Keynote Speakers
Narrating the Teaching Self: Narrative Self-Observation as a Framework for Teacher Education
Jason Anderson
University of Warwick
jason.anderson@warwick.ac.uk
Jaber Kamali
Ibn Haldun University
jaber.kamali@ihu.edu.tr
Abstract
This keynote introduces Narrative Self-Observation (NSO) as a theoretical framework for rethinking teacher development in language teacher education. We argue that teacher learning is not adequately understood through models that privilege skills, competencies, or observable performance alone. Rather, teacher development is fundamentally interpretive: it unfolds through the ways teachers make sense of experience, negotiate tensions, and construct professional identities across time and context. NSO emerges from this understanding and offers a framework for examining teaching as a narrated, mediated, and ecologically situated form of professional life. Drawing on narrative theory, sociocultural perspectives on development, and the person of the teacher, NSO conceptualizes self-observation as more than the monitoring of classroom action. It is an interpretive process through which teachers revisit experience, connect past and present, articulate tensions, and render their professional worlds intelligible to themselves and others. In this way, NSO provides access to dimensions of teacher learning that are often overlooked in dominant models of teacher education: the storied nature of pedagogical reasoning, the formative role of uncertainty and contradiction, the temporal layering of identity, and the embeddedness of teacher agency within institutional and relational contexts. The keynote outlines the conceptual architecture of NSO, discusses its cycle, and explores its implications for language teacher education as both pedagogy and research. We suggest that NSO can enable a richer understanding of how teachers become, not simply through what they do, but through how they interpret, narrate, and reconfigure their lived experience. By placing narrative meaning-making at the center of teacher development, NSO may offer a new language for theorizing identity, agency, and professional learning in applied linguistics and beyond.
Dr Jason Anderson is a teacher educator, author and associate professor at the University of Warwick with experience working in education systems around the world, particularly in the global South. He researches and writes on topics including language teaching methodology, multilingual policy and practice, teacher expertise and teacher reflection. He is author of 12 books, numerous research papers, articles and reports, for which he has won several awards. See www.jasonanderson.org.uk
Dr Jaber Kamali (from Ibn Haldun University, Turkey) is a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher in TESOL/ELT and Language Teacher Education. He serves as the Director of the IHU Teacher Training Center, where he leads Trinity CertTESOL and DipTESOL courses. Being a researcher in the field, he has published several articles in top-tier journals and was among the top-cited authors of Wiley publications in 2020-2021.
