Expanding
Space forReflection and
Collaboration
Naoko Aoki
Osaka Univer
naoko0323@mac.

This chapter ismeanttobean inverted map ofthis anthologyfor thereaders in which I trytosuggest
possible future developments of Learner Development anthologies in some less conventional ways.
My ideas include research intodiversity ofperception of learner autonomy byteachers and learners,
use of narrative in research writing, teachers' collaboration with learners in research, the issue ofreactive andproactive learner autonomies, and teacher-friendly schemes for teacher development.
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Introduction

You may wonder what this chapter is doing here in the middle of this anthology. No, I'm
not going to present the result of my research. This is meant to be, rather, an interlude. The
editors wanted me to write about "spaces for collaborative genres." I wondered what thatmight mean. I read a near final draft of each chapter of Autonomy You Ask! and jotted down
my thoughts evoked by them. Then I tried to organize them in a way that wouldn't make mychapter resemble either the introduction or conclusion because Tim Murphey and Phil Benson
were working on these. It wasn't an easy task. I almost regretted having agreed to do this. Why
should I get the most difficult bit? Then came a moment of'aha.' My notes were mostly about
what was absent or not very salient in this volume. The contributors have covered quite a large
terrain, but there seemed to be more to explore. Why don't I write about what I would like to
see in a second Learner Development anthology? Placed as it is in the middle of the volume,the chapter may also be able to offer an alternative reading. If Tim's introduction is a map forthis volume, I wanted to turn it upside-down so that the readers might see the land differently. I
hope I have been successful...
Multiple Views of Learner Autonomy

There is no single authoritative definition of learner autonomy. Reading the chapters in thisvolume, you will find many different perceptions of learner autonomy. You may agree withsome and disagree with others. But I don't think we should see this as a problem. This isthe very nature of teaching practice. A teacher's knowledge is embedded in their personal
experiences (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Elbaz, 1983). As no one has a completely identical setof experiences to yours, your knowledge is inevitably unique in its content and structure anddefies any stereotyping. And because you continue to accumulate more experiences as long as
you live,your knowledge or understanding of learner autonomy is always tentative and in flux
as Tim Stewart (Chapter 4) points out. This also applies to learners (Benson, 2002a). A learner's
perception of learner autonomy is most likelyinfluenced by her past experiences, both oflanguage learning and of other aspects of her life. But we,both teachers and learners alike, arenot just creatures of our past. We have aspirations for the future too. Lampert (1985) observes
that teachers manage dilemmas they face in their classroom according to the image of teacher
they would like to be. Norton (2001) borrows the concept of imagined community from
Wenger (1998) and claims that a learner's investment in learning is largely determined by how
relevant she feels her classroom is to the community she aspires to belong to. So what happens
in a classroom is a complex interplay of different perceptions of learner autonomy, or different
sets of experiences and aspirations, as many as the number of people involved.To understandeven a small event in a classroom, you need to go backward into the histories of people there,

yourselfincluded, and forward into their future. I was fascinated by the stories of "Jijis, Babas,& Sempais" (Skier &Vye, Chapter 3) in this respect. I would like to see more learner stories likethem and teacher stories in future research in learner and teacher autonomy.

Narrative Inquiry in Three Dimensions

Yes, narrative.1 Most contributors to Autonomy You Ask! tell stories of evolution of a course,
a curriculum or their research process. But it seems to me that the potential of narrative
could be more fully exploited. My pet subject these days is Narrative Inquiry (Clandinin 8c
Connelly, 2000). This Canadian pair of long-time collaborators claim that teachers' knowledge
is narrative and that it must be understood as we would understand stories and represented
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the personal-social dimension. Weare social beings who interact with others. But we also have
our inner world where our thoughts and feelings dwell. Narrative inquiry tries to explore both"inward" and "outward." The second dimension is the past-present-future continuum. Situatedin the present a narrative inquirer goes "backward" and "forward" in time. The third dimension
is place. We are bodies (hooks, 1994), and we live in a specific physical environment. What wedo, say, feel, and think is not unrelated with where we are. Trying to understand someone andtell a story or stories of this person involves describing the place that she inhabits.
So teachers writing on their learner autonomy practice actually have three possible
dimensions to expand their inquiry. A generic set of questions to kick-start an inquiry might besomething like this:• Where did this learner comefrom?
• Where is she heading?

