INTRODUCTION
Visualising Learner Development:
An Introduction
Hugh Nicoll, Miyazaki Municipal University
Darren Elliott, Nanzan UniversityWe began editing this first issue of the journal with a shared interest in metaphors forlearning. Darren locates his interest in his current research focusing on learners’
metaphors for learning, and ways in which learners’ metaphors connect to autonomous actions and beliefs. He writes, “… when this theme was suggested I saw an instantconnection. Of course, metaphor is just one way of “visualizing.” I wanted to see how otherteacher-researchers in different contexts interpreted the theme. I am really happy with thediverse range of ideas and voices we will be presenting in the first issue.”
Hugh connects the theme of visualising learner development to his awareness of learning
environments as new worlds that he needs to imagine fully in order to navigate and understand them. He recalls, “I am remembering first my work with elementary school children
who lived in the neighborhood of the church my family attended in Washington, D. C. in the1960s. We had moved to D. C. from rural Maine, so acting as a reading and writing tutor (as ajunior high school student myself) with mostly 8 to 10-year-old African American boys constituted a challenging and engaging introduction to the complexity of the world. My second
shaping experience began just after I graduated from high school, when I started training tobecome a mountaineering instructor. Those experiences took me back to the woods of myearly childhood, but also triggered efforts on my part to link the physical, conceptual, andleadership challenges of working in outdoor education to ideas of an intuitive sense that mynatural way of framing learning and teaching questions is essentially kinaesthetic. Having
later become a professor of American literature and cultural history, I see all of the key issues
in learner development as part of a great interdisciplinary continuum, where, just as for Darren too, the centrality of metaphor is fundamental to the journeys we undertake as learners
and as teachers.”
From these shared perspectives, as we worked with the teacher-researchers whose work iscollected here, we became increasingly aware of the complexity of the puzzles we all face intrying to share our understandings of autonomy. For some writer-researchers, for example,
the importance of metaphor may be thought of as a way to represent abstract concepts, while
for others metaphor may entail more concrete images. In other cases, narratives combinedwith images—such as The Language Learning Tree in Porter and Hilton’s paper (in this issue),or in the free drawing learner self-portraits Alice Chik has used with Hong Kong learnersof English—provide the basis for reflection and feedback, in which learning and language
learning selves are transformed into artifacts for reflection and dialog on learning practiceand learner identity. This is the same process (and struggle) we enter into as researchers andwriters, as we build bridges between our teaching worlds and our professional communities ofpractice as academics and/or administrators of language learning programs.

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Our views have been shaped by our individual experiences of learning, researching, teaching, and writing and by the communities to which we belong—especially the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT) Learner Development SIG, and sister communities ofteachers and researchers around the world who endeavour to understand and promote holistic
learning. In seeking to encourage curiosity and empathy with communities of learners andteachers, we unashamedly align ourselves with the principles of Exploratory Practice (EP) andother models for participatory research and practice. We thus face many of the same dilemmas that Judith Hanks (2017, p. 1) identifies when she states that “it has become axiomaticthat research into classroom language learning and teaching should be participatory, egalitarian, and empowering.” How to reach those aims remains open to lively discussion, as Hanks
also notes. This led us to several recurrent puzzles that we asked the authors and ourselves tocontemplate as we worked on the papers in this issue:
ʶʶIn what way does visualising learner development advance the principles that learningand teaching should be “participatory, egalitarian and empowering”?

ʶʶHow, in turn, does this mesh with what we perceive as our institutional responsibilities(i.e., to adhere to a curriculum and to assess learners)?

ʶʶHow can we envision our institutional constraints differently, thus transforming theminto affordances for learning and research?

ʶʶHow can we picture identities, our learners’ and our own, differently? Similarly, how
can we learn to see our research field otherwise and make connections with neighbouring disciplines and ways of knowing?

ʶʶABeAnd, importantly in the inaugural issue of a journal seeking to promote exploratory
practices in research and writing, how can we visualise the writing of research in newand engaging ways?

