From spectator to composer: The roses and rocks in the life of a language teacher

I Introduction

Those of us who are destined for a teaching life have our own stories of becoming and being a teacher. I am no exception. For more than a decade, English teaching has been the ingredients of my being; it is how I have come to know myself, and probably how others know me. Like many ordinary non-native English-speaking teachers, I have long lived in the world of educational institutions. I have experienced different approaches and methods as well as cutting-edge, rival-defeating packages of foreign textbooks, workbooks, and teacher guides delivered from overseas publishing companies to my local institutes. Quite often I took pride in teaching from them, and within them sought the language I was expected to teach. Like many other language teachers, I was regularly trained to teach the four skills, as well as their sub-skills and strategies and, not surprisingly, I was often observed and evaluated by supervising authorities to make myself and others feel that I was loyal to the established norms of language teaching and would not deviate from such standards.

Despite all the enjoyable and rewarding teaching moments I experienced throughout these years, I could see how my world of language teaching involved imparting trivial or irrelevant knowledge and mechanical or routinized teaching practices. My personal dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of the available resources for English as a foreign language (EFL), particularly commercially-imported ones, and my ambition to create locally-rooted language programs became the inspiration for this narrative inquiry project.

Part of my dissatisfaction came from reading recent research in language teaching and teacher education which invites language teachers not to be mere consumers, passive recipients, replicators, and implementers of sets of mandated or recommended techniques, skills or behaviors (Ghahremani Ghajar & Mirhosseini, 2011, 2012; Gong & Holliday, 2013; Higgins & Sandhu, 2015; Johnson & Golombek, 2011). Instead, language teachers are encouraged to explore their vast inner as well as outer socio-cultural sources of inspiration, seek innovative pedagogical approaches, generate their own instructional materials, examine the contexts in which their practice is embedded, and share their narrated experiences (Bamberg, 2007; Barkhuizen, 2011; Canagarajah, 2012; Parsaiyan, Ghahremani Ghajar, Salahimoghaddam, & Janahmadi, 2014a; Pavlenko, 2007). Some have even argued that an over-reliance on top-down syllabi and ready-made materials can deprive teachers of important opportunities to explore innovative teaching methods or initiating pedagogical change (Parsaiyan, Ghahremani Ghajar, Salahimoghaddam, & Janahmadi, 2014b; Thornbury, 2005; Tomlinson, 2013).

Prompted by this call to action, I shared my concerns with a professor of English language teaching (ELT) who had long attempted to challenge the superficialities of the status quo and revisit them through reflective classroom practices. Her artistic view of language and language teaching opened new horizons for me. My personal love of literature and an inner artistic aspiration enabled me to re-connect myself with literary works from a number of Iranian Muslim poets whose art-like engagement with language has been admired for centuries. I wondered how such Persian literary roots – or the kind of literary heritage we Iranians are heir to – could be tapped into in order to shed light on the teaching and learning of English. This point of departure, however, required venturing beyond the realm of simply teaching English. Through my ELT advisor, I became familiar with two experts on Persian literature and the history of Islam whose ideas, professional guidance, and friendship were invaluable in my own professional development journey.

With that interdisciplinary road ahead, I commenced on a journey – phased in over various periods of time – to read Persian classic works of literature, including Mathnavi couplets by Jalal Al-Din Rumi (1207–1273 CE or common era), The epic of kings by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (977–1010 CE) and Conference of the birds by Farid Al-Din Attar (1145–1221 CE). The art-like language, delicately-proposed themes, and deep underlying meanings of such literary works became my source of input, inspiration, decisions, and actions. As I read, I selected pedagogically appropriate poems and stories, sought the guidance and opinions of my advisors, and developed them into English narrative texts either by juxtaposing available English translations or rewriting them. This was a laborious process since, as Gray (2005) cautions, if translated first language literature ‘is not prudently chosen, and the students are not familiar with it or the translation is not appropriate, using it could mean lost pedagogical opportunities’ (p. 4). Moreover, since these narratives were meant to act not only as classroom contents but as springboards for further learning events and actions, I needed advice about how to make them pedagogically appropriate. My ELT advisor encouraged me not to use texts as merely reading materials – for teaching new vocabulary items or focusing on reading comprehension – but as grounds for re-living ideas, dialogues, inquiries, and actions. She suggested that literature should be experienced as ‘artwork’ rather than a means for delivering top-down, factual pieces of information. Though such ideas seemed far-fetched to me, I was determined not to use examination-type exercises (like true/false, multiple choice, and matching ones), which present a mechanical view of language, nor the more communicative ones (like opinion-gap, information-gap, reasoning-gap tasks), which can create artificial or life-detached classroom activities.

