RESEARCH PAPER“Personally, I don’t like the whole interactioning
thing”: Is a Classroom as a Community ofPractice for Everyone?
Takuya Kojima, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Chihiro Thomson, University of New South Wales, Sydney
This study, informed by Communities of Practice (CoP), Situated Learning (SL) and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP), explored the case of a resistant student at the margin of an introductory Japanese classroom where
an interactive and engaging mode of learning was implemented. Recent studies have noted that some students
participate at the margin of classroom communities. Questions concerning such students’ participation, identity
and learning at the margin have not received adequate attention. This qualitative case study employed a classroom ethnographic approach to gather data over a 13-week academic semester. It identified how one student’s
disengaged participation, coming largely from the disjunction between the mode of learning in the course and herlearning beliefs, turned her into having a rebellious identity at the very fringe of the class. This cautions us that
CoP, SL, and LPP put into educational practices may not be for everyone.
本研究は実践コミュニティ、状況的学習論、正統的周辺参加の考え方を基に、インターアクティブな活動が中心となる初級日本語クラスでクラスの活動に反発を感じていた学生の周縁での参加やアイデンティティについて調査した。近年、教室コミュニティでの学生の周辺的な参加へ注意が向けられるようになった一方、そのような学生に関する研究の数はまだ少なく、新たな疑問も生まれている。そこで、質的なケーススタディである本研究はクラスルームエスノグラフィーを用い、13週のクラスで調査対象の一学生のデータを集めた。分析から、その学生の学習ビリーフとクラスの教育アプローチの齟齬が学生の教室実践への関与の希薄さや消極的な参加を生み、さらに教室最周縁での反抗的なアイデンティティを生み出したことがわかった。このことから、実践コミュニテイ、状況的学習論、正統的周辺参加論といった理論を教育実践に応用する際には、細心の注意を払う必要性があることを示唆している。

Keywords
Communities of Practice, Situated Learning, Legitimate Peripheral Participation, marginalisation in a language
classroom, negotiation of participation and identity

キーワード
実践コミュニティ、状況的学習、正統的周辺参加、言語教室での周辺化、参加とアイデンティティの交渉“Personally, I don’t like the whole interactioning thing” (first interview)
This is a case study of a comprehensive metropolitan Australian university student, Joanna(pseudonym), enrolled in an introductory Japanese course designed by one of the authors as aplace for social participatory learning by applying social learning theories. As a part of a larger study, the other author observed lessons in Joanna’s classes, conducted semi-structured
interviews, and asked her to keep a journal, which all informed us about Joanna.
We, authors, believe that language learning is a social practice. The social turn in second
language acquisition that Block (2003) identified has seen the field of language education
expand its focus from learning as acquisition of linguistic codes to learning as participation
in social practices. Drawing upon the view, one of us, who also taught a part of the course
along with a colleague designed the Japanese language course at our university to be highlyinteractive and socially engaging. The sustained much higher satisfaction rate of the course
compared to the average at the university, accompanied by positive comments in students’
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course evaluation year after year, indicates the success of the course. However, through datacollection, another of us met Joanna, who was one of the students in the Japanese course. She
covertly resisted participation as seen in the above quote, and we had to ask ourselves a question: Is social participatory learning for everyone?
In this paper, we attempt to understand the experience of Joanna, a student who appears tohave resisted social participatory learning in our Japanese course, which is based upon social
learning theory; Communities of Practice (CoP; Wenger, 1998) and its associated concepts;
Situated Learning (SL) and Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP; Lave & Wenger, 1991).
These theories conceptualise learning as participation in social practices where the participants develop identities and negotiate varying relationships with other members in the community, i.e., in the CoP. As their participation changes from being in the periphery to thecore of the CoP, they develop their identities from newcomers to competent, responsible, andcontributing members, at least that is how we envisioned our practices would work out. However, as Joanna reminded us, a classroom as a place for social participatory learning is not freeof challenges.
The theoretical understanding of learning as changing participation from the periphery to
the core of a community tends to establish a uniform image of successful learners in CoP uncritically. Lamb (2012) states that learners who fail to follow the linear developmental processof participation, fail in learning. Theoretical discussions on CoP and LLP give little attention
to such “failed” learners remaining at the margin, as they are assumed to be unsuccessful,
indifferent to the community, and eventually leave the community taking an outbound trajectory (Wenger, 1998). It is perhaps because CoP was originally conceptualised as a self-formed
and self-organised group of people where membership make up is relatively fluid (Lave &Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). This assumption may not be relevant in the case of a classroom
community, from which learners cannot easily depart.
Some learners miss classes or assessment tasks, participate in classroom activities withminimal preparation, or do not engage in pair/group activities, and end up being at the margin of the classroom community. Classroom learners at the margin in institutional settings
are often trapped in their classrooms for a variety of reasons and thus need more carefulattention. For some learners, leaving may not be a viable option in formal institutions, e.g.,schools or universities (Lantolf & Genung, 2002), given that primary and secondary school
education is mostly compulsory, and university education comes with hefty fees. A few studies focusing on such students at the margin have reported on what factors prevented the developmental processes of their participation (Morita, 2004, 2009; Toohey, 1998, 2000) and on
how they responded to this lack of participation (Jang, 2017; Lantolf & Genung, 2002; Morita,2004). These studies raised a number of issues that necessitates further investigation into
marginalised learners (Duff, 2007; Morita, 2012; Norton & Toohey, 2011). The issues include
how these students perceive their own learning, which is shaped through negotiating participation and identity at the margin, and how attempts to validate their own learning at themargin impact the classroom community.
In this case study of the covertly resisting student, Joanna, we describe her lived experience and identity negotiation at the margin of a classroom where highly interactive activities were successively implemented. The data come from class observation notes, interviews
and student journal entries. Drawing on the description, we explore the relationship between
her negotiation of positionality, identity and the perception of learning at the margin of theclassroom community, and discuss its implications for classroom language education using
CoP, SL, and LPP.

