In this paper, I will tell two of my personal stories to try to explore the secret or opaque space between the original telling and retelling of stories in narrative inquiry. Based upon my difficult struggles with the two stories of tea, school, and narrative, I suggest that narrative inquiry has to be a complex loop of relationship, reflexivity,…

In this paper, I narrate highlights of my long process of learning and teaching English as a foreign language in mainland China and Australia, presenting a picture of the practices of learning and teaching English in mainland China from the bottom up. Over the past 50 years, English learners in mainland China, as Gao Yihong has written, have…

While there is abundant scholarship discussing gendered discourse on care in early childhood and compulsory education, little exploration has been made to explore whether care might also be gendered in higher education. This article, based on data from a year-long narrative study, examines the conceptualisation of care and its effects on teaching…

This is a qualitative longitudinal study of the lived experience of four mainland Chinese ESL teachers engaged in their first year of employment in Hong Kong secondary schools. Based on multiple interviews and email contact conducted over the course of one academic year, the research explores the adaptive processes these beginner ESL teachers…

Globally, teachers are trained to educate and assess children through matrices based on comparative competition, a practice that thrives on ranking. In an era of glocalization, how might educational systems cultivate classroom connections embracing diverse student gifts? This arts-based narrative inquiry explores fatherly life lessons of 17…

Drawing on narrative inquiry, the present study aims to investigate the trajectory of identity formation of EFL university teachers. Two types of data are collected. One type comes from life histories of Hyland (2014), Nunan (2011) and Widdowson (2009), and the other type comes from semi-structured interviews with three excellent university…

Insider-researchers are said to enjoy many advantages during the interview process that help them to access the innermost thoughts of participants. As a Chinese doctoral student interviewing other Chinese doctoral students, I assumed I was an insider. However, my experiences proved otherwise, as I oscillated between insider and outsider positions.…

This article treats the act of writing about past experiences as a material influence on the "self" I am becoming, particularly the "self" I call English Teacher, and explores how language is a material component in the "new materialist turn" in the humanities. The vignettes in this article describe experiences in my…

This article maps how narrative inquiry--the use of story to study human experience--has been employed as both method and form to capture cross-cultural learning associated with Western doctoral students' travel study to eastern destinations. While others were the first to employ this method in the travel study domain, we are the first to…

Despite modern technology and the focus on international business striving to make the world a smaller place, many organizations still struggle with the need for diversity and multiculturalism. This issue is also present in academia, as women of color and those previously perceived to be in the ethnic minority continue the journey to become the…

While there have been many western studies about what excellent teaching means, there are far fewer eastern studies. This study explored how students and parents perceived conceptions of excellent teaching in Chinese middle schools. The 77 students' and 67 parents' responses relating to a personal narrative of a time they had experienced excellent…

Four narrative fragments involving research disseminated globally -- namely, United States, Israel, The Netherlands, The People's Republic of China -- are used to instantiate the phenomenon of teachers teaching their best-loved selves, without becoming the curriculum themselves. Next, the development of the best-loved self-conceptualization as it…

Our study sought to understand changes in gender inequality in education across four generations of rural Chinese women's educational experiences in a small community in southern China. The 24 interviews and numerous informal conversations with 12 women showed that gender-based favouritism for men and against women undergirded family expectations,…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore what Chinese doctors have learned in authentic medical practice, what they want to learn, and the dynamics behind their professional learning in working contexts. Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses Narrative Inquiry, qualitative data which were collected by open-ended face-to-face interviews and…

This manuscript aims to explore and delineate the common characteristics of college students with perfectionism, to promote an in-depth understanding of dynamic personality development of perfectionists from the views of life story model proposed by McAdams (1985). The researchers adopted a narrative qualitative research method. The life stories…