During the early stages of the project, my activities often included follow-up questions – mainly at the end of the narratives – which invited readers to express their views and understandings of the events, reflect on striking concepts, or relate them to their personal and social lives. As I continued my journey, these text-bound activities were gradually replaced by more action-based and student-authored performances.

II Narrative inquiry

The present work represents teachers’ narrative inquiry defined by Barkhuizen, Benson, & Chik (2014) as ‘bring[ing] storytelling and research together either by using stories as research data or by using storytelling as a tool for data analysis or presentation of findings’ (p. 3). As argued, ‘the main strength of narrative inquiry lies in its focus on how people use stories to make sense of their experiences in areas of inquiry where it is important to understand phenomena from the perspectives of those who experience them’ (p. 2).

The value of narrative inquiry, particularly when written in teachers’ own voices in the form of autobiographies, reflective journals, and/or diaries, lies in what Johnson and Golombek (2011) call its ‘transformative power’. As teachers become self-critics of their own personal and professional lives, they enhance their awareness of their discursive interactions with students, possible congruencies, contradictions or inconsistencies between what they believe, know, and feel and what they actually do in their classrooms. In other words, when telling one’s life story or chapters of it, individuals convey to others a sense of who they are, and what beliefs or values they subscribe to (Barkhuizen, 2013; Johnson, 2007; Nunan, & Choi, 2010; Pavlenko, 2002; Tsui, 2007; Webster, & Mertova, 2007).

Bell (2002) argues that narrative inquiry is more than telling or retelling stories as it requires ‘an analytic examination of the underlying insights and assumptions that the story illustrates’ (p. 208). Moen (2006) places narrative research within both Vygotskian sociocultural theory (which highlights the role of socio-cultural contexts in learning and development) and Bakhtin’s concept of ‘dialogism’ (which highlights the role of addressees in forming individuals’ voices). To him, both theorists propose that one cannot understand human development and functioning (here teachers and their teaching) without examining the social, cultural, historical, and institutional contexts in which they are situated.

Similarly, Johnson and Golombek (2011) argue that teacher-authored narratives can be transformative as they create meditational spaces for teachers to externalize their perceptions of sophisticated issues, verbalize their thoughts through theoretical constructs, interpret their experiences, and notice issues that would have remained invisible otherwise. Ultimately, narratives provide fertile ground for exploring language teachers’ negotiable and nonnegotiable dilemmas, struggles, angsts, and epiphanies affecting their identity construction, as well as changes they are going through (Abednia, 2012; Harbon & Moloney, 2013). Unfortunately, teachers’ stories have often remained unheeded or unappreciated amidst dominant theories of teaching and learning, principles, mandates, and standards of performance (Barkhuizen, 2011; Freeman, 2007).

This narrative inquiry includes moments of epiphanies that I experienced over a period of 18 months, during which I confronted institutionalized entanglements I had woven around myself as a language teacher, and the challenges I went through in order to make connections with my immediate community and historical heritage. My journey began with my uneasy determination for loosening up my ties with textbook-defined teaching practices, followed by my hesitations, aspirations, and attempts to infuse more depth,taste, and vision into my teaching. There were invariably knotty days that did not go as well as I had imagined or hoped, as well as rosy days that filled me with sheer rapture.

As an autobiographical exploration, my narrative inquiry is based on self-observation and self-evaluation through both hand-written and electronic reflective journals. Such reflective journals often involved narrating behind-the-scene actions, such as the process I went through in selecting the stories, where my ideas came from, why and how I decided to act on them, and reconstructing what happened to my classroom on a daily basis.

For me, journaling was not a dialogue with myself as I often emailed my entries (containing a whole cluster of doubts, questions, or even Ah-ha moments) to my ELT advisor so that she could see what was going on in my mind. Almost always, she – like a critical friend – assisted me as I reflected on my teaching. Thus, this narrative inquiry is not a monologue echoing a single voice, but a labyrinth of multiple voices that enabled me to gain my present voice. To emphasize the invaluable presence of others (including my advisors and the students), their spoken and written voices will be referred to throughout this narrative.

