7.1 Introduction

Findings from the two inquiry cycles undertaken by the teacher partners in this research project were presented in Chaps. 5 and 6. Chap. 5 outlined the inquiries as documented through classroom observations, alongside the students’ reported intercultural learning gains. In Chap. 6, we focused on the teachers, and the reported challenges they encountered as they introduced an intercultural element into their language programmes, along with learning gains with regard to enhancing their students’ intercultural capability.

In this chapter, we trace the evolution of the collaborative inquiries at the core of the project. We present our own journeys as researchers working with teachers who were both participants and research partners and document the realities and complexities of the intersecting processes of collaboration and independent inquiry that we aimed to foster in the project from its inception. We draw on diverse data sources, including project documents, audio-recordings and transcriptions of meetings, email archives and notes on discussions involving different members of the group, as well as the data from our work with the teacher partners. In our analysis in this chapter, we draw in particular on the literature and conceptualisations of collaborative action research (e.g., Burns, 1999, 2019), communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and practitioner inquiry (Baumfield et al., 2012), to make sense of our journey.

Specifically, we document several “critical incidents” (Brandenburg, 2008; Tripp, 2012) that we identified as we reflected back on the project. Some of the incidents we describe may appear as normal occurrences in meetings, discussions or reflections, yet we identify them as critical in terms of how we saw their significance for the development of the project (Tripp, 2012) and for our own journey as researchers and teacher educators. Our purpose is to illuminate and interrogate the processes and enabling conditions of our collaboration and its outcomes, with a view to moving from the events themselves (the “what” and the “how”) to understanding what these events meant for the project overall. In so doing, we contribute to a broader understanding of the complexities involved in the development of intercultural capabilities through the learning of an additional language (L2).

7.2 Contextual Background

As researchers, practitioners and teacher educators working in different capacities in diverse institutions, but with a common interest in teaching and learning languages, we were acutely aware of the challenges of the Learning Languages area of the New Zealand Curriculum or NZC (Ministry of Education, 2007). Our own previous research had identified the difficulties teachers of languages experience in the intermediate school sector as they develop their L2 programmes and aim to address NZC expectations (Biebricher, 2015; Howard, 2012; Scott, 2014; Tolosa et al., 2015). We wanted to gain a better understanding of the reasons behind the distance between what the NZC expects and what happens in classrooms. Specifically, we identified the cultural knowledge strand of Learning Languages as a particularly weak component of L2 programmes, despite rhetoric around the importance of helping learners to develop intercultural capability (see Chap. 3). A key dimension of the project from our perspective, as both researchers and teacher educators, was therefore to better understand the complexities of implementing the intercultural dimension in L2 programmes in primary/intermediate schools in New Zealand, with a view to enhancing language education both in and beyond our immediate context.

As we planned the project, we, as a team of five researchers, established a strong community of practice, with agreed shared goals and clarity in the functioning of the group. As we advanced the design of the project, the group grew to include the five teacher partners. The resulting group developed over time into a “collaborative inquiry” partnership (Burns, 1999, 2019; Butler & Schnellert, 2012; Scarino, 2014), with distinct roles and tasks (see Chap. 4). Specifically, the type of collaborative inquiry represented in our project involved “collaboration between researchers based in universities, undertaking funded projects and working with groups of teachers located in different schools” (Burns, 2005, p. 65), in order to investigate an issue of shared interest. Such collaborations aim to address the widely documented divide between theory and practice (Ball, 2000; Loughran, 2002; Zeichner, 1994).

Inviting teachers to become research partners signals a commitment to value their knowledge, experience and expertise; conversely, the teachers acknowledge the input from the researchers. The relationship develops reciprocally in that the researchers gain direct access to the experiences of teachers at the classroom level, while the teachers are supported in developing theoretical understandings of their practices or of curricular innovations. Working within a community of inquiry creates conditions for teachers to access rich resources and to engage in developing practice and learning as the researchers support and scaffold their engagement in the inquiry (Butler & Schnellert, 2012). Although the positioning of those involved in the researcher–teacher relationship may be different, they find a shared commitment to understanding the issue at hand. As suggested by Bevins and Price (2014), collaboration between academics and teachers can have the greatest impact when the purpose is clear and the members engage in processes of reflection and continuous dialogue.