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Learning as Social PracticeThis study is informed by CoP, which allows us to view language classrooms as platforms wherestudents learn to participate in social practices and to negotiate identity as members of thecommunity. CoP is defined as “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or apassion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting
on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder., 2002, p. 4). CoP is sustained throughthree fundamental elements: Domain, Community and Practice. Domain entails shared interestor concern that brings potential members together. The members decide what they collectively
pursue based on the domain. Community is a social platform where members interact with eachother regularly and form interpersonal relationships. Practice signifies a set of shared ways of
doing those things that the members are concerned about. When the three elements develop and function altogether, the group of people is viewed as a CoP in which members with ashared concern participate in practices on a regular basis. The members of a CoP participate inpractices in that they address issues, create products, complete tasks, and the like, which are of
their mutual concern. In CoP, learning is not the goal but an integral part of the participation inpractice in which members jointly accomplish their goal. A group of people comes to function
as a CoP, when its members actively participate in and contribute to the practices.
CoP offers a place for SL, since it is a theory which views knowledge and skills as embedded in a social context (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, learning is an integral part of participation in the context where one continuously constructs one’s relationship with knowledge andskills as well as with others and resources. This learning process is theorised as Legitimate
Peripheral Participation (LPP). LPP holds that learning occurs in the process of changing
ways of participation from peripheral to full participation in the CoP. When newcomers entera CoP, they participate legitimately at the periphery. Such participation is a less demanding
but sufficiently contributing way of participation, which functions as a breathing space forthe newcomers to subsequently move toward fuller participation. Active participation moves
the newcomers from the periphery to the core of the community. When they have reachedfull participation at the core of the CoP, they have also developed necessary skills and knowledge to responsively and competently participate in various practices of the community. This
process of LPP is tied with the newcomers’ evolving forms of identity as members in a CoP.
Newcomers who enter a CoP participate in a variety of practices while they jointly work withother more experienced members called old-timers. The newcomers shape relationships with
old-timers, artefacts, and practices. The identity as a member is negotiated through how they
view themselves, their relationship with practices and how old-timers view them (Lamb,2012). The move toward fuller participation allows them to recognise themselves and be recognised by others as competent, contributing and responsible members.
Theoretically, if a group of people functions as a CoP, the LPP process functions successfully. When more and more members become responsible, competent and contributing, the CoP
develops as a supportive community which ensures and empowers its members’ active participation. Thus, designing and developing a group of people into a CoP has the potential to be aneffective way to support social participatory learning. This brings us to consider a classroom
designed as a CoP.
We acknowledge that applying CoP in its original form to classroom research is controversial (Haneda, 2006; Lamb, 2012; Canagarajah, 2016). That is, we are aware of the issues
surrounding whether a classroom can function as a genuine CoP. We have already seen one
restriction of a classroom which does not allow its learners to depart from the community
easily, which would not be a serious issue according to the original conception of CoP. Another concern can be that a classroom does not have old-timers whereas CoP expects to havesenior members with whom newcomers would become socialised (Norton & McKinney, 2011).
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This paper leaves the full discussion of the controversy to another occasion (Kojima & Thomson in preparation), and treats the classroom as a special case of CoP, which is tentatively
defined as “a classroom where classmates share learning goals and collectively deepen theirskills, knowledge and expertise in the relevant area by interacting with each other regularly
for a sustained duration”. Although a classroom CoP may not have all the features of CoP in
its original form, it still strongly reflects the nature of learning as social practice.

Marginalised Participation
Whereas legitimate peripherality is expected to function as a breathing space towards fuller
participation, stagnation at the periphery sometimes occurs, which CoP considers to be marginalisation. For CoP, marginalisation is a form of non-participation impeding negotiation of
positionality and identity toward fuller participation, potentially resulting in non-membership (Wenger, 1998). Past classroom research informed us that such negotiation of participation and identity at the margin of classrooms becomes a site of struggle (Block, 2007; Norton,
2006; Norton & Toohey, 2011). Exploring how individuals with various “needs, desires, andaspirations resist” marginalised positioning is becoming one of primary focuses in the field ofclassroom participation and identity research (Morita, 2012, p. 31).
Past classroom studies unpacking how students negotiate their participation at the margin has identified some reasons why not all learners move toward fuller participation in theirclassroom communities. For example, the classroom physical setting, for example, the seating
arrangement can isolate a particular student from other students (Toohey, 1998). In Toohey’s
study, the class teacher organised the seating in a way that the student gained little access toother students who had the same first language (L1) so as to promote the use of the student’s
English as a second language (L2). Consequently, the student failed to interact with a widegroup of classmates compared to other students. In a study conducted at a Canadian University, Morita (2004) identified that the stereotype held by local students, namely, that students
from Asian countries are likely to remain passive, imposed a marginal position and identity
onto students from Japan during in-class discussions. Lantolf and Genung (2002) reported
that a postgraduate student in an intensive Chinese language course at a university was seen
as incompetent and thus marginalised when she faced a conflict with the learning belief that
her teacher enacted. Overall, these studies indicate that the social structure, dominant discourse, and/or beliefs of those with power, i.e., “the capacity (and privilege) to project andimpose one’s perspective on others without taking account of others’ perspective” (Lantolf &Genung, 2002, p. 178) created direct or indirect causes of marginalisation of these students.
Whereas students’ participation at the margin and its causes have been identified, how learners perceive their marginalised participation is still inconclusive. Toohey (1998, 2000) reported that the student who was isolated by the seating arrangement was prevented from becoming a fuller participant of the classroom. He appeared to feel excluded from a group of otherstudents and struggled with the positionality. In the end, he did not show developmental useof L2 English as other students did. In contrast, Morita’s Canadian study (2004) reported thatthe seemingly marginalised Japanese student did not necessarily perceive herself as unsuccessful. The student saw her own learning as meaningful whereas she seldom actively participated in and contributed to the classroom discussion. These studies suggest that students do
not necessarily perceive their participation at the margin in the same way but hold their own
unique perceptions. This cautions us in interpreting studies that offer the more simplistic
view of marginalized participation as failure of participation, and as failure of learning.
Regardless how they perceive their own experiences, marginalised students in most studies
were considered as having little agency to assert their identity and thus unwillingly became

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marginalised (Morita, 2004, 2009; Norton, 2000, 2001) or they strategically switched theiridentity to fit the dominant discourse (Lantolf & Genung, 2002). For example, Norton (2001)
describes two migrants to Canada who resisted their teachers’ decision to refuse their participation in an upper level English class. However, their teachers did not change their decision.
The classroom kept its social structure, and eventually, the marginalised students had to leave
the school midway. These studies created the impression that the social structure of classrooms is prescribed and static once established by the one with more power (Jang, 2017).
Pedagogical discussion in the above studies was, therefore, mostly on how educators should
facilitate more active participation of the marginalised into the dominant discourse. However, each CoP is expected to change or become invigorated by its members’ participation andcontribution (Wenger, 1998). Thus, all participating members, including those at the margin,
should have their own unique influence on the social structure given that the classroom isviewed as CoP. Pennycook (2000) argues that classrooms are not “isolated space” (p. 90) in
which only teaching and learning are going on, but are “social spaces” (p. 91) in which “social relations” i.e., negotiations of power “are played out” (p. 94). This suggests to us that
it is important to examine closely how a student’s participation at the margin informs thedesign of classroom community from a CoP perspective, especially if the student is not unwillingly marginalised. We attempt to address this by conducting a qualitative inquiry using
a classroom ethnographic approach (Bloome, 2012) in order to “convey a holistic understanding of the case” (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016, p. 233). As a part of a larger study, this study has
obtained ethics approval at UNSW Sydney.
In the following section, we will discuss Joanna’s case using data from interviews andjournal entries. All quotes from the interviews and journal entries are italicised. Wordings are
original. Fillers are removed to ease readers’ understanding.