The exploratory and interpretative nature of my quest demanded that I not follow a linear path, but move back and forth between reviewing transcribed classroom events, my journal entries, observational notes, classroom materials, and students’ written works. I studied these meticulously to see how they were contributing to emerging themes. Reading and re-reading the data and negotiating their meaning with my advisors led me to gradually establish provisional codes, split multidimensional codes, synthesize overlapping codes, and eventually identify major themes. The themes that emerged throughout this irradiative process are presented in the narrative inquiry that follows.

III A different me: Roses and rocks

Throughout this project, I had the chance to re-visit my understandings, critique myself, re-enact my role as a materials developer, and rethink what I do as a teacher. Needless to say, on some occasions, my fear of change intimidated me to move back and forth between my institutionalized being and a new, emerging one.

In light of my personal struggles, my contacts with the students as well as consultations with my ELT and non-ELT advisors, I began to see myself moving away from being a spectator to being a composer, and from being an orchestrator to a vocalist. Furthermore, I could see myself moving from the domain of words to the wider realm of worlds, and from fragmented practices to more interconnected ones. Though separated into various sections below, each of these shifts emerged simultaneously within me.

IV From English route to Persian root

Not being forced to work within a narrowly-prescribed curriculum gave me the freedom to abandon commercial textbooks and rely on my own resources and devices. Nevertheless, this was not an easy transition. Despite feeling prepared for this process, I was initially overtaken by a niggling sense of emptiness inside and outside; chiefly a fake one. I could see that textbooks had long been the beating heart of my teaching, and now steering clear of them could take that sense of security away and would make me filled with a sense of emptiness. As Amiryousefi and Ketabi (2011) in their review of the ‘anti-textbook views’ mention textbooks when followed faithfully are likely to ‘give false confidence to teachers that they are developed by virtuous people and everything is catered for, and instead of being involved in day-to-day practice of what to teach and how to teach they sit back and relax’ (p. 216). Re-familiarizing myself with Persian literature, wherein a type of artistry inheres, reconnected me to the vast world of new and forgotten stories; stories that stimulated deep thoughts about human nature and our mission in the world. The more I read, the more resourceful I began to feel. I could see how stories containing the roots of Iranian-Islamic culture and ideology were beginning to gradually change and shape my language and becoming part of my life both inside and outside the classroom.

For me, one of the striking events was preparing the mystic story of Conference of the birds, by Attar, and sharing that with several communities of non-English major female university freshmen. This lengthy poem is a story about thousands of birds that start a journey in search of a king: Simorgh. The birds cross over seven deadly valleys, and when only thirty of them finally reach the dwelling place of Simorgh, all they find is a lake in which they see their own reflection; meaning that they and Simorgh are actually one and the same. In this poem, each of the birds represents how human nature prevents us from abandoning worldly desires and attaining selflessness.

Since no pedagogically-appropriate English translation was available, I referred to online and print English translations and consulted with my Persian Literature advisor who helped me come to deeper understanding of the story. Later on, I juxtaposed different translations, compared and contrasted the translated sentences with the original verses, and eventually designed a new text. I also included pictures – mainly from the internet – to make the story visually appealing.

The first time I was about to share the text with a group of university students, I felt both excited and nervous. While the students were busy reading the text, I looked at their faces carefully to see how they were experiencing it. The first question I asked was how they liked the story. A good number of them said they had found it ‘interesting’, ‘meaningful’, and ‘enjoyable’. They also mentioned that they had not found the language of the text problematic since on many occasions, unknown words or expressions had been preceded or followed by familiar context clues.

I then asked them to re-read the text to find the expressions, phrases, sentences or even words that caught their attention. I wanted to see how they were interacting with the text, what in the text they found meaningful or where in the text they could find their own words. In the next session, I asked the students to work in groups and share their ideas with regard to the story’s underlying themes and hidden meanings. Their discussion of the story succeeded in creating a new sort of atmosphere in the class; characterized by their use of ideas such as ‘shaking off the self’, ‘soul’, enduring ‘difficulties’, reaching God, and ‘Simorgh’, as well as meaningful allusions to Persian poetic verses, Qur’anic verses, and the like.

This shift in language was significant. We were using a kind of language more rooted in our everyday life and inner values; language that provoked us to contemplate our conduct in this challenging life. This was in contrast to the not-very-long-ago days when textbook-defined topics such as ‘staying in shape’, ‘getting enough sleep’, or ‘cell phone etiquettes’ preoccupied my teaching and kindled not much deep thinking in me and the students.