As with all action research, the process of inquiry in the collaboration involves the systematic collection of evidence and the engagement in problem-defining, action-oriented, reflective and iterative cycles of inquiry with a shared goal (Timperley, 2011). Framed as such, the inquiry has the potential to “impact not only teachers’ learning but also their practice in classrooms” (Butler et al., 2015, p. 2), thus offering an alternative to top-down dissemination and implementation of curricular innovations. However, a risk here is that the teachers do not retain full ownership over the inquiry since the issue to be investigated was first and foremost the researchers’ agenda. To mitigate this possible threat, teachers engage in inquiry in their classrooms, while the researchers frame and relate these inquiries to the experience of others and to research literature and policy documents through a wider investigation, which would then inform the development and focus of a subsequent cycle of classroom inquiries. The ideal is that these inquiries become “virtuous cycles” (Wall & Hall, 2016) through which teachers develop a culture of reflection and research in their classrooms through their experience in the collaborative inquiry.

Furthermore, inquiries are opportunities “set up for teachers and researchers to construct knowledge collectively over time” (Burns, 2009, p. 294), although often with different aims. Whereas the researchers may engage in collaborative inquiry with the aim of solving a problem or introducing an innovation, the focus for teachers may be to “understand rather than change” their practices (Allwright & Hanks, 2009, p. 172). By integrating teaching, learning and research, the participants in the collaborative inquiry “construct pedagogical knowledge through dialectic interaction and critical exchange” (Burns, 2009, p. 294). Collaborative inquiry is thus regarded as an effective method both to support reflective practice and to generate valuable insights into practice. Our project was framed in the above light.

7.3 Beginning the Journey

A pilot project in 2015 had gathered initial evidence about how the intercultural dimension was being dealt with in schools (see Howard et al., 2015). The main project as reported in this book built on the pilot and took place in 2016 and 2017 (see Chap. 4).

Our decision to initiate a project where researchers and teachers would co-construct inquiry cycles positioned the teachers as co-researchers, thereby valuing their knowledge of practice and acknowledging their contributions to knowledge creation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We wanted to ensure that all members felt they would benefit from participation in the project and that they could contribute equally to it as part of a democratic process of gaining and sharing knowledge and developing practices (Burns, 2015). We encouraged the teachers to exercise agency and autonomy as they undertook their own inquiries while also actively engaging with the wider investigation proposed by the researchers. Acting as knowledge brokers (McLaughlin et al., 2004), we scaffolded the teacher partners’ development of their understanding of the intercultural dimension in L2 teaching, as well as of the inquiry process itself. As researchers, we thus developed roles common in these kinds of collaboration (McNiff, 2016): at times we were consultants who contributed research skills and theoretical knowledge; at other times we were facilitators who supported the teachers’ inquiries; and sometimes we were critical friends.

7.4 Phase I

In a first step in working with the teachers, and before we had brought the teachers together as a group, individual researchers worked with individual teachers to establish rapport and develop the relationship of the pairs (Phase I). This initial step was crucial to the beginning of the project. As we noted in Chap. 4, when we first conceptualised the project, we approached schools where our institutions already had established relationships, and, in some cases we approached teachers we already knew through previous professional contact. However, a professional inevitability of the intermediate school sector is that teachers move to new positions. Once we started the project, we were working in schools we knew, but sometimes the teacher partners were new to the schools and new to us. Thus, Christine began working with a teacher whom she knew well and with whom she had an established relationship. By contrast, Martin, Constanza and Jocelyn were working with teachers they did not know.

We visited the teachers in their schools and collected baseline data about the school, the position of L2 teaching in the school, and the teachers’ backgrounds, including their knowledge and understanding of language teaching pedagogies. As part of these data, we specifically asked the teachers about their knowledge of the ten Ellis principles (Ellis, 2005) and the six Newton et al. principles (Newton et al., 2010). We also observed at least two lessons and talked with each teacher about their teaching of languages. Besides the initial data collection, this first encounter also aimed to establish a shared purpose and initiate the development of mutual understanding and collegiality, all considered key components of collaborative efforts (Loughran, 2010). In those initial conversations, teachers expressed their commitment to the overall project and recognised the importance of establishing common goals. An important finding of the baseline data was the teachers’ lack of knowledge of the Newton et al. principles and the concept of intercultural capability.