Joanna’s Case
Joanna’s Background
Joanna, a Korean-Australian born in Australia, was a fifth-year student majoring in Media and Journalism at the time she participated in this study. Being a fifth-year student, she
was a little older than many of her classmates. She did most of her study part time due to anumber of commitments outside the university, such as her part-time job. This resulted inher spending less time on campus than most students. The courses she had taken prior tothis study employed relatively new approaches to learning, e.g., flipped classroom in which
students engage with content before classes and focus on discussions/activities during classtime. Thus, she was “familiar with” flexible ways of learning and in-class discussions (firstinterview). As she had grown up in Australia where teacher-student relationships are less hierarchical than is the case of many Asian countries, such as Korea or Japan, she often had had
casual rather than professional relationships with the teaching staff members.
She undertook French in her high school and went on an exchange to France as her mother wanted her to do so. She studied French mostly by sitting down and memorising grammar
in class and practiced using what she had learned when she went outside her class. Now, shegoes to France every year for her family business and manages conversation at both daily andbusiness level in French. She often experiences that speaking French “breaks a lot of barriers”
between her and French speakers (first interview). This made her believe that learning languages is important. In the same way that her family received a few exchange students from
France for Joanna to be eligible to go on the exchange to France, they also received exchange
students from Japan for her siblings to be eligible to go on an exchange to Japanese highschools. Therefore, she stated that she was familiar with Japanese people and culture.
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For her free-elective subject, Joanna wanted to take a language course. She chose Japanese
because Japanese seemed easier than other languages. She felt this was so as she knew thesimilarity between Korean, one of her L1s, and Japanese and she was familiar with Japaneseculture drawing on her experience with exchange students from Japan. Thus, she seemingly
expected herself to do well in the course. Her goal of Japanese study was to be fluent enoughto manage a basic conversation after completing the Japanese course in Semester 1. She
planned to continue up to Semester 2 to further develop Japanese for travel to Japan. She also
wished to use Japanese with Japanese customers and an Australian-born Japanese colleague at
her work.

The Course and Classroom
Joanna was enrolled in a 13-week introductory Japanese course with a student enrolmentof nearly 400 at one of the top eight Australian universities. The course had a vastly diverse
membership as it was composed of both students majoring in Japanese Studies and thoseundertaking it as a non-major free-elective subject. Students in the course had different cultural and academic backgrounds, were motivated by a variety of interests and goals, and had
diverse prior exposure to Japanese. This also meant that the students ranged from first-year
university students to more experienced near graduation students. This created particular social dynamics in the course.
The course emphasised social participatory learning where students were encouraged to engage in various types of interactional activities and receive help from others to move from thelearning stage of “I can do this with scaffolding” to that of “I can do this alone”. This aimed
to offer purposes and social settings for students to use Japanese with members in the course.
We facilitated these opportunities in the course as students of Japanese as a foreign language
rarely found the purposes and situations to use Japanese outside the course.
Students attended a large group class (about 200 students, called Lecture) for two hours, asmall group class for one hour (Tutorial) and another small group class for two hours (Seminar) of about 25 students each week. Lectures tended to be where students encountered newcontent and engaged in initial use of the content, and Tutorials and Seminars tended to bewhere students engaged in highly interactive modes of learning to put their knowledge andskills into use. However, students were expected to prepare beforehand for active engagement
in interactive activities for all types of classes. In this study, we will focus on Joanna’s experience in Seminars.
Seminars had four features that attempt to promote social participatory learning so thatthe classroom would develop into a CoP. One feature was to facilitate the students’ identity development as members of the Seminar through “naming” the Seminar. The course had
15 Seminar classes for the particular semester of the year. Most of them were scheduled inparallel with other Seminars. Each Seminar was designated as the students’ homeroom, andthe students through discussion gave it a name, such as Samurai-gumi or the Team Samurai.
Then, the students were encouraged to identify themselves as a part of the Team Samurai.
Joanna’s Seminar, which was taught by one of the part-time tutors, chose Sakura-gumi (pseudo name) as its Seminar name. While aiming at forming group identity, this naming was alsoa practical device for the teaching team of seven teachers (four were full-time and three werepart-time teaching staff) to manage a course of nearly 400 students. Seminar teachers, as
homeroom teachers became a point of contact for each student, and the group names madeit easier to distinguish students of the same or similar names. Another feature was the use of
paper name plates students made. At the beginning of each class, a few students took turns indelivering the name plates to relevant classmates by calling out their names. During the class,66

