Abstract Summary
This paper analyses narratives told by Brazilian academics about their past and current language and literacy practices, in teaching, learning, administration, research. We show how increasing digitization and internationalization are reshaping literacy and language practices, along with explicit and tacit expectations about what it means to be an academic nowadays.
Abstract :
This paper draws on a research project entitled: The changing literacy and language landscapes of Brazilian universities: English in policy development and in practice. It offers insights into the way the internationalization and digitization agendas are enacted in practice. Two Brazilian universities were the sites of enquiry.
Two types of semi-structured interviews were undertaken for the project: interviews with policy makers and life-history interviews with individual academics (including techno-biographic questions). Both types of interviews are peppered with recollections of the past and with narratives about how technological changes - from mimeographs to digital resources such as the Internet or apps for mobile technology, such as WhatsApp – have shaped the literacy and language practices of individual scholars. Our project data includes narratives about teaching and learning, administration and research (including international research collaboration).
Drawing on Georgakopoulou’s (2006) and Baynham’s (2011) frameworks for ‘small story’ narrative analysis, our analysis of this type of data from the project reveals the advantages, pressures and expectations arising from the ongoing move towards increasingly digitized working practices in higher education. It also shows how, in Brazil, these practices are traversed by languages other than Portuguese, in the wake of internationalization policies. In conclusion, we highlight the ways in which this approach enables us to gain insights into the research participants’ own perspectives and values and their own accounts of their lived experience in contemporary academic workplaces, in particular national contexts and in particular kinds of universities.
Baynham, M.J. (2011) Stance, positioning, and alignment in narratives of professional practice, Language in Society, 40 (1), 63-74.
Georgakopoulou, A. (2006) Thinking big with small stories in narrative and identity analysis, Narrative Inquiry, 16 (1), 122-130.