7.5 Phase II

The first full research team hui (meeting) with the teachers took place over two days in July 2016 and initiated Phase II of the project. We wanted to provide the teachers with a sense of the support available to them, ranging from “structural support” (Timperley, 2011) that allowed them to be released from their teaching to attend the hui, to support with understanding any new concepts through explanations that built on their experiences and prior knowledge (González et al., 2016). We anchored the start of the two days on the NZC itself, beginning with the development of key competencies (see Chap. 3) that we knew would provide common ground across teachers and schools. We also prepared short presentations on the theoretical aspects of the project, using the six Newton et al. (2010) principles, and including presentations by two researchers on the findings from their recent investigations into the implementation of the principles in New Zealand classrooms (Kennedy, 2016; Ramírez, 2018). Our aim was to provide a robust base for the teachers to understand the Newton et al. principles and to gain insights from others who had used these principles to interpret their own understandings of what they observed in classrooms.

We tried to provide a balance between the intellectual and procedural tools that we anticipated the teachers would need for the project, and thus build teachers’ capacity to undertake research, and also eliciting from them what would be feasible for them given the realities of their work and their contexts. At the same time, we wanted to ensure that the aims we had set for the overall project were of mutual interest to all participants, albeit allowing room for individual inquiries. We therefore encouraged the teachers to narrow their focus on two of the Newton et al. (2010) principles, with particular guidance to consider Principles 3 and 4 (see Chaps. 5 and 6)—encouraging and developing an exploratory and reflective approach to culture, as well as fostering explicit comparisons and connections between languages and cultures. This balance between teacher autonomy to select the principles to focus on based on their contexts and teaching plan, and the researchers’ nudging towards Principles 3 and 4, is illustrated in a comment made by Kelly at the start of the second day of the hui when we had asked the teachers to share how their thinking about the project had developed overnight and how they would describe what they were being asked to do:

You mean, the idea of it [the project]? Picking a goal that will show good student outcomes and will really benefit them and their learning with regards to learning culture. Using these principles, particularly 3 and 4 which are quite important … What you guys said about your data and Juliet’s [Kennedy - one of the guest researchers] study as well … show that these two, in particular, needed attention. Collecting results from … examples and data from students and myself, reflections and stuff like that … putting it together in some kind of a portfolio way to communicate what I’ve found.

Another illustration of the way the researchers supported ownership by the teachers was by reviewing and discussing the teaching as inquiry model commonly used in New Zealand schools (see Chap. 4) which the teachers would use to develop their situated inquiries. We wanted the teachers to see that although we acknowledged that we might have greater understanding of theoretical aspects, they already had the skills to develop their own inquiries, and they had intimate knowledge of their contexts. We were thus building a sense of mutuality which does not require all members of the team to be equally skilled in all areas of the project (Bevins & Price, 2014). Furthermore, we wanted the teachers to gain confidence in articulating their knowledge of practice and translating their contextual understandings to the whole group, what Passman (2002) called going public.

With regard to the choice of an inquiry model, we were mindful that “practice shifts are most likely to occur when teachers engage in practice-level inquiry, because it is at this level that teachers draw on resources and tools to define goals for students, strategically direct activity, monitor outcomes and make shifts accordingly” (Butler & Schnellert, 2012, p. 1208). Through the inquiries, we wanted the teachers to become “agentive actors and investigators within their own social contexts” (Burns, 2019, p. 166). All the teachers confirmed their familiarity with the teaching as inquiry model. Kathryn described it like this:

We do a lot. There is a lot of teachers’ reflection on our practice and a lot of ‘what do I need to do?’ which also needs ‘how do I do that?’ And so, we’re very used to going out and find what we need and bringing in resources and how those are to be applied as well… [so I see a] very strong connection [with the proposed inquiries].