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students placed them on their tables to display their names to others. This helped not only
students get to know each other but also the teachers in charge of multiple Seminars, to learn
the names of a large number of students. Thirdly, the classroom was arranged with tables andchairs to make a group of four to six students facing each other, for easier student-student
interactions. Fourthly, Senpais, or senior students from more advanced level Japanese courses
were regularly present as supporters in Seminars. Senpais were expected to add more variety to typical classroom interactions, i.e., teacher-student and student-student interactions(Thomson, 1998). They also became role-models for introductory students (Thomson & Mori,
2014), as well as acting as experts i.e., old-timers in the community, and often mediatedteacher-student relationships. In Joanna’s Seminar, one of the authors was an observer andacted somewhat as a Senpai while a Senpai in the sense as described above was not present. In
summary, these four features aimed to raise students’ awareness toward developing a membership identity, active participation and interaction, and learning enhanced by others’ scaffolding. Using these features, the Seminar teacher promoted social participatory learning.
The Seminar served as a summative class of students’ learning of the week. The teacher continuously provided highly interactive pair or group activities where students applied
what they learnt during the week in combination with what they had learnt up to that week.
Further, when students engaged in short dialogues or interview activities, the emphasis wason developing the short dialogues and interview activities into more realistic interactions
with appropriate discourse stages starting from a conversation starter, and ending with aleave-taking remark, with ample attentive feedback in between. The discourse stages were
expected to be effective scaffoldings for the students to express their own ideas when theycame to rely less on such scaffoldings. At the end of each Seminar, students engaged in arole-play where they listened to a model dialogue performed by a Senpai and the Seminarteacher, read the dialogue in pairs, developed their own scenario using their own informationand the discourse strategies, rehearsed several times with gestures, and presented the performance in front of another pair for peer-evaluation. In Week 9, the students undertook an
Interaction Test in pairs where they performed their own original scenario of 5-7 minutes inJapanese in front of all Seminar members. The Interaction Test, an extension of the weeklyrole-play, was officially assessed by the teacher and peer-evaluated by classmates. This typeof intensity of interaction and constant engagement with classmates together with the new
language can only be sustained by active participation as the core value, which was expected
to be shared by all members.

Joanna’s Learning Experiences
How it Began
Thrown into the intensely interactive class, Joanna encountered an unfamiliar approach tolanguage learning from the very beginning of the semester. Unlike Media and Journalism
courses where she experienced in-class discussions frequently, her expectation of language
courses which she gained through her previous study of French was beginning with memorising letters e.g., Hiragana, in the case of Japanese and moving to learning vocabulary andexpressions to form sentences. She expected to learn the linguistic rules in class and to develop them outside class. However, the Japanese course was “the other way around” (first interview). The course expected students to familiarise themselves with linguistic rules outside theclass and use them in class to express themselves. Toward this approach, Joanna said that,“personally, I don’t like the whole interactioning thing” (first interview). The pressure of interaction, though she expected it to some extent, went beyond her expectation. Thus, she felt thatthe course was “moving very fast on a direction that I wasn’t expecting” (first interview).
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Joanna felt that the social participatory learning was forced upon her when the course
quickly established the dominant discourse of highly valuing regular attendance, active interactions, and participation of students. The feeling of being “forced” was multiplied by teachers and a few Senpais who “micromanage[d]” students, for example, taking attendance evenfor Lectures with over 200 students and regularly checking each student’s performance in
Lectures, Tutorials, and Seminars (second interview). The particular way of learning in which
she had to partake in interactive activities and the way of interacting in which teachers emphasised the use of discourse stages under the “surveillance” of the teaching team made her
feel that the course had “no flexibility” and was “very static” (second interview). Not only did
the way the course was run differ from her expectations of what a language course should be
but it was also contrary to her expectations of what a university course should be, i.e., relaxed
relationships between teacher and student, laidback attitude towards attendance and casualand free atmosphere.
Further, Joanna felt that the social participatory learning in the Japanese course essentially included forging and developing relationships with classmates, which did not agree withher view of relationships with university classmates. She was already “tired of having Facebook
friends that I haven’t seen in three years [after] I had one class with them” (first interview). She nolonger wanted to bother making new friends with those whom she would not see after one
semester. Her view of the university relationship was strengthened due to being a part-timestudent who did “not spend time” on campus (first interview). She came to the university towork on her studies as the university was what she “want[ed] to get done and over with” (firstinterview). However, developing relationships with classmates was inseparable from Japaneselearning in the context in which she was thrown.
The imposition of the dominant classroom discourse resulted in her disengagement in
the Seminar. It was because she wanted to avoid constantly feeling “watched”, “forced” and“judged” in the class where, in her opinion, a “rigid” way of doing things were repeatedly emphasised (first, third interview). However, on the surface, she appeared to participate
in activities as other students did. What she did was to pretend to engage in given activities
when her teacher or Senpai, one of the authors, came close by. Further, she did participate
at least minimally as underlying motivation for her participation was to avoid unnecessarily undermining her classmates’ learning. She noted that the fact that “I’m disengaged doesn’tmean I should be disengaging other students with my bad attitude” (first interview). She sustained
her disengaged identity, it appears, at the margin, which diverged from others, rather than
unwillingly keeping an identity as an active student which was valued in the Seminar. This
identity as disengaged student beneath the surface was not something forced upon her but
something she negotiated and chose.
Having chosen to disengage herself and remain at the margin, Joanna frequently questioned, complained and dismissed messages behind the educational practices and devices in
the Seminar. She described the naming activity of her Seminar as “childish” and remained“indifferent” about the name although she understood its “concept” which aimed to provide an
identifying feature and “more of a group identity” (first interview). To Joanna as a disengaged
student, the Seminar was “another class I have to go to” rather than her “homeroom” where
she would have developed her sense of membership (first interview). In Seminars, the social
participatory learning promoted awareness towards not only active speaking but also paralinguistics skills such as body language (bows, nods), and discourse strategies. Joanna felt these
aspects were “overly emphasised” and “forced” regularly to “stereotype a lot” (first interview).
Joanna said that “I totally get that [idea], but … I don’t think it’s quite necessary at this [introductory] stage” and “I refuse to believe that’s the thing” to use the paralinguistic skills and discourse
strategies in real life settings (first interview). These remarks indicate that she dismissed

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what the course expected her to absorb in the Seminars and the course. On the surface, sheremained an ordinary student but underneath, she was developing what might be termed aresistant student identity.

A Sign of Change
Several weeks into the semester, despite her covert resistance to the discourse of the course,
Joanna started to develop relationships with her Seminar classmates. She met “old acquaintances” from her Korean community and gradually became “very close to them” by weekly
attending the same Lecture, Tutorial and Seminar (first journal). She started having lunch,which is “the only extra time I spend on campus” (second interview). She also exchanged messages in an online chat group with them to discuss their Japanese studies. Even though she
was still sceptical that the relationship would be maintained after the semester, the oldfriendships were “reinforced” (first journal) and facilitated her engagement in the study ofJapanese both in and outside the Seminar. However, such positive experience was interrupted
due to two symbolic incidents highlighting her marginality in her Seminar.