Using metaphor, narrative, and visualization innovatively, the contributors to the first issueof The Learner Development Journal each try different ways to make the invisible aspects oflearner development (more) visible. Four of the papers were written by Japan-based individuals or author teams. It is our pleasure too to share papers from the Italian teacher/researcher Luciano Mariani and a pair of language counsellors working together at the University ofHelsinki, Fergal Bradley and Leena Karlsson. We are also delighted to include a final reflective
commentary from Alice Chik, who, looking back over the whole issue, draws our attention to
the issue’s fundamental thematic puzzle: “… how do we explore different ways for learners
and their development to be seen?” Using visualisation of identity and learning, Alice’s research has grown out of her studies of children in Hong Kong who deepened their interest in
English outside of school. The research featured in this issue, however, comes from puzzles
that arise in school and university classrooms, which brings us to how learners and teachers
within different institutional settings may conceptualise learning and autonomy, and visualise learner development.
In the first paper, “One Year Later: Students’ Visualizations of ‘Independent-Mindedness’ in the L2 University Classroom,” Tanya McCarthy reports on her use of an Independent
Learning Scale (ILS), adapted from Toyota’s Kanban Board Technique (KBT), to help her students visualise their “thoughts and feelings” about learner autonomy and their independent
learning abilities. McCarthy notes that autonomous learning, viewed as essential for learnerengagement and achievement is being assessed in relation to Japan’s Ministry of Education,Sports, Science, Culture, and Technology’s (MEXT) policy of goal of increasing “indepenLearner Development Journal • Volume 1: Issue 1 • November 20173

One Year Later: Students’ Visualizations of “Independent-Mindedness” in the L2 University Classroom

dent minded learning.” Interestingly, the MEXT policy documents link “independent-minded learning by individuals” to the achievement of greater “independence, collaboration andcreativity” in Japanese institutions and in society as a whole. Universities, McCarthy observes
drily, “have tried to adopt new measures in the L2 classroom...with mixed results.” Our familiarity with Japanese university settings, and the pressure to adhere to MEXT guidelines
elicited a nodding empathy on our parts, and a strong measure of respect for McCarthy’s efforts to research with her students, rather than on them.
The second article, by Mathew Porter and Scott Hilton, explores the use of a visual metaphor, The Language Learning Tree, to help students—at a Faculty of Nursing and a high school
respectively—reflect on their language learning goals, practices, and attitudes, in two different institutional settings. Their paper discusses the challenges and discoveries the teacher/researchers made with their respective groups of students, and also provides readers with anarrative of collaborative professional development across institutional boundaries, the benefits of which Porter notes towards the end of their paper with this observation: “Although it iseasy to see how learning a complex system such as language can be represented by a growing
tree, discussing how the tree could be used to introduce a growth mindset added a new dimension to my understanding of the metaphor.”
Then Luciano Mariani’s “Exploring Italian High School Students’ Metaphors of Language
Learning” reports on a survey conducted with Italian secondary school students studying avariety of foreign languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. Mariani is particularlyinterested in what students mean by “knowing a foreign language” and how they see, i.e.,
what they understand as the processes, the how-to(s) of learning a foreign language in theirschool (institutional) settings. Participants were asked to visualise their learning through theuse of metaphors, in their L1, Italian. Mariani uses this analysis to identify key metaphorsthat leaners use to represent their language learning experience—and to uncover what he defines as “aspects of the ‘hidden curriculum’”—students’ attitudes and beliefs about language
learning and how those beliefs affect learning outcomes.
In the fourth article, Mayumi Abe’s “Integrating Metacognitive Knowledge for Planning in
Self-Directed Language Learning” returns us to Japan and reports on a case study conductedwith two students enrolled in a Self-Directed Learning course Abe teaches. Her goal is to help
learners develop a greater metacognitive awareness of their learning practices in an effort tohelp them more effectively plan and reflect on their learning goals. Her work also highlights
the inevitable tensions teachers and learning advisors will struggle with as they formulate
and reflect upon their efforts to help their students acquire more expertise in taking controlof their own learning, or, in becoming more successful, more effective in defining and meeting their next language learning goals.
Yoshifumi Fukada, Tetsuya Fukuda, Joseph Falout, and Tim Murphey—although based atdifferent Tokyo-area universities—research and write as a collaborative team. Their paper,“Collaboratively Visualizing Possible Others,” takes a multi-faceted approach to “collaborative, self-reflective research” in working and researching with students imagining idealclassmates and themselves as more collaborative possible L2 selves. Their collaborative arrangement has allowed them to explore inter-institutional peer feedback systems, giving
them a learning experience that in some ways parallels those of their students. They explore
these interconnections through reflective discussions and shared narratives of their classroom
lives as teachers and researchers.
Our sixth research paper, by Fergal Bradley and Leena Karlsson, returns us to two key
themes introduced in previous papers—learner metacognitive awareness, i.e., “learning how