We were pleased that the teachers demonstrated enthusiasm to embark on the project. We closed the two-day hui by summing up our roles as researchers and motivating the teachers to start their individual inquiries—“maybe [we] challenged your thinking in the right ways and taking you to new directions, but this is what it’s all about. It’s about inquiring about something new and to see where it goes.”

7.5.1 Critical Friend Conversations

As teachers embarked on their first inquiry cycle, they were supported closely by the researcher-partners who kept in regular email communication, visited the schools to observe lessons and held debriefing meetings with each teacher following a semi-structured interview format. These encounters were important in supporting the teachers’ inquiries. We framed these debriefing meetings as “critical friend” conversations (Costa & Kallick, 1993) where the researchers’ role was to support the teachers in framing and reframing their practices by moving from the concrete of their teaching and practices to the abstract (Loughran, 2010) of the Newton et al. (2010) principles, and vice versa. These conversations became catalysts for the teachers’ reflections, helping them to move beyond the individual’s thoughts and feelings and into the realm of research-informed practice.

The critical friend conversations developed differently for each researcher–teacher partnership. Since Martin, as Principal Investigator, was collating all the data from transcripts of our conversations for the milestone reports required by the project funder, he had a sense of these differences, as he pointed out in an email to the researcher team around halfway through the first inquiry cycle:

… several of us are working hard in the reflections to scaffold people into next steps—thanks for doing that! People may find it useful to listen, as an example, to the post-lesson reflections that Christine undertook with Kelly. Christine usefully probed Kelly to think further about how she could exploit some pretty key intercultural incidents, guiding her to think about how she could get the students to reflect on what they thought and how they felt.

In the transcript of Christine’s debriefing with Kelly, they are discussing the topic of family that Kelly had selected for her beginner Mandarin class. Kelly had decided to include a discussion on the one-child policy in China, recognising that the mainly Pasifika students in her class would often come from larger families. The following excerpt from the debriefing illustrates the probing done by Christine as Kelly’s critical friend:

Christine::

You mentioned a lot of them [in China] grew up without siblings and I think that can be explored a little bit more: ‘What would that feel like? What wouldn’t you have?’ And in comparison, ‘what do you have here?’ But also ‘what are the challenges?’ like, ‘how many siblings in comparison?’ I think you wanted to look at the values and the beliefs underneath. So possibly a little bit into that, if you looked at ‘what does that feel like?’

Kelly::

I didn’t actually think of getting into that like that, but that is actually a really good idea, because if I do want to go on [to] the values. I think in my mind I keep focusing on the comparing and contrasting [Principle 4], you know what I mean. It’s hard to try and think of all of them [the Newton et al. principles].

Christine::

And one way can be to focus on this and go more in depth, and you would still compare and contrast. I think you would take it to a more emotional level or to think about ‘what are the consequences of this?’ Because otherwise it’s on a factual level.

The ideal was that all of us would assume the probing and critical role that Christine was establishing with Kelly. However, since the circumstances of each partnership were different, occasionally the processes of developing a relationship, building trust and conceptualising the project had, comparatively, been somewhat more rushed and piecemeal. This meant that we felt that some of the teachers were operating with less conviction about the goals of the project and were engaging less critically. For some of us, this meant that we had to tread carefully and exercise professional courage (Alexander, 2010) to balance keeping the project moving forward with tactfully encouraging the teachers to engage more deeply, since their control of their own inquiries was crucial for the goals set for the project. We were, overall, encouraged to see that all the teachers did seem to be actively engaged with the project.

7.5.2 Promoting Reflective Practices

In order to support the teachers’ reflective processes throughout the first inquiry cycle, we agreed to set up shared folders for each teacher in Google Drive so that they could archive documents relevant to the project alongside their reflections. For example, Kathryn included a file with a presentation she had given to her school’s staff on her own involvement. She reported on her written reflection that she had told her colleagues, “the biggest takeaway for me so far is that it is just as important to be raising students’ cultural awareness as it is to be teaching the language itself.”

