Curiouser and curiouser. I received an email soliciting my potential submission to the SAGE journal Ethnography. A form email, but still: they found me somehow. Either way: now considering it. Likewise, after accepting an editorial request from another SAGE journal - Journal of Contemporary Ethnography - to review an Inter-Cultural Communication [IC] methodologized ethnographic research paper and sending my review, I have 60 day access to SAGE. And a reviewer profile: updating my ORCID public profile (in case in this late career stage something eventuates), and corresponding with Clarivate now. After over a year of stress-related illness - anxiety, immune system issues and the onset of a thyroid condition - which forced me to withdraw from a late career enrollment (by distance from China) in a GDRM (in Australia) - its intriguing now on recovery to have this access. Especially in the current geo-political context in which I am situated as a foreigner living and working in China.
In the film (first part) of Being in Time (accepted for literary / arts journal exhibition in 2024 as mentioned last blog update), I sought to render (through experimental montagism) the transformative affect of critical reflection on my personal experience of living and working in China (since beginning my formative EFL career in Xinjiang in 2011/12) in this current geo-political climate: beset by Western MSM discourse on both China (Xinjiang) and Russia, the latter in relation to 1) Ukraine's Nazi influences post-2014 Maidan coup as documented in the Igor Lopatonok directed / Oliver Stone produced film Ukraine on Fire (which I saw first on YouTube before it was taken down following the 2022/02/24 Russian military operation in Ukraine); and 2) my then recently deceased father's recollections of his own childhood under the Nazis in then occupied Czechoslovakia (as a Slav thus to the Nazis an "untermensch" as were Russians so considered). In utilizing extracts from a filmed interview with my late father one of the last times I saw him - and my mother - alive, I selectively edited it based on an experimental short edit of an approximately 2-3 hours of interviews concerning his lived experience as a WW2 "displaced person" who came by UN ship to Australia as part of the first immigration wave: collectively termed "new Australians" by a resentful, prejudicial Australian population. More of the collected interviews will be utilized in the film's second part (and longitudinal development) but for now, included below is my first attempt at a personal film reflection on my father's revelations.
VIDEO 7: "Jiri's Tale 1: I Untermensch" - Experimental intended pilot for a YouTube series exploring personal reflection accompanying an interview series with my late father over the few times I saw him alive prior to his death (being unable to attend his funeral due to Covid-19 travel (and financial) restrictions to Australia. This was my second attempt at an episodic YouTube format following two Reflections on Xinjiang episodes (Video 3 in Blog 1).
It's been over a year since last reading Academic research papers as stress-related illness following my father's death interrupted such a pursuit. My focus at that time was auto-ethnography in Chinese EFL: the research context being the call for a change in pedagogic practice, research and educational design innovation during the 2020-2022 Covid-19 emergency response period. Specifically: the call for a change in pedagogic practice in China in Poo (2021) re-iterated that originally delineated earlier, in an EFL context, in Liu, et.al’s (2015) qualitative justification of the need for a “paradigm shift” in EFL pedagogic practice in China. Poo (2021) specifically delineated this “paradigm shift” as that from the “didactic towards the inspirational”. Though not acknowledged, the potential (and precise) methodological facilitation of this shift - and its epistemic justification - was inherently implied in Liu et.al (2015) as innovative research design: the incorporation of foreign teacher analytical auto-ethnographic participant-observation praxis-based methodologies. Liu, et.al (2015) thus effectively applied and validated, for the first time in Chinese EFL educational research design, the somewhat controversial field of analytical auto-ethnography: apt, since underlying Poo (2021) was the rationale that “Innovative minds are shaped by education and life’s experiences (italics added)”. Lived experience. Given the domination of quantitative methodologies in Chinese EFL literature, this was a radical innovation.
Indeed, Liu, et.al (2015) posited as a research field the methodological implications of the auto-ethnographic mode of inquiry on educational design reforms in China: i.e. establishing foreign teacher participant-observation praxis as a new core “globalized” pedagogic best practice educational research design principle in China’s National EFL Curriculum Reform Agenda. Significantly, the Liu et.al (2015) methodological application of analytical auto-ethnographic inquiry into Chinese EFL pedagogic practice drew on Canagarajah (2012)'s specific conception of EFL as a “global profession” and similarly challenged the current modeling of Chinese EFL pedagogic practice on imitable native-speaker standardization. Canagarajah (2012) self-examined “the ways in which he negotiated the differing teaching practices and professional cultures of the periphery and the center in an effort to develop a strategic professional identity”. Following on from Caravaganah (2012) EFL pedagogic application in a specifically Chinese EFL context was Gao’s (2014) auto-ethnographic study of how language ideology affected educational design principles in Chinese EFL curricular reform, concluding that functional over reflective ideological concerns dominated Chinese EFL curriculum design (p. 553). In this, Gao summarizes three main affective points of auto-ethnography in EFL education, centered on personal narrative inquiry: “(1) Narrative inquiry makes researchers or teachers understand experience, (2) it helps researchers grasp information that is often neglected or unconsciously known even by themselves, and (3) it also assists researchers to perceive the experiential changes of people and events” (Gao, 2014, p. 555).
