt from an early draft of a book chapter. The book will be about language teacher education and GenAI. I am posting these in smaller (mostly) self-contained posts. The posts are numbered consecutively. After they will have all come out, I will link them with each other.

Narrative autoethnography

“Ethnography is the study of social interactions, behaviours, and perceptions that occur within groups, teams, organisations, and communities” (Reeves et al., 2008, p. 1). It focuses on exploring the nature of a social phenomenon, using unstructured data taken from a very small number of cases [sometimes only one], and interprets human actions to produce an analysis in the form of verbal descriptions and explanations (Reeves et al., 2008, p. 2).

When researchers write autoethnographies, they seek to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience. They accomplish this by first discerning patterns of cultural experience evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or artifacts, and then describing these patterns using facets of storytelling (e.g., character and plot development), showing and telling, and alterations of authorial voice. Thus, the autoethnographer not only tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging, but also, by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences that traditional research usually disregards.
(Ellis et al., 2011)

Pavlenko (2007) argues that autoethnographic narratives have made a major contribution to research in Applied Linguistics, especially because they constitute valuable information when other sources are scarce. My goal is to “retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity” (Ellis et al., 2011). More specifically, I will reflect on the lessons of the past as a language learner, as a certified teacher of German and Russian, and as a researcher on computer-assisted language learning, by using relevant academic literature as the lens for my reflection. My study adopts an interpretive epistemology, in that it treats the narrative, the story, as an act of meaning-making, which is situated in a certain time and place and through which experience is retrospectively organized and, hopefully, rendered intelligible for you, the reader, so that you can reflect and draw your own conclusions.

My data: Memory work and literature research

Memory work is the prerequisite of an autoethnographic study. My work involved multiple drafts and their re-writing. In this process, I checked sources and chronologies, re-read my own and others’ publications, and studied the documented cultural-historical context of particular activities. I received feedback from colleagues, who had seen some of these events and/or collaborated on these activities. Referencing Bochner and Ellis (2016), Cooper and Lilyea (2022) argue that “if we approach memory not so much as “objective reality” but as an indication of what holds meaning for us about the topic we are exploring, we can draw upon these memories with confidence as indicative of significant aspects of the experience” (p. 200).

The first and obvious conclusion to draw from the narrative data (section 1.3) is that I am not a trained ethnographer. My research uses the method of narrative autoethnography, and this makes me vulnerable as a dilettante ethnographer. Vulnerability also comes from telling a story that is not just professional but also personal. Others are only represented in my narrative when this is rooted in joint publications. Thus, all limitations in the data are my responsibility.

References

Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. Routledge.

Cooper, R., & Lilyea, B. V. (2022). I’m interested in autoethnography, but how do I do it? The Qualitative Report, 27(1), 197–208.

Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 36(4), 273–290.

Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographic narratives as data in Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 28(2), 163–188.

Reeves, S., Kuper, A., & Hodges, B. D. (2008). Qualitative research methodologies: ethnography. BMJ, 1–3.