To further support teachers’ reflections, Adèle, who was not working directly with any of the teachers in their school, offered to have critical friend reflective (written) conversations with each of the teachers. The teachers were encouraged to reflect at two levels as described by Farrell (2012) and to place these reflections in the folder. We first encouraged reflection at a descriptive level where teachers could regularly pause to consider and evaluate their actions. They were to follow that with a more focused reflection where they were to draw on the Newton et al. (2010) principles to evaluate their practices and search for evidence on the outcomes of their reflections. Accordingly, we suggested:

  • jot down your reflections regularly in an ongoing reflections document if possible—even a couple of sentences a week.

  • when you do get to reflect in a bit more depth, do have Newton et al.’s principles in mind—which ones come to the fore at this point? How can I enhance understandings? What questions should I ask next (of myself? My plan? The learners?).

Through these reflective exercises, we aimed to support the teachers in developing the ability to distance themselves from their practices in order to look into them with different eyes (Brookfield, 1995). These framings and reframings were not about justifying particular actions or decisions, but about seeing alternatives, because taking alternative perspectives offers insights into how and why a situation might be perceived in a particular way (Loughran, 2002).

The following thread illustrates how Adèle supported Kelly’s reflection through praising progress and decisions made, posing questions about the planned inquiry, offering suggestions on how to collect evidence of students’ intercultural learning, and encouraging deeper reflection:

9th August

Looks like you’re making great progress with the planning for your inquiry. I have a small question for you. Do you have a particular format (table/diagram/questions) that will frame (1) your own reflections? (2) the records of prior knowledge that the children will complete?

Kelly responded by apologising for a late reply and explaining that her plan was to ask each student to complete a Venn diagram on “family” in New Zealand and China to determine their prior knowledge of intersections and difference. Adèle’s promptings continued as follows:

26th August

Don’t worry about when you come in here to “reply” to me—I’ll be in and out every couple of weeks to keep the conversation going and will catch up on any responses at those times. The Venn diagram idea sounds like a good one.

When you talk to the students, it would be good to recall the questions you use, the prompts etc. to elicit their ideas and thinking. Some you will have thought ahead about, others might come on the spur of the moment … if you can remember, do keep a record of these for your notes. Helps to document your thinking and the process you went through … make sense? Have fun!

21st September

Hi again! Great to see your regular reflections and some data—I’m just about to listen to the audio file.

7th October

From your reflections and the audio snippet I can see that you are definitely focusing on the 4th principle in particular—you use explicit questioning …

One observation (not a criticism) from listening to the audio—towards the end you ask them to think of some adjectives or phrases to describe their families—some of the time you probe for further explanation—but I notice you only do that for the “negative” comments/phrases—these seem to dominate their responses, which I guess is why you later make a comment in your own notes about “unsettling descriptions of families.”

Some extra ideas could have also come out if you probe the positive comments for more also—e.g., “what do you mean by caring?”

Despite the potential for feedback and direction available through the Google Drive initiative, and different attempts to motivate the teachers to write down and share their reflections with the research team, this channel for guiding reflections did not gain traction, and we decided to stop bringing this avenue for feedback to teachers’ attention. Rather, we preferred to have the teachers invested in their own inquiries, since these were central to the work. Also, the debriefing interviews after observations still provided crucial opportunities for reflection.

As the inquiries progressed, evidence was emerging that teachers were able to facilitate a level of noticing of intercultural comparisons and contrasts with their students. However, it also became evident that “it is proving challenging to encourage teachers to take the next (harder) step of encouraging their students to reflect on how they think and feel about the comparisons and contrasts and, therefore, what the contrasts in particular mean for them as learners and developing ‘intercultural interlocutors’” (Milestone Report, September 2016, our emphases). This was further confirmed in our summative interviews with the teachers and focus group interviews with the students at the end of Phase II. As there was a natural break at the end of the year, we decided to reflect on the issue ourselves and take appropriate actions as we prepared for Phase III of the project.

7.6 Phase III

In Phase III, the teachers were to embark on their second inquiry cycle, and with a new group of students, from the start of the new school year in 2017. The exception to this arrangement was Lillian who continued with the same group of students in the following school year. In the transition from one school year to the next, two teachers changed schools. This resulted in Tamara not being able to continue with the project and Kelly remaining in the project, but with a new school community. We carefully planned the second two-day hui where all researchers and teachers would come together so that we could provide spaces to deepen the teachers’ reflection and learning.