The Incidents
Joanna and her Seminar teacher had developed mistrust between them, especially concerning
her learning attitude e.g., punctuality, as Joanna had been late for the class a few times by
the middle of the semester. The course regulation states that the students must arrive in theclassroom within the first 15 minutes of each lesson, otherwise the late students’ attendance
will not be recorded. If a student is more than 15 minutes late, the class teacher is required to
notify the student verbally on the spot and via email on the day as a record.
In Week 10, when Joanna was late for her Seminar by more than 15 minutes, she was approached by the teacher and was told that her attendance would not be recorded. However,
Joanna decided to stay regardless of being recorded as absent. Then, she was told about theattendance by the teacher twice more during the class. The teacher did so possibly because
Joanna remaining in the Seminar made her unsure if Joanna had understood the message. In
the evening, Joanna received the teacher’s email reconfirming her absence on the day and referring to the rule written on the course outline. The teacher was simply following the institutional rule in doing so. However, Joanna who understood the message after the first notice,and did not know about the requirement of notification could not avoid expressing her anger
by saying “this actually got me really angry” (second interview). She thought it was abnormalthat the teacher told her the same thing three times in the class and even emailed her, andthat the teacher “didn’t even ask me why I was late” (second interview). This teacher’s approach
was very different from what she had experienced with other teachers in her school life. She
no longer wanted to talk to the Seminar teacher. To make the matter worse, when Joanna
walked in late, she realised that the class did not have one extra chair for her. This was due tothe fact that a few students had temporarily joined the class from other Seminars. She complained that “my seat was taken” as she was not able to sit with her friends (second interview).
These events made her feel unneeded in the Seminar and ask herself “why am I even there?”(second interview). She began considering changing her Seminar class.
After the incidents, she described herself as a “rebellious” student: “do what I want” and“fight against the rules” (second interview). She reported that, during a whole class interview
activity in Week 10, she was reluctant to approach unfamiliar classmates. She recalled that,“the girls I spoke to” were those “I’ve previously been in touch with before” (second interview).
Besides, whereas she successfully completed the Interaction Test in Week 9 with her partner
who forged a good friendship with Joanna throughout the process, she reflected upon the test
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as “unnatural and forced” and thus neither “necessary” nor “enjoyable” (second journal). She
also dismissed the implementation of peer-assessment as she “didn’t want to be the judge ofanyone’s hard work” (second journal). Joanna felt that her position even at the margin in the
Seminar was threatened and thus attempted to secure and validate her presence by positioning and identifying herself as “rebellious” (second interview).
As a result of feeling displaced in her Seminar, Joanna seemed to lose her initial motivation
to learn Japanese in order to manage basic conversation when visiting Japan or at her work.
She became “a little bit less ambitious” compared to the beginning of her studies (second interview). She even said that “I’d rather just fail the course rather than… do something that [I] don’t
want to do and feel miserable about it” because she no longer “care[d] about marks” (second interview). However, she was aware that she still had to complete the course considering the institutional regulations. She stated, “well, the census date has passed. … So, [discontinuation] is kindof not an option”, given that after the census date, students dropping the course receive academic and financial penalty, and thus, her motivation to continue the course became to “finish
what you started” (second interview). The conflicting positionality and identity at the margin,i.e., wanting to discontinue but having to continue, required Joanna to seek a way to persist
and finish the course in the remaining two weeks in the semester.
Towards the end of the semester, Joanna increasingly accessed Japanese learning opportunities outside the Seminar. For example, she attempted to catch up with the contents byreviewing vocabulary and grammar outside the class, which was different to her original viewof learning; learn basics in class and practice outside. She still exchanged messages to grasp
what was going on in the course, had lunch together, and did homework in the library withher friends with whom she had reconnected. At her workplace, she had an Australian-born
Japanese friend who studied Japanese at another university. He always asked Joanna, “How’s
Japanese going?” (second interview). She frequently consulted the friend and received answers to her questions and a third opinion, which was critical toward what she was taught in
the Seminar. He also gave supportive comments on what Joanna experienced in her Japanese
course, which made her feel relieved from time to time. These allowed her to remain in the
Seminar even at the very fringe and assert her covertly rebellious identity.
In Week 12, however, she made her decision to move from her original to another Seminarwith a different teacher and different classmates. Whereas she stated that “the relationship”
she “had in the course made it easier to attend and study Japanese [in the original Seminar] because
we could rely on each other” (third journal), she confessed that “I’m too scared to even talk to her[the teacher in her original Seminar]” (second interview) and “I was quite nervous that I would
unintentionally offend her” (third interview). For this reason, she freed herself from the unnecessary “stress and tension” with her teacher (third interview). This may have been one of a few
doable coping strategies to avoid conflict with the teacher and academic and financial penalty,
but simultaneously to stay on track towards graduation, which was her ultimate goal.

Her Perception of Learning
In the last interview, Joanna reported that what she learned in the course was “another six
units of credit” toward her graduation and she was “still far off from” what she “was hoping to”
initially achieve (third interview). However, the six units of credit included various things. At
some point, she mentioned some learning which was expected to happen through the social
participatory learning such as adopting “certain mannerisms that are Japanese when you speak
Japanese” (second interview). She added that she learnt “contextual use” of Japanese while
experiencing “the flow of the language” (third interview). She reminded us, however, that she
did not learn it but was taught or, in other words, forced. As she put it, “we are kind of taught,

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everyone starts sounding the same… and that’s what they want, which is kind of scary” (second interview). It was against her view because she believed that “language reflects character and individuality” (second interview). These remarks illustrate that she was not learning what she wanted, that is to express herself and her individuality through Japanese, but learning a certain
uniform way of contextualised usages of Japanese, which she dismissed as “another six unitsof credit”. This is ironical as the course designers’ intention was for the students as beginnerlearners to become able to express themselves using some set discourse strategies as scaffoldings. Without such scaffoldings, they would have little clue about how to express themselves
freely. Joanna missed this intention. At the same time, the teaching team failed to make theintention clear.
Joanna remained as a rebellious student, albeit covertly, because her fundamental identity as a “leisure learner” was explicitly threatened. As the semester progressed, her interview
revealed an expectation of the course as a place for “leisurely learning” as a free-elective subject i.e., “fun thing to do” focusing not on “academic” but “practical side” “for a tourist” since
she heard that this is how the course would be (third interview). Nevertheless, in the middleof the semester, she had to admit that “it’s harder than I thought” (second interview). Joanna
had studied French in high school and could have expected a similar pace of learning in theuniversity Japanese course, while in fact university language courses move twice as fast as
high school language courses. It gradually became difficult to accept the requirements of thecourse, which was “fast-paced and content heavy” to her, as she wanted to sit back, listen, andenjoy “leisurely learning” Japanese (third interview, journal). She said that, “everyone is superserious. Everyone needs to relax” to highlight such a gap between her as leisure and other classmates as non-leisure learners (second interview). In the end, she survived the semester andpassed the course using learning opportunities outside the Seminar. However, she changed
her original plan and decided not to undertake the Semester 2 Japanese course as she hardly
imagined a place for herself as a “leisure learner” in the imagined Japanese course community. Joanna concluded that, “the course aims and what the students aims are, it doesn’t really matchup” (third interview). A series of interviews and journal entries revealed to us that Joanna
underwent a range of emotions where her history, ongoing experiences, and expectations for
future dynamically interplayed with each other to determine her ongoing positioning, participation and identity.