• Where did I comefrom?
• Where am I heading?
• How do we interact?

' How doesshe thinkandfeel about herclassroom experience with me?
• How do I think andfeel about my classroom experience with her?
• Whatkindofplace do we work in?
' How does thephysical settingaffect us and how is it affected by us?
Cath's (Malone, Chapter 16) vivid description of a junior high school classroom enables
me to feel her urge to make her course relevant to the classroom reality and to develop
in the student teachers she works with the capacity to engage 12 year-olds in learning.
Uncomfortableness of wooden chairs, PE kits hanging at the side of each desk making thealready packed classroom feel even more so, sticky air of June full of chalk dust, the hum offidgeting children. I need this sort of detail in order to understand other teachers' practice.
Perhaps we need to bring such details to our consciousness too in order to come up with a new
insight into our own practice.
Three Kinds of Stories

But the place and people that are to be described and explored are not limited to classrooms
and teachers and learners as the time frame extends beyond one term/school year/curriculum
cycle. Teachers work not only with learners in a classroom but also with colleagues,
administrators, parents, sponsors, and other stake holders outside. Clandinin and Connelly(1995) metaphorically call these factors teacher's professional knowledge landscape. In thislandscape, according to Clandinin and Connelly (ibid), teachers tell three kinds of stories:
sacred, cover,and secret. Sacred stories have their basis in theories which are unquestioningly
thought to lead practice. They are "elusiveexpressions of stories that cannot be fully anddirectly told, because they ... lie too deep in the consciousness of the people to be directly told"(Crites, 1971, p. 294, cited in Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, p. 8). One of the most pervasive
sacred stories concerning learner autonomy is, I would say, the one about quiet shy students.
Why can't they be autonomous? What's taken for granted in equating quietness and shyness
to lack of capacity for learner autonomy? Isn't it, among other things, the picture of ideal

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classroom interaction which theories of second language acquisition paint for teachers? Emika
challenges the sacred story by her practice (Abe, Chapter 7). Whether the solo activity which
Emika has devised helps her students' developing autonomy must be judged by the students'
perception, not by any theories.
Cover stories are told by teachers outside their classroom in order to prove their competence
and hide any uncertainties. They are often affected by new prescriptions, new mandates,
and new policies that "are dropping from the conduit to litter the professional knowledge
landscape" (Clandinin 8c Connelly, 1995, p. 32). Uncertainty is, however, a part and parcel ofany professional practice. Schon (1983) actually advocates the notion of reflective practiceas an antithesis to positivist epistemology Positivism believes that what counts as knowledge
must be obtained in an objective and value-neutral way and that it is generalizable and canpredict and control future events of practice. Yet, such an approach is unable to deal with theuncertainty, complexity, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict which professionals face intheir daily practice. Practice for learner autonomy involves all the more uncertainties. Breenand Mann (1997) state that one of the teacher's roles to support learner autonomy is managing
the risks to mediate between individual learners' learning agenda and the group process, and"to go through the disorienting but developmental phase of'anarchy'" (p. 147). We need tocreate a space where we do not have to pretend that everything is under control and where we
can honestly admit our uncertainties. The Learner Development SIG has been a fairly goodnurturing bed for collegial working relationships. But how can we create such a space in our
workplace where our colleagues may or may not believe in the value of learner autonomy? I
think that this is a valuable research topic to explore in future LD anthology volumes.
Secret stories are the stories teachers live out behind the closed door of their classroom.

Although Clandinin and Connelly (1995) are aware of the danger of unscrutinized practice,they also recognize that the privacy makes the classroom a safe place for teachers' storied
practical knowledge. Here is one such story told by a beginning Japanese as a second language(JSL) teacher who participated in a teacher conversation group where teachers told stories of
their practice (Aoki, 2002, in press).
Yukiyo: That waswhyI started taking English lessons. But becoming a language learner
again put me in a dilemma. ...I don't know whattosay to mystudents any more. There
areso many things I would do if I were a learner, butI don't wantmystudents to do. I
confessed to my students on an examination dayI'dcheated in exams. Perhaps it was
because I talked about my learning experience in the conversation group. It was myfavourite class too. Anyway the students were very surprised and said 'You're a niceperson.
You're OK'

Naoko: What was OK?

