Influences on, and possibilities for, my English pedagogy: a narrative self-study.

Abstract

This thesis reports on a narrative self-study through which I explore the influences on and possibilities for my pedagogy. Throughout the 32 years of my working life, I have been in the field of English education and have always felt that the pedagogy which I enact is quite ordinary. Over the years, I have taught English as a first language and as a second language in secondary schools in South Africa. I have also been actively involved in other phases of education and have taught in the field of Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET). I lectured Communication at a University of Technology and am currently employed on a permanent basis as an English teacher educator at a university in Kwa-Zulu Natal in South Africa. I aspire to model purposeful pedagogy that will inspire my students. In an attempt to make my enacted pedagogy congruent with that to which I aspire, my starting point was to write my personal history narrative in an attempt to understand my current practice and to identify possibilities for future practice. I was the main participant in the study and the other participants were my sister, my critical friends, my pre-service undergraduate students who volunteered, and my 2015 and 2016 honors students. My research text was my personal narrative and my reflective diary, conversations with my sister, peers and students as well as critical friend feedback served as my field texts. Additional field texts were student emails, assignments and lecture reflections. In the analysis of my personal history narrative, I used my disciplinary knowledge as I juxtaposed my personal narrative with literature and film. In the first layer of the analysis, my personal history narrative was analysed in the same way as I would analyse any other literary text and what was revealed was that more depth was required. This led to a second layer of analysis wherein I juxtaposed my personal history narrative with literature. The second layer of analysis revealed twenty-eight themes which I collapsed into three major dimensions of my pedagogy. A third layer of analysis followed and in this, there was juxtaposition of my personal narrative and film. My original methodological contribution is that of two creative analytic practices. The first being my layered literary analysis. After the layered analysis, I examined my undergraduate and post graduate pedagogy in an attempt to use the influences that had been expose to identify possibilities for current and future pedagogy. In doing so, I used a method of multi-layered pedagogic reflection which is my second creative analytic contribution.