In initial response to the methodological research design gap in Chinese EFL tertiary education - and consequent internal MOE directive to address it as an immediate priority, including through the incorporation of qualitative research methodologies - Zhang et.al (2020) asserted that “arguably, one of the most pressing current tasks is to conduct in-depth investigations into Online education... and support students’ successful re-adaptation... after the epidemic”. Referencing again the paradigm shift in pedagogic practice first iterated in EFL in the Liu, et.al (2015) analytical auto-ethnographic study, this arguably epistemic re-contextualization of contemporary Covid-19 inspired BL content selection and course design consequently incorporating Content-Based Instruction [CBI] research in China on the basis of what Zhu & Liu [2020] termed “conceptual and philosophical re-thinking”. This “paradigm shift” discourse indeed had informed MOE research directives consequent to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s delivered speech before the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party on 18 October 2017, or Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, a detailed clarification and long term strategy for the realization of “the Chinese Dream”. With this, Liu, et.al’s (2015) stated “paradigm shift” now had in Zhu & Liu (2020) a specific epistemic correlation to the “rejuvenation” conceptual ethos underlying Xi Jinping’s vision of a “globalized” China and, in Poo (2021), a methodological goal for educational design research in EFL: to facilitate in corresponding CBI BL curriculum design the construct-valid paradigm shift “from didactic towards inspirational” pedagogic practices that would theoretically constitute a “globalized" Chinese EFL.
Interestingly enough, however, within auto-ethnographic research for educational design based pedagogic practice, the precedent exists in Duncan (2004) who sought to use auto-ethnography to improve her educational design practice:
"To answer my research question, How do I improve my practice of hypermedia design?, it became clear that what I needed to do was externalize my inner dialogue of decision to find and develop fully the central themes and outstanding questions that were emerging."
It was during the lockdown circumstances of China's zero-Covid policy, however, that I began to explore contemporary "design theory" in relation to IC course and curriculum design. However, as no Chinese EFL literature had to that date specifically examined a particular IC context, I sought to draw on the newly emerging greater ASEAN / Global South literature on “design thinking” and resultant curriculum design modeling of Crites and Rye (2020) and the earlier work of Barrot (2015) specific to “sociocognitive-transformative instructional materials design model(ing) for second language (L2) pedagogy in the Asia Pacific” as a base for Content-Based Instruction [CBI] modification in the Vygotskian context informing CBI research in Chinese EFL in Wang (2018), Fu (2019), Wang (2021), and Sun & Zhuang (2021). Indeed, I incorporated that into my online teaching during China's Ministry of Education [MOE] "emergency response" switch to online and blended learning during the zero-Covid period (as much as practical given my IT and language limitations - my Chinese ability is basic (regrettably). So too, following the end of the zero-Covid measures, I re-integrated it into my recently completed IC class, utilizing extracts from Being in Time.
Drawing on these sources, I designed a classroom mediated IC exam task (one of five) based on a socio-cultural examination of a Western social media genre - the YouTube mashup video: the form's signature montagist re-deployment of found footage to new music as a form of personalized cultural "ownership" having influenced my own conception and montagist construction of Being in Time). For this, I 1) showed the Alzheimer's Disease influenced John Lydon / PiL music video Hawaii (video 1 in blog 1) as an example of old found footage to new music (with text-based narration / lyrics), 2) showed the Chinese video on filial piety (video 5 in blog 2) as an example of a Chinese-oriented social media circulated video on the theme of ageing in relation to a traditional Chinese socio-cultural value, and 3) showed the "Filial Piety" extract from Being in Time as an example of a mashup video exploring ageing and similar values. The video assignment (as group work, to be accompanied by an exegesis and personal contributor statement), was then a Chinese mashup video exploring the importance of traditional filial piety in China's treatment of the aged suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Of the submitted videos, two in particular made me tearful: although all stand as innovative examples of a uniquely IC themed Chinese mashup video (especially so since the mashup is not as yet a common video practice outside of Douyin / TikTok). Permission and institutional clearance pending, I may post these in a later blog now that final grading is completed and the course finalized.
Although in the IC I did not give further examples of my own mashup work - exploring the role of cultural artifacting in identity construction - I will close this blog with a sample of such work, albeit one which is comparatively less overtly politicized: unlike my first experiment in such found footage montaging - as autoethnographic reflection - made during zero-Covid lockdown in 2020-1 and automatically age-restricted and thus audience limited on YouTube. In comparison to the age-restricted video, this is more of an auto-ethnographic music video homage, as it integrates footage I shot of Australia into found footage taken from several US movies - credited - to a personal favorite song and poem extract.