Introduction
My research agenda reflects two identity positions that I have constructed in the past decade: (1) a composition teacher and (2) a prospective teacher educator of language and writing. As a writing teacher, I am interested in meaningful literacy practice in a higher education context (as introduced in Eodice et al., 2016) and exploring the pedagogical values of autobiographical narrative as a catalyst to empower student writers’ identities (as discussed in Hanauer’s 2012 and Park’s 2010 studies). As a future teacher educator, I am particularly interested in unveiling complex relationships between teachers’ diverse experiences and knowledge and their constructions and negotiations of teacher identities, which would eventually influence their pedagogical approaches. In the next 5 years, I will be focusing on these areas of research not only as a teacher but also as a teacher-scholar.
Pedagogical Values of Personal Life Story Narratives
As a writing teacher, I have always been interested in providing students with meaningful learning experiences; besides, it is my teaching philosophy that writing education should play an important role for students to explore who they are through their writing activities. In this sense, meaningful literacy practice with a focus on autobiographical narratives perfectly meets my agendas in teaching and research. Indeed, the pedagogical value of narratives, either autobiographical or autoethnographic, has been discussed in language and writing education studies, and it has become an important research agenda. In the writing education context, students can catalyze their lived experiences as a resource to construct arguments and also to identify a meaningful relationship between their identities and writing (as I have argued in my article published in 2019). Indeed, as Park’s (2010) study indicated, helping student writers consider their trajectory–who they were in the past, who they are in their situated learning contexts, and who they hope to be in the future–can empower their identities and also help them (re)consider the purpose of learning. The potential benefits of writing autobiographical narratives are not necessarily exclusive to the mainstream writing education context. In the second language writing education context, students can expand their vocabulary knowledge or develop a sense of effective communication with a rhetorical audience by reflectively and expressively writing about their life stories. A series of research studies conducted by Iida that focused on haiku poetry writing in the Japanese English as a foreign language education setting advocated such potential benefits of reflective writing in language and writing classrooms (e.g., Iida, 2008, 2010, 2016). Shedding light on these pedagogical benefits, I aim to explore the ways to incorporate autobiographical narratives into language and writing education curriculums.
As a part of my current research projects in the academic year of 2023-2024, I am writing a manuscript based on my teaching experience in the basic writing course at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania where I created an Academic and Career Autobiographical Narrative assignment. This narrative assignment encouraged students in a developmental writing course to think about their career goals by exploring and identifying the specific life stories that motivated them to pursue college degrees. Addressing the potential role of first-year writing education in maintaining students’ retention rate at college, I will argue the importance of narrative-based assignments. When I write up this manuscript, I will submit it to Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments so that I can share my sample assignment guideline with other teachers in the language and writing education field.
Teacher Identity Studies and Pedagogical Applications of Teacher Identities
My career as a writing teacher started in 2011 when I was appointed a graduate teaching assistant position for the newly established Intensive English Language Institute at Minnesota State University. Since then, my interest gradually shifted from what I can do for my students as a writing teacher to what I can do for prospective or fellow writing teachers. To begin with, I became interested in teacher identities as a research agenda when I read a book written by Dr. Douglas Brown in the “Methods of Teaching ESL” course. As a teacher myself, I was impressed by one of his messages:
Teaching is no easy profession. It requires deep dedication, a willingness to work long hours, a genuine desire to help other people, a commitment sometimes to “walk the second mile” in facilitating students’ best performance, cognizance of a professional core of knowledge, and ability to be “on tap” in front of students many hours in a day, and more. (Brown, 2007, p. 488)
As Brown indicated, teaching is not easy. We, as teachers, all know that teaching requires a lot of energy, time, and a sincere sense of dedication to students’ learning. Besides, it should be essential for us to keep learning for students to offer the best ways of learning for them. However, it is quite important to consider what can motivate teachers to keep moving forward and what teacher education can do to support teachers. When I read Brown’s quote above, I thought that understanding who we are as teachers is one of the most important driving forces to help us keep our long journey every single day. As a writing teacher from an international background, I am now interested in better understanding “international composition teachers” (the term that Shehi preferred to use in her 2017 article) and their identities.