“Why Am I Even There?”
Joanna, who initially positioned herself at the margin in a somewhat deliberate way by intentionally disengaging herself, had to change the way to negotiate her marginal positionality andidentity when the conflicting views between her, her teacher, the majority of her classmates,
and the course became apparent. The dominant “right” discourse of valuing participatory
learning was reinforced through repeated emphasis and practice by more and more members
moving toward the core of the community. Joanna must have felt that the other 400 students,
seven teachers, and a number of Senpais formed a force against her. In classrooms, this type of
dominant discourse and power are not easily negotiable, and thus not easily changeable especially by those with less power (Jang, 2017; Lantolf & Genung, 2002). Joanna had no way toovertly negotiate and express her desire to be a leisure learner who could sit back and relax
during the class. Thus, she covertly disengaged herself and developed her covertly resistantidentity beneath her apparently “right” participation at the margin where she felt being outside the “surveillance”. This resistance notwithstanding, the participatory practices were forced
upon Joanna, and she became immovable towards anywhere other than remaining at the very
fringe. In a CoP in its original from, stagnation at the margin may result in non-membership(Wenger, 1998), however, as expected, leaving the course and accepting academic and financial
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penalty was never a choice for her since her ultimate goal was to finish the university degree as
quickly as possible. In this context, Joanna coped by establishing a rebellious identity to secureand validate her presence even at the fringe of the community. Marginalised students in previous studies were depicted as those with little agency to assert their marginal identities (Morita
2004, 2009; Norton, 2000, 2001), which was not the case of Joanna, who asserted her rebellious
identity and willingly stayed at the fringe. However, the incidents in Week 10 strikingly symbolised the loss of her legitimacy even at the margin in the Seminar for Joanna, and that waswhen she chose to move to another Seminar instead of staying.
Throughout the semester, Joanna was consistently resistant to social participatory learning,which we believe is essential in the success of the Japanese course. It is normal that students
come to this course with their own expectations about how a foreign language course should
be managed. Joanna’s expectation was to sit down and memorise grammar in class and practice using it when she went outside her class, due to her past successful experiences withlearning French. This approach may have allowed her to express her individuality in Frenchoutside of the classroom, using the basics she learned in the classroom. Unfortunately, theJapanese course approached language learning in an entirely different way. She was expected
to sit down and memorise the basics at home, and practice using Japanese in class. It seemed
to be one of the causes of her resistance toward the course which aligns with a case of a student in a Chinese course whose learning belief clashed with her teacher’s teaching belief,
reported in Lantolf and Genung (2002). This student of Chinese ended up changing herself toadopt her teacher’s approach to survive the course. However, Joanna remained covertly resistant; she positioned herself at the margin by disengaging herself from and being indifferent
to the practices to which she did not assent.
The gap between the approach in the curriculum and individual students’ preferred learning styles is nothing new. For example, similar observations could be made in the era ofCommunicative Language Teaching which benefited students who willingly interacted withothers, while possibly undermining the learning of students who preferred a solitary modeof learning. In contrast, Lantolf and Genung (2002) reported that the student who stressed
the importance of communication resisted a teaching approach that was based on recitationand memorisation. No matter which method the teacher adopts, the disjunction and conflict
would remain between different learning beliefs. We assert that any students who are notused to the social participatory learning, not just Joanna, would naturally feel a certain degreeof anxiety and frustration. Thus, it may be incorrect to attribute her resistance solely to the
disjunction between her learning belief and the course’s approach.
Interviews with Joanna gradually revealed her identity as a “leisure learner”, and this may
explain her persistent resistance toward the dominant discourse of social participatory learning, which demanded consistent preparation outside class and active participation in class.
It is hard to imagine that her successful learning experience of high school French did not
demand any degree of consistent preparation and active participation. Whereas we note thata university language course proceeds twice as fast as a typical high school language course,
Joanna’s overconfidence as a successful language learner-speaker of English, Korean andFrench, who was familiar with Japanese culture, and as a seasoned university senior student,
compounded by the course’s reputation as a “leisurely learning” course seemed to undermine
her judgement on how much work would be required. In this sense, her claim of being a “leisure learner” sounds like an afterthought. Joanna’s characterisation of a “leisure learner” isa little different from Stebbins’ (2007) and Kubota’s (2011) characterisation of leisure learners
as those who do not pursue language learning for practical benefit or professional development but who consume “short-lived pleasurable core activity, requiring little or no special
training” (Stebbins, 2007, p. 38). Before having come to the course, Joanna indeed wanted to72

