Consistent with recent calls to bridge the research–practice divide in second language acquisition, this article reports on the findings of a collaborative autoethnographic study that we, authors of this article, conducted as critical second language teacher educators. Conducting a series of constructive dialogues among ourselves for a semester, we focused on how our acts of reciprocal reflexivity were characterized by discussions and subsequent actions with our teacher partners located in different parts of the world and working in diverse contexts. Our data, which included reflective journal entries, phenomenological interviews, artefacts, and audio‐recorded group conversations, illustrate how we fostered constructive researcher–practitioner collaborations. These collaborations were mediated within and outside our classroom settings, as we sought to ultimately improve our own pedagogical practices. In contrast to working from an ivory tower and in keeping with our commitment to promoting equitable educational and research practices, our article also demonstrates and problematizes how we conducted our research in an ethical manner when designing, carrying out, and subsequently disseminating our findings to multiple audiences.
This collaborative autoethnographic essay centers on memory-work describing the ebbs and flows of boarding school policies’ effects on ethnic minorities in China and language policy decisions on multilingual citizens in Sri Lanka. The text is the product of the authors’ attunement to the role that confabulation plays in shaping collaborative autoethnographic research through the sharing and analysis of life-writing activities—for example, memoirs, journal entries, photographic narratives, and so on. Confabulation guided the authors through questions related to the meanings of self, other, and culture often taken for granted in (auto)ethnographic research. This is a topic expanded upon in the postface, where confabulation as the method, process, and outcome of research is discussed.
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