Yukiyo: i told them I'd thought teachers wouldn't know if I only moved my eyes. All we
had to do was to collaborate and not to tell the teacher. But when I became a teacher

Ifound out a teacher could see themovement ofstudents' eyes. SoI knew I'dfailed incheating. I spent partof the time for calling the roll to tell the story. No one cheated on
thatday. Seating arrangement was certainly a contributingfactor, butIfelt mystory had
sunk deep in thestudents. Ifelt goodabouthaving talked aboutmy experience honestly.
... I would have told mystudents what theyshouldn't do instead of tellingthem aboutmypersonalfeelings if I hadn't talked about mylearning experiences in the conversationgroup. So that wasprobably a change in my teaching.

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Expanding SpaceIn this short story you willsee many features common among secretstories: dilemma,
uncertainty,honesty,personal feelings, moral, care,trust, hopes for the future... Secretstories are
onlytold in secretsafe places, most often outsideschool. But those storiesare the cream of teachers'
professional knowledge. Teacher autonomy as freedom would remain an unattainable goal unless
those secretsare shared and recognized in public without threatening teachers' sense of security.
We can look into sacred stories and cover stories we ourselves and our colleagues tell. Or we
can tell our secret stories and reflect on them. What would we see then?

Does the Story Have to Be True?

An assumption behind the recognition of the narrative mode of knowing is that there is no
single absolute truth. Human beings configure otherwise separate events into a believable
story in order to understand their experience (Polkinghorne, 1988). So representation of ourexperience is always subjective. One event may be interpreted differently by different people
or by the same person at different times. The evaluation criterion of research presented in
the form of narrative is not whether it is true, but whether it is verisimilar (Bruner, 1986). If

a story resonates with your experience, it does not matter if it is a fiction as long as it is basedon data collected from relevant sources.2 Back in 1990 Eliot Eisner and Alan Peshkin wrotethat "there is no reason, at least in our minds, why in the future the academy might not accept
Ph.D. dissertations in education that are written in the form of novels" (p. 365). They claimthat "novels have helped people more sensitively and insightfully understand the world inwhich they and others live" (ibid). Other media which have also played the same function,
films, drama, and poetry to name a few, may also be possible alternatives in reporting teacher
research (Eisner, 1997).3 Steve Davies should not have worried when he decided to write his sci-fi story for this volume (Davies, Chapter 17).
Collaboration

Then comes collaboration.4 This volume has ample examples of teachers working together;as protagonist and understander in cooperative development, as colleagues collaboratively
teaching different classeswith the same curriculum, writing a curriculum, or exploringa specific issue. The value of collaboration among teachers is evident in the contributors'
enthusiastic accounts of collaborative experience. But what if we included learners in our listof possible collaborators? Of course many students mentioned in those pages, the dream teamin Joyce's (Cunningham 8c Carlton, Chapter 9) class for example, seem to have been very goodcollaborators with their teacher in carrying out their classroom practice. But wouldn't it bepossible to go a step further and involve them in research process as co-researchers? I have seen
only a few such studies (e.g., Coyle, 2000). But it is an area worth exploring.
In fact, some versions of action research are concerned with the improvement of thesituation in which the practice takes place and all parties involved are seen to be responsible
for their own emancipation (e.g.,McTaggart, 1997). Autonomy, for me, is participationin decision-making concerning my own fate. If action research is to contribute to thedevelopment of learner autonomy, it may be a good idea to conceive it as something that allows
teachers' and learners' collaborative effort to change the situation. As Andy (Barfield, Chapter5) realizes, defining ourselves as (teacher) researchers and learners as objects of research could
create distance. Viewing learners as active agents in the research process will hopefully prevent
teachers' othering of learners.
Research in collaboration with learners will have to have a new set of requirements. For
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making them co-authors, sharing drafts with them, and/or giving them a say about what is tobe written and how.