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gain some practical benefit, i.e., linguistic skills and credit for graduation. Nevertheless, she
mistakenly thought that she could do so while enjoying the course as entertainment without putting any significant amount of effort into the class. Paradoxically, the Seminar was
where being serious and active was the key to enjoying the entertainment aspect of learning.
We assume that remaining at the margin i.e., being disengaged from and indifferent to what
she experienced, was possibly Joanna’s way to justify her presence as a “leisure learner”, andby claiming this identity, she must have further justified her legitimacy to herself. Under thecircumstances, it was most likely the only way that she could cope.
Unfortunately, social participatory learning constantly required Joanna to expose her ability
or inability in public, i.e., in her Seminar, unlike a solitary mode of learning. She emphasised
a feeling of discomfort at being “watched, “forced”, and “judged” that she felt was characteristic of the Seminar. The Seminar as CoP, if we may view it as such, determined the “right”
practice, i.e., a set of discourse strategies, the domain, i.e., valuing active participation ininteractions, and the community, i.e., a place for befriending classmates. Joanna’s rebellious
identity may have been an unconscious or perhaps conscious strategy to avoid facing up thefact that she was falling behind by the measure of the “right” standards. Considering the“right” standards that she neither shared or valued, she had no other choice than to disengage herself, to pretend to participate as others did, and to remain at the margin until the two
incidents pushed her to move to another Seminar, and discontinue her Japanese studies at theuniversity. It is now understandable that she exclaimed “why am I even there?”. For Joanna,
instead of continuing to struggle at the margin, leaving the Japanese course community wasperhaps the right choice. If this was a more standard CoP, Joanna, as its member, could havechosen to contribute to practices to negotiate the domain and move to the core of the community, or to exit the community. However, as stated above, the special nature of the “classroom” CoP kept her stuck at the margin.
No matter how we view Joanna’s experiences, it is true that she underwent a range of emotions dynamically. Joanna anticipated a course where she could engage in “leisurely learning”,
so was surprised at the new learning approach. She was uneasy with her younger classmates,
feeling a short-lived comfort with her “friends”. Becoming upset and angry at her teacher,she remained covertly defiant at the margin. When learners experience an emotionally loaded experience, they may resort to reticence and withdrawal as a form of emotional defence(King, 2013). Such an emotionally loaded experience may have frequently occurred for Joanna
in the Seminar where she was forced to participate in interaction on a regular basis. We needto acknowledge that language classrooms can be the cause of “emotional turmoil” and sitesof “emotionally highly loaded experience” (Dörnyei & Murphy, 2010, p. 22). For Joanna, theSeminar is best described as a cause of emotional turmoil and the site of an emotionally highly loaded experience.

“Six Units of Credit”
Joanna described her learning outcome in this course as the “six units of credit” toward her
graduation. Despite her initial motivation to be able to manage basic conversations in Japanese, she concluded that she had not achieved that goal. Then, she decided to discontinue
Japanese study after completing Semester 1 though she had originally planned to continue until the end of Semester 2. Past studies have mostly classified marginalised students as
unsuccessful when they failed to move toward the core of a community (Morita, 2004, 2009;
Norton, 2000; Toohey, 1998; 2000; Wenger, 1998). However, Joanna did at least complete thecourse and acknowledged some progress in the contextual use of Japanese and Japanese behaviours, which were intended outcomes of the course. Nevertheless, she remained critical
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toward the course and its approach. Once a dominant view is established and regularly imposed, it becomes hard to be self-reflective especially at the core of the community, but Joanna at the margin did remain so. On one hand, she may have been unsuccessful in moving
towards the core of the classroom community, on the other hand, she gained the six units ofcredit toward her graduation and acknowledged her own learning outcomes. In other words,
she survived in the CoP. Instead of classifying her as unsuccessful, we might want to conclude
that Joanna was after all a successful student even at the margin, and that she exited thecommunity with the unique outcome she gained, especially because of her positioning at themargin and covert resistance or rebellious identity. Her experience gave us an opportunity toreflect upon and question the uncritical view of full participants as successful and marginalised participants as unsuccessful.
Joanna made us question what it means to “participate”. In the course, the teachers andSenpais came around the tables to “watch” the students to “judge” whether they were “participating”. In Joanna’s opinion, the students were under “surveillance”. Social participatory
learning views more contributing, responsible and thus valued participation to be overt engagement with a person and a practice in a situation. The teachers perhaps wanted to see thestudents to be genuinely engaged in oral practices with their classmates. We assume that the
Seminar teacher readily assessed Joanna’s engagement as genuine participation. Actually, oneof the authors as an observer who knew her covert resistant identity through interviews andjournals, did not see much difference between her and other students’ participation. In fact,
what the Seminar teacher saw as Joanna’s seemingly genuine engagement when she approached Joanna was pretend-participation. We know so now only because Joanna disclosedthat she pretended to be engaged when the teacher and one of the authors as a Senpai camecloser, while she was actually disengaged beneath the surface. Joanna reminded us that thesaying “seeing is believing” does not apply in this context.
Especially in language classroom where social participatory learning is employed, we, theteachers, are easily inclined to regard ideal classroom students as extroverts, with overtly active participants collaborating in the classroom activities orchestrated by us. This viewis prevalent not only in teachers but also in students, as well as the general public and this
discourse must have pressured Joanna to act in the way she did. However, what Joanna
demonstrated was that overt participation can be a mask covering disengagement or pretend-engagement. In turn, a seeming lack of overt participation may not necessarily signify
disengagement but could mean deep mental engagement. In fact, Morita (2004) reported thata student who remained quiet at the margin during in-class discussions was actually satisfied
with her learning experience. Given that we acknowledge the diversity of the student population and in the way that students participate, either overtly or covertly, or being engaged ordisengaged, we also need to promote diverse models of ideal classroom students rather than
impose a uniform model informed by the concept of “full participant” onto students.

Classroom CoP?
Joanna’s experience led us to rethink the validity of “imposing” the social participatory
learning on all students, and to reflect upon other students who might actually be resistant
without being noticed by us, in other words, to reconsider what it means to implement CoP,
SL, and LPP for classroom CoP. We now know that Joanna’s emotionally loaded negative experience in the course not only forced her out of the Seminar community but also took away
her appetite for studying Japanese any further, at least at the university. What this suggests
to us is that a strong insistence on social participatory learning may result in the unintentional effect of forcing some members out of the community.

