ABSTRACT(RE) TELLING: A NARRATIVE INQUIRY INTO PRE-SERVICE TESOL TEACHERS' STUDY ABROAD EXPERIENCESBy Sheila K. MarquardtLearning to teach ESL entails not only knowledge of linguistics, pedagogy, and curriculum, but it also entails negotiating challenges to identity, cultural sensibilities, and emotional relations. In order to make sense of these challenges, I inquire into the experiences of pre-service TESOL teachers teaching and learning experiences in a study abroad context in Malaysia. Drawing on field texts, I created stories to illustrate students' experiences as shown through their stories, their bodies and their tears. My study focuses on learning-to-teach stories in three contexts: the Malaysian-context field, the students' local school placements, and the language assessment undergraduate course in which they were enrolled during this study-abroad program. This study offers narrative inquiry as an alternative to psychology as a framework for negotiating the challenges to identity, cultural sensibilities, and emotional relations in an ethical and humane way. Using Dori Laub's and Shoshana Felman's framework of bearing witness to make sense of the crises, listening, witnessing and testimony, the stories give possibility to a new way of knowing and responding to students. In an effort to prepare teachers for the emotional work of teaching, a bearing witness narrative approach creates the possibility for teacher educators to model ethical responses for pre-service TESOL teachers. This approach departs from previous definitions of professionalism that tended to censor or banish expressions of emotion from the processes of learning to teach. Since I believe that teaching entails the establishment of human relationships, my study articulates and models how teachers and teacher educators can manage emotional relationships in a humane and ethical way, rather than censoring emotional relationships from professional development processes.
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