Identity construction through narratives

Tracing the reflective practices of student teachers in online modes

“…In effect, even by looking at this component of the keyword lists we have a reasonably strong indication that the STs are producing discourse congruent with the three types of reflection demarcated by Jay and Johnson (2002): descriptive, comparative and critical. Indeed, in other discourse analytical work on the blogs datasets (see Riordan & Farr, forthcoming), we found similar evidence of the functions highlighted above, which support the corpus-based findings presented here. A more detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of some of these discrete items in the next section will shed further light on these links.…”

“…Thus far we have shown evidence of reflection and introspection on teaching (particularly from the blogs), and also a tension in maintaining a novice identity while also crossing the boundaries into the arena of professional identity. As was noted, this corpus-based analysis is supported by more qualitative research using discourse analysis techniques and examining the narratives present within the blogs (see Riordan & Farr, forthcoming).…”

“…This section offers results from corpus-based analysis of the datasets. We have previously analysed identity emerging from ST narratives (Riordan & Farr, forthcoming) in a more qualitative discourse-analytical manner; however, for the purposes of this paper we begin our analysis with more quantitative corpus linguistic methods…”

“…Here we see the dilemma of the STs, depicting themselves as knowledgeable novices as is required by their role in this context. This comes through in the discourse where we can see them engaged in description and reflection as iterative processes but with a certain lack of confidence (see also Riordan & Farr, forthcoming). This assumed identity may be genuine or it may be the result of them playing a role which they feel is demanded of them by their status as novices.…”

Exploring perceptions of pracademics in an Arab context

“…The current study adopted a qualitative interpretive research methodology, using an approach that is situated in oral narrative data. We departed from characterizing oral narratives as a type of discourse (Riordan and Farr, 2015), rather we considered these narratives within the framework of sociocultural theory and treated them as being situated practices (De Fina and Georgakopoulou, 2011). Guiding our study was the belief that “experience becomes linguistically and socio-culturally transformed through narrative genres and through the activity of recounting experiences for, to and with particular interlocutors” (Ochs, 2006, p. 64).…”