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We believed that the application of the concept of social participatory learning in a form of
CoP functions well when “all” members are on board, that is, by valuing active participationand contribution to practice. This might work well in the original CoP in which the membership makeup is fluid. However, this study showed that in classroom CoP where the membership was basically static, expecting all to be on board without question would not work. In
the course overall, there were indeed many students who came to enjoy and exploit the social
participatory learning where they not only learned but also practised Japanese. However, large
courses such as this introductory Japanese for hundreds of students are very likely to include
students who may not be ready to be fully on board for a number of complex reasons, as Joanna exemplified. We need to reconsider if “all” have to be on board to the same degree andin the same way.
The course we have discussed is difficult to manage as not only is the number of people involved large, but also the participants are diverse, and thus, they come with their own culturally
and historically loaded expectations. Taking Joanna for an example, her heritage is Korean, but
her upbringing is Australian. Her interviews partially revealed that she had a strong motherfigure who decided that Joanna would study French and go on an exchange to France and host
French exchange students. This home experience may have been different from her other experiences of the Australian education system in which she could form casual relationships with
her teachers. Joanna appears to cope with the two value systems but got lost when she stepped
into the Japanese classroom within the Australian education system. In the Japanese classroom,
the teacher, or the mother figure, chose what she was to do, which perplexed her. The glimpseof her life lets us envisage the complexity that each student has and brings to the classroom
community. In reality, students like Joanna may be more common than we can detect.
We also need to be aware that teachers have different statuses, experiences, and teaching philosophies and thus different expectations for student participation. Joanna’s Seminarteacher was a part-time teacher on a semester-by-semester contract, who was in a vulnerable position and so may have felt obligated to strictly follow the institutional rules, such as
the university’s attendance policy, and implement the teaching approach that the full-time
continuing teachers decided on, no matter what teaching philosophy she might have personally held beneath the surface. This does not mean that there was little communication
between full-time and part-time teachers at the university. They had rather frequent communication to manage the large course as a team. However, we do not know to what extent
individual teachers understand the theories to implement in her or his classrooms. It is possible that the teachers at the university were implementing the participatory approach without
fully appreciating the theory and philosophy behind it. Another possible explanation about Joanna’s Seminar teacher could come from Japanese discourse strategies. In communicating inJapanese, people tend not to give reasons for being late, but simply apologise. Giving reasons
is seen as giving excuses to justify wrong-doing, and not taken as graceful. Although it does
not excuse the teacher for not acknowledging why Joanna was late, we could surmise that it
was most important for the teacher on the day to enforce the attendance rule. Mistrust between Joanna and her teacher may have been built upon not only individual but also complex
layers of social, historical and organisational relationships brought in by the various members, of which, we, the teaching team, might not be aware. Just as Pennycook (2000) argues
that classrooms are not isolated but situated in a larger social space in which social relations
are played out, a classroom CoP is, just as an original CoP would be, connected to the diverseand complex realities and histories through its members, and meanwhile regulated by thenature of the classroom. In the case of our Seminar, the social relations between Joanna andher teacher were indeed influenced by the diverse and complex realities and histories as wellas the nature of the classroom.
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In fact, theoretically, CoP, SL, and LPP do allow members to locate themselves in the periphery of the community even as leisure participants as long as they wish to be part of thecommunity. As a student who undertook the Japanese course as a free-elective subject, Joanna’s identification as a “leisure learner” at the margin should have been justified or at least
recognized as valid. The course overall may have allowed her to remain at the margin as she
passed the course, but it is questionable whether Joanna’s Seminar allowed her to situateherself in this manner at the margin of the community. Ideally, a classroom CoP should not
rigidly determine a single domain, community and practice to give those at the margin, like
Joanna, opportunities to express their desired identity and to contribute to the practices of
the classroom in their own ways. In such a classroom, teachers may well be able to orchestrate different ways of students’ participation in and contribution to practices, and divergent
students can assert their own positionality and identity as meaningful. However, classrooms
including ours are embedded in the broader social context e.g., the university system witha number of regulations such as the attendance policy, and grading the students for unitsof credit. Whether leisurely learning expecting a little workload is a viable option especiallywithin a highly competitive university such as ours is debatable. This cautions us to communicate more thoroughly with students about different ways to participate in the classroom,
the broader context in which the classroom is situated and possible outcomes resulting fromtheir participation in the classroom.

Concluding Remarks
The course Joanna was enrolled in finished successfully with an overall highly positive student evaluation. We are thankful to Joanna who made us turn our attention from this overall
evaluation to the individual lived experience at the margin, which is often overlooked. Before
closing this discussion, we address how marginalisation might be dealt with given that it
must be more common than we assume.
Most crucially, if we acknowledge the diverse culturally and historically loaded expectationsof students and thus different positioning in classrooms, “it is important for educators to
explore with students which identity positions offer the greatest opportunity for social engagement and interaction” (Norton & Toohey, 2011, p. 429). Further, given that we expect acertain way of learning, we may need to explain why we employ the particular approach (Satoet al., 2015), especially if it is relatively new such as social participatory learning. We feel that
we have to become more resourceful in communicating crucial information to our students,
as we find that stating the information in official university course outlines or syllabuses, andverbally conveying it again in lectures would not be enough. These tailored supports have thepotential to avoid immediately imposing a teacher’s view of learning on students (Rogoff etal., 2001), and students with contrasting views need not feel marginalised but should be able
to remain at the periphery until they find the means to contribute to the classroom community in their unique way.
We suggest that resisting is not necessarily an unhealthy practice but is actually a part ofa process of constructing new practices, which should be received positively. However, when
all students are required to become full participants who are integral to the core part of thecommunity, resistance to the core value may not be valued or allowed. Instead, the dominantview which the core participants hold may be forced upon the students, and thus they will
only learn what the community wants them to learn in a way which the community sees as
the “right” practice. This may result in merely reproducing the same practice and negating
individual uniqueness because it fails to conform the “right” practice (Freire, 1970) or students
pretending to participate in the “right” way and dismissing their learning experiences as un-

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meaningful as this study revealed. Thus, those who have more power in the community i.e.,teachers and course coordinators, need to legitimate other views and to turn various views,
including resisting views, into valued resources for community development. We would liketo learn from Joanna’s experiences and develop our Classroom CoP, into one in which resistance is not outlawed.
This study focused on Joanna’s learning experience at the margin. One case study cannot
reveal enough to understand the experiences of all students who for one reason or anotherfind themselves at the margin. Furthermore, this case study is about a particular course at auniversity in Australia, which may not be relevant to other courses. As students like Joanna
must not be rare, we hope to hear more voices of students who experience participation at themargin to incorporate their views into designing better language classrooms.

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Takuya Kojima & Chihiro Thomson

Review ProcessThis paper was blind peer-reviewed by members of the Learner Development Journal Review
Network. (Contributors have the option of open or blind review.)

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr. Barbara Northwood, Dr. Emi Otsuji and Ms. Nagisa Fukui
for their constructive comments. This paper uses a part of Kojima’s PhD study supported by
the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney. The authors also acknowledge theeditors of the journal and blind reviewers who helped shape this paper.

Author Bios
Takuya Kojima is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. He has a graduate diploma in researchand PhD from UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research interests include social learning theories,
identity and language practice, and language pedagogy (learning environmental design). He
currently researches into critical and transformative pedagogies for foreign language education at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Chihiro Thomson is Professor of Japanese Studies at UNSW Sydney, Australia. She writes
widely on Japanese language education. Her most recent book is Foreign Language Learning
Communities of Practice: Mechanisms for Participatory Learning (Thomson, Ed. 2017, Coco Publishing, Tokyo). She is a winner of multiple awards, including the Japanese Foreign Minister’sCommendation (2016), and an Australian Award for University Teaching (2012).

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