RESEARCH & REVIEWS

Research & Reviews溿狒ٛ‫٭ٖل‬Book Review: Duoethnography in English Language Teaching: Research,Reflection and Classroom Application.
Edited by Lowe, R.J. & Lawrence, L. (2020). Multilingual Matters.

Ellen Head
Miyazaki International College
ehead@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp
Narrative understandings were what firstpulled me into the Learner Development SIG.
The possibility of being able to contribute to acommunity of teachers who were also consciousof being learners, gave me hope and inspiration
for my own teaching and also enabled mebroaden my repertoire by learning from others.
The first issue of Learning Learning which I everread featured a piece by Murphy and Chang(2001) entitled “Coco capuccino company andlegitimate peripheralizing: learning throughautoethnographizing ourselves.” The use of thegenre of “written dialogue” showed that one
could write about teaching in a way that was lively
and full of the juice of lived experience. Murphy
was experimenting with scene setting to give apiece a pleasant affect and kinesthetic impact,which is probably why I remember it in contrast to100s of other articles. The dialogue style allowedfor two points of view to be explored without
foreclosing on one “right” idea. Writing a dialogue, one could give two sides of the question, andthe probing from the dialogue partner often created insights which would not have been had
when writing alone. Once I started dialoguing, I found it was more motivating than other forms ofwriting, since it was driven by the wish to reply to my co-writer. Were these collegial conversations“duoethnography”? It was not a word I had heard before. Ethnography was a room in a museum
which was full of masks and old pots. In my mind those written dialogues were just collegialconversations.
The appearance of a book which puts forward a case for duoethnography to be taken seriously
as a genre of academic writing, is a cause for celebration. As I read the first chapter of Lowe andLawrence’s new book, I was excited to read this quote from Freire:Some may think that to affirm dialogue – the encounter of men and women in theworld in order to transform the world – is naively and subjectively idealistic. Thereis nothing more real and concrete than people in the world and with the world, thanhumans with other humans. (Freire, 1970: 102, In Lowe and Lawrence, p. 1).

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LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(1)In a world in which the hegemony of human knowledge and skill is rapidly being challenged by
AI, this is a helpful reminder that our human experience is something we should value. Lowe andLawrence’s clear explanation of duo-ethnography will help any reader who wants to understandhow their collegial conversations could be used as an academic genre. According to theintroductory chapter, the first instance of published work using the term “duoethnography” wasNorris and Sawyer’s 2004 chapter on the hidden curriculum in relation to gender identity. Norrisand Sawyer define duoethnography as “a collaborative research methodology in which two or
more researchers of difference juxtapose their life histories to provide multiple understandings ofthe world.” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012, in Lowe and Lawrence, p. 8).
The book consists of three sections. The first section “Duoethnography for ELT Research”, whichis said to be more theoretical and formal, features three papers emerging from encounters
between demographically different “others” across gender and nationality. The issues include
native speakerism, teacher autonomy in teaching critical issues, and tensions between thepersonal and the professional in a graduate student/supervisor relationship. The middle section“Duoethnography for Reflection and Teacher Education” consists of more freeform conversations
by colleagues, including a dialogue between an experienced and novice teacher, two colleagues
talking about a neurodiverse student, and a pair who write about their experience as teacher
trainers at a university in Japan. The third section, “Duoethnography For Language Teaching”,
contains chapters describing the principles and implementation of duo-ethnography as a task
for students. Both the authors offer accounts of modules in which students produced written
duoethnographies. In Lowe’s classroom, students researched a concept such as world Englishes ornative speakerism, and wrote discussion question for a partner, alternating face-to-face discussion
with exchanges of written questions and answers to their partner over a four week period, before
performing the resulting questions and answers as a dialogue in front of other students. InLawrence’s class students recorded their discussions, then transcribed and created a written paperusing their dialogue as data. One of the resulting papers is included (p. 170). There is a chapter byboth authors together, (Chapter 8, p. 155 Digging Deeper) which offers a “how-to guide” together
with student feedback from Lawerence’s class (Chapter 10) and evidence of language related
discussions during Lowe’s class (Chapter 9), suggesting that these activities were perceived as
helpful and interesting, though challenging for students.
Although the authors say that the first section puts more weight on theory, when reading, I could
not see a huge difference between the blend of theory and practice in the first and middle
sections, other than the first part written by Lowe and Lawrence, which contains the discursive
groundwork positioning duo-ethnography as a genre of academic writing. This does not constitutea problem, since the theory is adequately explained and exemplified. However, the quality of myengagement with the book varied a bit due to lack of diversity in the perspectives in one or two
papers in the middle section. One of the principles of duo-ethnography is that the participants
should offer different perspectives on the issue in question. It is noticeable that the most successful
papers are those in which the two authors are different in nationality and gender. In some of theother papers the authors’ experience has been so similar that they seem to understand each otheralmost too well:
Of course, who you are is how you teach. That’s indisputable. But at the same time,
you’re being a version of who you are. And I think that’s true of how you are as amanager. It’s a version of who I am but it’s not necessarily the entirety of who I am.
(p. 147)
It would be fascinating to know more about the idea of “being a version of who you are” andwhether these two educators ever experienced tensions between the “version” and “the entirety”.