My appreciation of Persian poetry slowly manifested itself more as I continued to create English narratives with Persian verses inserted somewhere in the texts. It also marked an important transformation in me from zero tolerance of first language usage to a point where Persian verses, their carefully crafted patterns of words and their overtones, became valuable instructional jumpstarts. My use of Persian poetry was giving life to the dryness of learning English, and even the students began to borrow Persian verses whenever they felt Persian expressed it more meaningfully.

V From spectator to composer

As I reflect on my years of teaching experience, I can see that designing a course had always seemed like a specialist’s profession, in to which I rarely dared to lurk. Although I never considered or accepted others’ course designs as dogma or scripts to be followed, I acted more like a spectator, listening silently to loud passages played by others; clapping at times in response to impressive effects or critiquing badly-designed ones. To put it simply, I felt part of the audience and the performers (here other materials developers and course designers) were on the stage. My decision to become a composer, rather than a mere spectator, pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me face the challenges of becoming someone I had never been before. It was a struggle to make this imaginary persona a real one.

As all composers will admit, writing music for the first time is a daunting task. You need a sense of melody, harmony, rhythm, pitch, cadence, tempo, and the like, and you need to learn how to notate your compositions. Like a novice composer, I took up this persona with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the very act of preparing something with my own hands filled me with a sense of ownership, authenticity, and self-trust. On the other hand, making decisions about the themes; selecting content that is both informative and engaging; streamlining the language to make it comprehensible, meaningful, and purposeful; thinking about the layout and other visual features; and creating follow-up activities, their presentation, order, and pace proved to be very demanding.

Moreover, like composers who are sensitive to the reactions of their audience, I experienced a good degree of stage fright before sharing the materials. I wondered if the materials (here the prepared narratives) sounded pleasing to the students’ ears. Beyond simple judgments of like or dislike, it did matter to me whether or not the materials stimulated intellectual and emotional responses; whether they were provocative enough to linger in the back of students’ minds; whether they helped them learn something worthwhile about themselves and their world or come to re-experience what they had previously given undue attention. All these made me mull over their reactions and suggestions for change and be open to further revisions.

VI From orchestrator to vocalist

Despite taking delight in being engaged in materials development and designing activities, I began to realize that I was unintentionally keeping distance from learning alongside my students. In other words, I acted more like an orchestrator as I saw myself mainly in charge of adapting and designing classroom contents and determining what learners had to do. In that role, I heard myself repeating, ‘For our coming class you are supposed to …’ quite often, relatively devoid of personal touch or involvement. I gradually began to feel that if teaching is a performing art, I also needed to invest my creativity and imagination in it. Instead of acting like an orchestrator, I needed to act like a vocalist by voicing my own notes. With that in mind, I once considered starting the new semester with ‘Who am I’ stories in which not only the students but also I shared synopses of our lives. Weighing up various propositions, I finally grabbed the idea of writing down and sharing my early memories of attending school. Wth a sense of humor and even sarcasm mingled in, I described being scolded for a 14 (out of 20) in dictation, and as a punishment I had to rewrite all the wrong words 10 times so that I would ‘learn them’. I described my frustration with the repetitive cycle of receiving, memorizing, and repeating information.

Suffice to say writing and sharing a personal story was not easy for me to do. Telling my story demanded that I swallow my own pride. Moreover, I was apprehensive about how a non-professional, teacher-written text would be received by the students. I also felt that if the students know I was the author of the text, they may not share their ideas freely with me. With that in mind, the first time I distributed my story, I simply asked the students to read the text and see how ‘the narrator’ was talking about herself and her experiences in school. Accordingly, the students described a ‘she who hated school, but then became successful’; a ‘lazy student’ who got low marks; a ‘she for whom Saturdays were the darkest, ugliest days of the week’; a ‘she who is criticizing the education system because of its emphasis on memorizing’. During the discussion, I suddenly began to see myself joining in, talking about this remote, fictitious character. Later I wrote in my field notes that talking about an outsider or a third person left me with a bizarre feeling of self-alienation, and I vowed ‘I would never become a stranger to myself.’ At the end of that session, I asked the students to guess who the writer was, to which they offered big smiles and wide eyes. One student even asked why I had not mentioned my name anywhere in the text. To be frank, I could not reply.

