Suchergebnisse

This is my story of how I, a teacher in an Australian university, and twelve students from Timor Leste negotiated cultural difference and gained a deeper understanding of ourselves and each other - and the lesson the story has for researchers. Using autoethnography and structured vignette analysis, I show how each of us evolved coping strategies to deal with our different cultural expectations, and in the process experienced enlightenment and personal transformation. Phenomenology and in particular autoethnography are well suited not only to understanding the interaction between researcher and the researched, but also the role that researcher self-awareness plays in the process of cultural adaptation. To gain perspective on the student experience, I undertook a case study by conducting a focus group and individual interviews. For the students, learning how to exist in Australian culture became the hidden curriculum. For me, understanding the impact of the cultural distance between teacher and students became imperative as the tension between their wellbeing and my own gathered momentum. This demonstrates how the initially separate cultural journeys of researchers and researched can come together as a shared journey of increasing self-understanding and personal growth.

For a reader to trust the perspective of a researcher as presented in qualitative inquiry, the disclosure of the researcher's position in relation to the data is vital. Who am I in relation to the research? becomes the central tenet in disclosing the positioning of the researcher. I contend that what we know (ontology), and how we know it (epistemology), are a result of our philosophical beliefs developed through our lifelong learning and not a precursor to them. In seeking to understand my philosophical positioning when researching my teaching a group of professionals from Timor Leste, I have found it helpful to answer four questions. What do I believe underpins my knowledge of life? Where did I gain this belief? How does this belief influence the way I react to situations and people? How do the assumptions, which I have accumulated from my life experiences, affect my reflexivity in my research? This article describes the process that I have used to reveal my position in relation to the data using examples from my autoethnography.

With this article I aim to progress the use of vignettes within autoethnography by explaining the conceptual framework for my structured vignette analysis. In researching my role as a teacher of a group of Timor-Leste vocational education professionals I have undertaken a phenomenological study using autoethnography to highlight the existential shifts in my cultural understanding. I use vignettes to place myself within the social context, to explore my positionality as a researcher and to carefully self-monitor the impact of my biases, beliefs and personal experiences on the teacher-student relationship. To assist my analysis I developed a structured method for analysing each vignette to reveal layers of awareness that might otherwise remain experienced but concealed. In my analysis I describe the context, the experience told as a personal story, the emotional impact on me of this experience and my reflexivity to the described experience. I identify strategies I developed resulting from the impact the experience had on my interactions with my students. This structured vignette analysis reinforces the necessity of all these research elements within autoethnographic writing. I provide an example to highlight the usefulness of this method. (author's abstract)

Difficult cultural encounters can impact both student sojourners and academics. In this article we present vignettes of separate experiences of an unforeseen cultural encounter in each of two groups of short-term adult student sojourners and we who taught them: One Indigenous group from Timor Leste entering Australia for a 12-week period, and one Indigenous group from Australia traveling to Greenland for a two-week period. We use a structured vignette analysis (PITARD, 2016) of each critical incident to present specific details of how these intense, unanticipated cultural experiences impacted us, the academics. Within our vignettes we see at work a process for cultural adaptation, which we have developed into a taxonomy to assist other teachers in their experiences with difficult cultural encounters to better understand what is happening as a means for stepping outside their own cultural boundaries.