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RESEARCH & REVIEWS

However the co-author simply comments “That’s really interesting and kind of brings me to my next
point.”It seems that there is a risk in duoethnography that participants understand each other too well.
One wonders what would happen if one of the writers engaged in a dialogue with one of theteachers they manage. In contrast, another paper (Nagashima and Hunter, Chapter 3) describes
teaching social issues from the point of view of a female Japanese teacher and a male UK teacher.
Their different perspectives enable the reader to understand more about the privilege that “nativespeaker” teachers experience. The former was given the freedom to decide on his own curriculum
for global issues teaching with the result that he was able to introduce critical issues discussions
into his class and gained some satisfaction from being able to do this. On the other hand, theteacher who was from Japan was forced to teach grammar although she wanted to teach about
feminism and racism. She reflected wistfully that maybe she should not be putting forward a criticalperspective, precisely because it is aligned with her personal view and desire for social change
and so in this sense she wonders if she is “biased”. A second important moment in the paper waswhen she wrote that she wishes those who already are in a powerful position would advocate forthose who are not. The personal writing style can arguably capture things which academic prose
cannot. For example regarding workplace sexism:….most people may think it is a problem but they don’t really do anything. They remain
quiet or they kind of like laugh it off. And they will never call them out….And the more
I encounter those kinds of situations, the more I start to feel like those who are not on
the immediate receiving end of problematic actions or behavior, maybe those who arecloser to the perpetrator, should be able to speak up to them… (p. 63)
This spoke deeply to me, as did the sense of tentativeness which both participants felt aboutteaching critical social issues in a way that is not threatening to students.
Another chapter of great interest was that focusing on students with special educational needs(Kasparek and Turner, Chapter 6 Puzzling about Special Needs in EFL Teacher Development). The
authors focus on a student who did not speak but communicated in writing. They were tasked
by the administration with adapting a speaking class for the student, which they approached
as a collaborative research venture, replacing spoken with written tasks and tempting her withreferences to her favorite anime and chocolate. They raise the issue that communicating a
student’s diagnosis runs a risk of medicalizing what might previously be considered a personal
character trait. In this chapter too, one felt the similarity between participants meant that theytended to speculate rather than engage with lived experience.
My feelings have led me to feel that working with a SEN learner presents professional
puzzles, leading teachers to reevaluate practice once again, prompting teachers tofind innovative ways to deliver lessons, while looking to ensure inclusivity and quality.
(p. 129)
Clearly, the authors are caring people, and to their credit they do end up suggesting that they
could try to “involve the students in action research projects” if they encounter such students
in the future. However there was no mention of the Japanese legislation around special needs
education, which has been developing steadily since 2000 (MEXT, 2012; UNESCO, 2014) andwas probably the trigger for the importance given to the special needs students by their school
administrators. It would have been useful if they could have contextualized the situation in relation
to the required provisions within the university. It would also have been interesting to get a bitcloser to the experience of the student whom they taught. Their paper concludes with a note thatit covers the period up to 2018. Thus they hint that there have been subsequent developmentsin the understanding of neuro-diversity within the ELT community in Japan. Any discussion of23

LEARNING LEARNING『学習の学習』30(1)the awareness of educational special needs in Japan requires a mention of Alex Burke, whose
award-winning poster presentation in 2019 helped to focus on the experience of students who areneuro-diverse (Burke, 2020).
What about the challenge that the writing style of duoethnography is overly self-referential? Breault(2015) suggests that some duoethnographic conversations are transformative, while some arestatic, consisting of “parallel talk” or “theory confirmation”. The emergence of this publication froma group of friends gives it a certain unity and positive energy and excitement but the friendships
between co-authors may result in some pieces in which they simply reinforce each others’ views.
At the same time, the fact that the style is chatty makes the book approachable to read. Aftera busy day at school, I am more inclined to dip into a text which reads “Tom said to Joe” than“Farrell (2016) comments as follows on Campbell (2014)”. I enjoyed the down-to-earth, readable
style, the efforts at honest reflection and the feeling that reflection is inherently worth sharing. Inaddition, the theoretical sections of the book open the way for other conversations, other articles
and other books. “Duoethnography in English Language Education” will be empowering andstimulating, particularly for those who want to find ways to articulate reflective practice and whogain motivation by co-constructing text with colleagues. What is more, the models of doing duoethnography as an activity with students offer exciting possibilities.

REFERENCES

Breault, R. A. (2016). Emerging issues in duoethnograph. International Journal of QualitativeStudies in Education, 29(6), 777-794. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1162866
Burke, A. (2020). Neurodiverse Students in Your Classroom. The Language Teacher, 44(3), 31-37.
https://jalt-publications.org/sites/default/files/pdf-article/44.3-tlt-yl.pdf
MEXT (2012). Special Support Education in Japan: Children with Special Needs. https://www.mext.
go.jp/component/a_menu/education/micro_detail/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/05/25/1321539_002.pdf
Murphy, T. with Chang, Y. (2001). Coco Capuccino company and legitimate peripheralizing:learning through autoethnographizing ourselves. Learning Learning, 8(2), 20-25. https://ld-sig.org/
wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2001b.pdf
UNESCO (2021). Japan Inclusion. https://education-profiles.org/eastern-and-south-eastern-asia/
japan/~inclusion

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