Events like this enabled me to practice learning alongside my students and bringing my own voice into the classroom. I gradually heard myself saying, ‘For our coming class, let’s think about … and let’s share our …’; which conveyed a sense of community. I also realized that my intellectual survival, as a human being and as a teacher, depends on my ability to regularly pull in fresh air and push out stale air. Renewal, once started, should not be stopped.

VII From words to worlds

As a language teacher, I had long been concerned with reading texts line-by-line, paraphrasing sentences, generating synonyms and antonyms, and text-driven comprehension questions. I worried that if texts are not read aloud, the students would fail to recognize important linguistic features in the texts. My same concerns persisted when I asked follow-up and text-bound questions as I felt these were necessary if the students were to comprehend the text.

While I never abandoned close readings, I gradually realized that the responsibility for tackling unfamiliar words and structures could be carried out by the students themselves. This opened spaces for me to focus on more complex and significant life issues.

By thinking about literature as ‘artwork’ that needs to be unveiled, I began to encourage my students to think about alternative meanings underlying the stories we read, the symbolic nature of particular characters or events as well as the possible ways they could connect these stories to their daily lives. In other words, stories which I initially used as reading materials became sources of deep pondering. I found myself no longer asking, ‘what does this word mean?’ but instead ‘what does this word mean to you?’ I wanted to move away from external definitions of words to my students’ internal worlds and meanings, encourage them to think for themselves, and show them that I valued their thoughts.

For example, one of the events that opened spaces for an engaging discussion was sharing the story of The rabbit and the lion, from Book I of Mathnavi by Rumi.

This fable story, an adaptation from Kalileh and Demne, narrates the story of a fierce lion who hunts the beasts in his neighborhood. To satisfy his hunger, the beasts agree to furnish food to him if he agrees not to attack them. When it is the rabbit’s turn, he asks the other beasts to let him end this injustice. He cleverly leads the lion to the edge of a well, where he sees his own reflection and jumps in and drowns. While preparing this text, I was concerned that the students may not like the fable or find it babyish. However, the deep, moral meaning behind the fable seemed worth the risk. Having shared the story with a community of students, I could see that much of the class time was spent on line-by-line reading and occasionally encouraging the students to guess the meaning of unknown words, asking for connections between words and events, and sometimes word by word translation. This probably meant that I was too concerned with words rather than my students’ worlds.

An inside voice kept nagging that this did not feel quite right. My dissatisfaction drove me to write to my ELT advisor . I told her how I was still acting ‘stereotypically’ and mechanically. In a prompt reply she said I needed to ‘push’ myself and the students to ‘the unexpected where learning happens’. She also suggested that instead of getting stuck in words, I had to see how people actually ‘make changes in their lives’. She wrote:

Teach yourself and them to LOOK BEYOND, beyond the text, beyond the words, beyond the act of reading, beyond themselves … and this will push you and them to the unexpected where learning happens … Just give them the text and tell them how these people think and how they make changes in their lives, and they are doing the same every day. SO JUST BE YOURSELF, YOU ARE A SPECIAL PERSON WITH A LOT OF HONESTY AND BLESSINGS FROM GOD … (Email correspondence, 26 October 2012)

For the next session, I took my first step in going beyond the text. I handed out small pieces of paper containing some questions about the story and asked the students to work together and share their thoughts with one another. The questions focused on different aspects of the fable; possible messages, the symbolic roles of the characters, the idea of ‘lions outside and lions inside’; and the relevance of the story to their lives.

One student said the story meant that ‘people should defend their rights and … don’t let another people to take their rights.’ Speaking more symbolically, other students talked about how the animals in the story represent ‘people in the society’. Another student guessed that beasts represent ‘ordinary people who are indifferent to those who are in trouble. They just adapt to the situation they … they let others to be cruel to them.’ As the students were expressing connections between the story and their everyday lives, I asked an impromptu question, ‘Do you feel like you have ever acted like the rabbit in this story?’ One very soft-spoken student said, ‘Yes … I remember … one person … told me … you … you can’t … you can’t do anything good. And I … very sad … but I tried … tried, and I could do it … like the rabbit in the story.’ Her candor spread through the class as the other students began talking about how they succeeded in ‘giving up’ their ‘bad habits’ like those inside the lions. Their contributions made me feel like I was sowing seeds on fertile soil where fruits were beginning to blossom for me and the students. I felt I had finally conquered the ‘lion inside’ (my fears) and was experiencing ‘light in heart’.

