‘I’d rather you worked individually’: An autoethnographic enquiry

Abstract

In this enquiry, I (the first author) as a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) reflect on my own deep-seated reluctance to use pair/group work activities in my classroom, although I am aware of the benefits of pair/group activities for second language (L2) learning as abundantly documented in empirical studies. Through an autoethnographic enquiry, I reflect on my broader lived experiences to investigate how my dispositional mindset towards pair/group work was formed in the course of my life. Data were primarily my personal experiences that I analysed drawing on the conceptual framework of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 1987). Analyses of my data showed that my teacher subjectivity towards collaborative activities has not derived from experiences in diverse educational settings. On the contrary, our findings illustrated that my mindset had been largely formed in my earlier personal experiences, even before my formal-schooling education, by the invisible norms of my family culture, itself a reflection of the larger ambient culture. The findings of this enquiry may open new windows of opportunities for teachers to draw on the emic approach of autoethnography to reflect on their own subjectivity which mediates their classroom practices.