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to learn,” and learner advising as a mode of helping learners to plan and evaluate their own
learning. Bradley and Karlsson describe their learner advising work (language counselling) as aparallel journey, in which their conceptualization of their counsellor selves is the counterpart
to the work they encourage their students to do as they conceptualize “learning and themselves as language learners.” One intriguing aspect of Leena and Fergal’s work is that while
the language is primarily conceptual and abstract, rather than explicitly visual, the metaphorsof learning, research, and writing as “journey” link the inherently emotional, intersubjective
experience of working and learning with others to the reconstruction of understandings inmore formal (academic) senses.
All of the papers collected here serve as touchstones: testimonies to an inescapable conclusion as we struggle yet again to re-construct the fundamental questions and tentative understandings at the heart of the learning-teaching relationship. They help us to remember that
we need to be reminded from time to time—especially when we are under the pressure ofcurricular requirements, course content, assessment rubrics, notions of language as a technical skill, grade and ranking systems, and so on—not to draw conclusions about our learners
without ensuring that they have been given the opportunities to fully tell their own stories.
And that also brings us to the story of how the two of us as editors visualised working—andworked—on this inaugural issue of The Learner Development Journal together. We tried to offer
writer-researcher-practitioners a chance to collaborate much more closely than they would
on a regular journal. We, therefore, worked fairly closely with the writers of each paper, andat various stages, each of the writers has read and commented on other papers submitted tothe first issue. A couple of the papers we received were almost complete, but have been rewritten after commentary from other writers. Some of the papers started off as research notesor proposals and have taken a lot more work to build into the final versions we are now publishing. We also looked to members of the journal’s Review Network who responded to later
iterations of each paper and gave yet more useful feedback. In the end, each paper was seen
by at least half a dozen people, all of whom have made astute observations, before completion.
Our aim was to develop papers, rather than accept or reject submission. The paper weworked on the most was one that came to us as a proposal rather than a piece of completed research. For various reasons, the research didn’t go entirely to plan... but the processof reworking the goals was really interesting. It is actually rare that research does work out
exactly as intended, of course. What was particularly interesting from an editorial perspective
was assisting the “writer-researcher-practitioners” in repositioning themselves within thedata they had, and discussing with them how they could come up with a paper quite different
from the one they had originally proposed. It has been a great pleasure for both of us to work
together with teachers who are committed to research writing that grows out of their exploration of the dynamics of the teaching-learning relationship as they have engaged with visualising learner development in quite different ways.
In the end, tantalizingly, the deeply puzzling and mysterious aspects of trying to visualize
learner development often seem as opaque and resistant as ever. Perhaps this comes with theterritory, given that efforts to answer questions about how people learn things and what anyof us can do to help are so difficult to resolve coherently. We therefore hope, in sharing thiscollection of writing in the inaugural issue of The Learner Development Journal, to inspire bothcontributors and readers to puzzle out new understandings of visualization in language learning and teaching for, by, and with both learners and teachers.

Learner Development Journal • Volume 1: Issue 1 • November 2017

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One Year Later: Students’ Visualizations of “Independent-Mindedness” in the L2 University Classroom

References
Elliott, D., Nicoll, H., & Stewart, A. (2017, in press). An interview with the co-editors ofissue 1 of The Learner Development Journal, “Visualizing learner development.” Learning
Learning, 24(3).
Hanks, J. (2017) Exploratory practice in language teaching: Puzzling about principles and practices.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Editor bios
Darren Elliott (MA ELT, DELTA) has taught at universities in the United Kingdom and Japanand currently teaches at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan. He has published and presented
internationally on learner autonomy, teacher development, and reflective practice, particularly guided by internet technologies. In his current research he is exploring connections between metaphor and learner beliefs.
Hugh Nicoll (American Studies, The Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, USA) retired as professor of English and American studies at Miyazaki Municipal University in March2015. He has been teaching in Japan since 1983 and been an active member of the Learner
Development SIG since 1994. He currently teaches at Miyazaki Municipal University, Miyazaki
International College, and the University of Miyazaki as a part-time lecturer, exploring, withhis students and like-minded friends and colleagues, academic literacies, learner autonomy,
and critical pedagogies in language education.

Acknowledgments
We would first like to thank the writers for their contributions, and also extend an especially big thank you to the members of the Learner Development Journal Review Network—PaulBeaufait, Steve Brown, Paul Collett, Dexter Da Silva, Chika Hayashi, Ann Mayeda, FumikoMurase, Jo Mynard, Diane Nagatomo, Ted O’Neill, Colin Rundle, Akiko Takagi, and Katherine Thornton—and the members of our Learner Development SIG Translation Team—Chika
Hayashi, Tokiko Hori, Yoshio Nakai, and Koki Tomita. Additional thanks are due the membersof The Learner Development Journal Steering Group—Tim Ashwell, Andy Barfield, and Alison
Stewart—for their encouragement and support in helping us arrive at the end of a very longjourney indeed. And, finally, a big thanks to Malcolm Swanson for the invaluable skills hebrought to the layout and design stages of publishing this first issue of the journal.

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