As time went on, I became convinced that language classes should not be isolated from the world in which we are immersed in; particularly from the events that are interwoven with our lives outside the classrooms. To act on this, on the eve of spring season, New Year on the Persian calendar, I collected some nature-related videos, with Persian captioning. One video, Nature, beauty, gratitude, ¹ by American cinematographer, director and producer, Louie Schwartzberg, showed how flowers ripple in dance-like fashion as they bloom; how a colorless strawberry swells and ripens as it turns red; and how hundreds of monarch butterflies begin their migration. After clapping excitedly, the students began offering some remarks of self-confession, self-criticism, and regret about our separation from nature. The video had apparently shaken all of us as we were talking about nature as something hidden in our lives. I decided to capture the sense of wonder that was emerging by writing a big ‘Wow’ on the board and then asked the students to bring their own ‘Wows to class’.

However, what they brought to the class were internet-downloaded pieces of information that they had simply found ‘exciting’ or ‘interesting’. This left me with a sense that ‘something was missing’. Instead of turning the spotlight on the students, I began to look at myself. I realized that if I want my students to become ‘nature explorers’, I had to act like a pioneer. I needed to use less prescriptive and less detached language. For this to happen, I first needed to bridge the gap between myself and the world around me.

One evening just before sunset, I went out to watch the sky, something I had rarely taken the time to do. I watched the sky for nearly 30 minutes and at the same time I took photos of the disappearing sun. My first photo was a big, circle-like, full-shaped sun. In my subsequent photos, the sun was getting smaller and smaller, the sky was getting darker and darker with its colors changing constantly. The sky looked like a big pot and the sun was melting in it. In no time there was no sun in the sky.

Feeling both excited and delighted, I took the photos to my classes, and I told the students my story of ‘living with the sun for 30 minutes’. I explained how the changing colors reminded me that ‘when I have my head down, there are many … many events happening above my head … that I do not pay attention to them … as if they are not there.’ Using the photos, I showed them how to feel ‘the passage of time’, and how the sun might resemble our soul; ‘when we are surrounded by darkness … we might gradually melt into darkness.’

For a while, I wondered if sharing this experience had reached my students’ hearts, but I was relieved that I had finally come out of my own alienation. I also asked them to feel free to share examples of their own explorations in our coming session; not because of doing a classroom assignment or getting a score but because of its joy.

When I told my ELT advisor about the event, she expressed her happiness about how my ‘cocoon also broke apart’ and I ‘came out!!’ She wrote:

I really enjoyed what you shared as usual. It is fascinating how your cocoon also broke apart and you came out!! I think this is the best and probably a result of your prayers during spring and close relationship with your students. As you have now discovered, it is how you start learning and becoming what you say and what you do without any separation. So this will happen to your students too. Sometimes it is clear and sometimes not so clear. So don’t be disappointed, instead insist on what you believe and make what you say more and more your own pain! (Email correspondence, 2 May 2013)

Even though this activity was quite small in scope, it encouraged me to try out new ideas, and to make my teaching even more genuine. I could also see and feel a change of language in the subsequent ‘Wow’ texts as instead of reading copied, internet-downloaded texts, some of the students began writing about their personal adventures with nature.

VIII From fragmentation to connection

Being directly engaged in materials development, I began to feel a sense of direction; a sense of moving with a meaningful agenda; a sense of knowing where I was heading; and where I was taking the students. This movement from fragmentation to connection enabled me and my students to see how our occurring classroom events were highly connected to each other. With that sense of connection, at the end of one semester, I reviewed the narratives we had read together, selected certain significant parts from each, and then arranged them all in connected bubbles. I gave the sheets to the students and told them that instead of taking a conventional final exam, they were to see how they could find connections between the themes, concepts, or characters of our readings. Their documents illustrated a variety of political, social, psychological, historical, and even mystical analyses, linkages, and interpretations; some of which I had never noticed or thought about before. All these made me feel proud of trusting the students and their capabilities. What gladdened me the most was that I was not also the person I was 18 months ago.

My story, characterized by a rich cast of characters and a plot with a good number of rosy and rocky circumstances, does not end here. In fact, it must not end here. As Sarason (1999) suggests, ‘[T]he burned out teacher tends to be one whose performance has been routinized, like an actor in a long running play who once “lived” the role but now goes through the motions’ (p. 4). I hope my narrative inquiry and the challenges I faced will inspire other teachers to embark on their own journey of self-inquiry and professional growth.