Problematizing Reactive Autonomy

Littlewood (1999) has offered us a very useful set of concepts: reactive and proactive
autonomies. A general argument among practitioners since then is, as far as I understand,that working on Asian students' reactive autonomy is culturally appropriate because theytend to respond well to the call for autonomy once the direction is set by a teacher. But isreactive autonomy really doing a service to learners themselves? Some of the female JSL
teachers whom I interviewed to study how they developed a positive attitude towards learnerautonomy experienced what I would call a turn from reactive autonomy to proactive autonomy(Aoki, 2003). They had wanted to be a good child, daughter or student and consciously or
unconsciously tried to live up to the parents' and teachers' expectations, but when they started
questioning the way women were treated in the family and in the wider society, those womendecided to have their own way if it meant going against expectations of their significant others.
Reactively autonomous students are angels for a teacher. But perhaps we should not make it
our goal to produce a classroomful of such students. Our job may, rather, be to challenge themand support the development of proactive autonomy I do not have an answer to this question.
I am aware that teachers could not and should not step into all aspects of students' lives. But it
seems to me that jumping on to the idea of reactive autonomy is too easy a solution. We needmore dialogues among ourselves as teachers and with our learners on this issue.
But Teachers Are Busy

Research is a time-consuming activity. The beginning of Mike's chapter (Nix, Chapter 15)
conveys with a convincing intensity the sense of panic which many teachers juggling theirteaching, research, and administrative commitments in their busy schedule are likely toexperience. And he is in a relatively privileged position. Many teachers are not as lucky as Mike.
Some may teach an enormous number of hours part-time to make ends meet. Some of them
may even be expected to do some administrative work for very little or no pay. Others may bediscouraged to do research by their institution's administration: "Yourjob is to teach, not toresearch."Still others may be primary care giversat home. It is quite understandable that doing
research seems to be an impossible task to them. It may actually be so. Reluctance to engage
in teacher research or failure to produce research reports should not be interpreted as lackof motivation or capacity for teacher development. We should think of less time-consuming
ways to stimulate and support teacher development. One possibility I could think of off-handis a teachers' conversation group (Clark, 2001). This requires no formal data collection or
analysis. Allyou have to do is get together with like-minded teachers, preferably regularly but
not necessarily so, and talk about each other's experience in an empathic and reflective way. Of
course we will need to report on such activities in order to claim their legitimacy. Participantsin a teacher conversation, for example, could write up a story they told in the meeting or
reflection on a story heard there. The LD Anthology could be a precious rare outlet for such
writings.
Finally

Space has been a very useful keyword for me in writing this piece. Having sorted out mythoughts by writing, I realize it means many things. It is physical space where teachers can meet
and talk. It is also physical space in academic journals and books which accept unconventional— LD SIG 2003 A n t h o l o g y —

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research methods and writings. At the same time the term space has metaphorical meanings.
It is space free from academic hegemony of the positivist paradigm for teachers to develop
their practice. It is space in our mind which we pay a visit to in our reflection. It is also space inour mind for our colleagues with differing views of learner autonomy and space we give themfor their teacher autonomy. Collaboration, if it is at all possible, has to start by respecting andtrying to understand each other. And, above anything else, it is space in our heart and mind
for individual learners. Fostering learner autonomy involves letting learners make choices.
Letting learners make choices involvesbeing responsive to each learner's history, concern, andaspiration (Webb 8c Blond, 1995). Without personal care for each learner our job would not be
possible. Teaching is after all a caring profession.

Notes

1. Some theorists distinguish narrative and story whereas others use theminterchangeably. I shall follow the latter in this paper.
2. I am in a dilemma here. I would say this to my students who are working on an MA
or PhD thesis. But, as I will argue later in this chapter, I do not necessarily thinkteachers' stories have to be based on any data as long as they are based on their own
experience and memory. I obviously differentiate these two types of writing, but I
still have to figure out what that means.
3. Andy Barfield pointed out that Freeman (1998, pp. 154-156) reports on an
experimental session at an annual meeting of The American Educational Research
Association in which the same set of data was represented in 10 different alternative
ways. Freeman refers to Eisner (1997).
4. Steve Brown commented at my presentation at the 2001 JALT conference that two
people doing things together is not necessarily collaboration. I have tried to comeup with my own definition of collaboration since then. My favourite at the moment
is that collaboration is working together with a common goal or goals, sharedcognition, and affective involvement. This is a summary of Crook (2000) in my own
words.

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