Along with the growing number of international students in graduate studies in English (Park, 2012) and the potential increase in the number of international composition teachers in U.S. higher education institutions (Rucker et al., 2018), there is currently an expanding research interest in exploring international composition teachers. Among various kinds of studies, both composition studies and TESOL showed interest in writing teacher identities (e.g., Lee, 2010, 2013; Rucker et al., 2018; Zheng, 2017; etc.) and the teachers’ pedagogical applications of their diverse identities and backgrounds (Motha et al., 2012; Zheng, 2017). As one of the international composition teachers in the U.S., I am strongly motivated to investigate the complicated relationship among writing teachers’ diverse backgrounds, their constructions and negotiations of teacher identities, and their development of pedagogical approaches to the negotiations between their teacher identities and institutional expectations. Indeed, my dissertation titled Composition teacher identity and practice: Exploring composition teachers from international contexts in the rural Pennsylvania college composition courses focused on three international composition teachers and investigated in what ways their diverse backgrounds contributed to their constructions of writing teacher identities and influenced their pedagogical approaches in the college composition courses (Akiyoshi, 2022). Based on this dissertation, I aim to publish 1-2 articles so that I can contribute to the expanding body of knowledge in this field.
Research Trajectory in the Next 3-5 Years
My research trajectory for the following 3-5 years includes (1) publishing a few research articles from my dissertation including the CCCC’s conference presentation titled “Constructing discourse community in a college writing classroom through translingual teaching approach: A lesson learned from one international composition teacher”; (2) publishing and presenting research studies on the pedagogical applications of autobiographical/autoethnographical narratives in both composition studies and TESOL fields; and (3) publishing research articles in the field of writing center studies, including my recent conference presentation titled “Writing Center as a bridge for writing teacher education: A narrative approach by two international multilingual writing tutors” (Akiyoshi & Liang, 2023).
Reference
Akiyoshi, J. (2019). Pedagogical applicability of autobiographical narrative in college research writing class. Humanising Language Teaching, 21(5).
Akiyoshi, J. (2022). Composition Teacher Identity and Practice: Exploring Composition Teachers from International Contexts in the Rural Pennsylvania College Composition Courses (Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania).
Akiyoshi, J. & Liang, D. (2023, November 3rd ). Writing Center as a bridge for writing teacher education: A narrative approach by two international multilingual writing tutors. The National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing (NCPTW), Pittsburgh, PA.
Eodice, M., Geller, A. E., & Lerner, N. (2016). The Meaningful Writing Project: Learning, Teaching and Writing in Higher Education. University Press of Colorado.
Hanauer, D. I. (2012). Meaningful literacy: Writing poetry in the language classroom. Language Teaching, 45(1), 105–115.
Iida, A. (2008). Poetry writing as expressive pedagogy in an EFL context: Identifying possible assessment tools for haiku poetry in EFL freshman college writing. Assessing Writing, 13, 171-179.
Iida, A. (2010). Developing voice by composing haiku: A social-expressivist approach for teaching haiku writing in EFL contexts. English Teaching Forum, 48(1), 28-34.
Iida, A. (2016). Exploring earthquake experiences: A study of second language learners’ ability to express and communicate deeply traumatic events in poetic form. System, 57, 120-133.
Lee, I. (2010). Writing teacher education and teacher learning: Testimonies of four EFL teachers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 19(3), 143–157.
Lee, I. (2013). Becoming a writing teacher: Using “identity” as an analytic lens to understand EFL writing teachers’ development. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22(3), 330–345.
Motha, S., Jain, R., & Tecle, T. (2012). Translinguistic identity-as-pedagogy: Implications for language teacher education. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research, 1(1), 13-28.
Park, G. (2010). Meaningful Writing Opportunities in the Community College: The Cultural and Linguistic Autobiography Writing Project. In S. Kasten (Ed.), Effective Second Language Writing (pp. 51–55). TESOL, Inc.
Park, G. (2012). “I am never afraid of being recognized as an NNES”: One teacher’s journey in claiming and embracing her nonnative-speaker identity. TESOL Quarterly, 46(1), 127–151.
Ruecker, T., Frazier, S., & Tseptsura, M. (2018). “Language difference can be an asset”: Exploring the experiences of nonnative English-speaking teachers of writing. College Composition and Communication, 69(4), 612-641.
Shehi, M. (2017). Why is my English teacher a foreigner? Re-authoring the story of international composition teachers. Teaching English in the Two Year College, 44(3), 260–275.
Zheng, X. (2017). Translingual identity as pedagogy: International teaching assistants of English in college composition classrooms. The Modern Language Journal, 101(S1), 29-44.
Jun Akiyoshi 