From our analysis of data emerging from Phase II, we had identified several limitations in the inquiries regarding the collection of evidence of developing intercultural capability among learners. We saw this second hui as pivotal in our next steps with the teachers as co-researchers, and as a means both to value their own knowledge of practice and to recognise their contributions to the creation of knowledge (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We were mindful that our presentations of relevant concepts to the teachers had to be made “in ways to bring these concepts to bear on concrete practical activity, connecting them to their everyday knowledge and the goal-directed activities of teaching” (Johnson & Golombek, 2011, p. 2). After up to a year in the project, we wanted to give the teachers the opportunity to engage more actively as researchers, ensuring that they felt they would benefit from participation in the project and that they could contribute equally to it (Burns, 2015). Consequently, we started the meeting with the teachers sharing their insights from the Phase II inquiries and relating those to the analysis we had carried out. These were valuable opportunities for the teacher partners to hear from each other how their inquiries had gone. We also included a session that aimed to provide the teachers with first-hand experience of data analysis by getting them to examine a sample of the student data, and thereby gain some insight into the students’ journeys to that point.

On the second day of the hui, each teacher was invited to describe their plans for the Phase III inquiries. We had suggested the following key questions as a guide to the teachers’ planning and presentation:

  • What will the second teaching as inquiry sequence look like in my school context?

  • How might I evaluate my students’ intercultural learning outcomes?

  • How might my students record/document their intercultural reflections?

  • How will you ensure that language and culture are inter-related?

It was at this juncture that a significant critical incident occurred. Our aim was to facilitate group discussion and input, aimed at clarifying aspects of proposed inquiry cycles as we supported the teachers in their planning. Lillian began to talk of a plan to help her students to understand how some practices can be seen differently by different cultures, thus helping to avoid stereotyping. As the group began probing into different aspects of her planning, it became evident that there was a disconnect between the focus and aims established for the project and Lillian’s understanding of them. A long discussion (about an hour) ensued, where the group of researchers tried to address several mismatches that Lillian articulated with regard to the purpose of the project, the goals of language learning and the research process.

A number of issues emerged. It seemed at this point that Lillian perceived that we, as researchers:

  • were trying to impose an agenda on the teachers;

  • were going to formally assess student intercultural outcomes;

  • had a narrow focus on intercultural gains (compare, contrast and reflect) and not on linguistic gains (despite our advocacy for an interface).

In response to the concern that we seemed to keep on pushing an agenda for a language–culture interface, Martin explained that our goal was “teasing out that language–culture relationship …” Before Martin could continue, Lillian asked for clarification to the teachers’ group regarding what we expected to see in the students—enhanced intercultural capability or (by apparent contrast) knowledge of the language. It seemed Lillian perceived that we were only interested in the former and that we would assess that in a formal way. This time, Christine responded, “we are not assessing. I don’t see myself assessing any of your students. I see myself as wanting to find out, but not assessing as in judging … I’m trying to find out what happens in a particular process.” Jocelyn added, “it’s an exploration that you are all going to do quite differently. From this perspective, the issues become, how is it working? And how you might decide to change it. There’s no right and wrong.”

Despite what we regarded as appropriate reassurances, Lillian questioned why it was important to get the students to the point of appreciating otherness. Jocelyn attempted an explanation: the purpose was “to work out how within a language programme we can be developing … beyond ‘the cultural aspects’ [signalling the practice of isolating cultural facts] to that sense of comfort in meeting with people from other different cultures and languages.” Martin provided a more detailed description of how the project had arisen from the mismatch between what the NZC expected (i.e., the inclusion of an intercultural dimension) and what we knew was happening in practice (i.e., a focus on language to the [partial or total] exclusion of culture). He elaborated on the aims of the project and how we were working with the teachers to find out if there were workable ways to address the mismatch. He added a clarification of our intention as researchers—“as a researcher, I want to see what’s the evidence that I have from your inquiries [as] to what works and what doesn’t work and therefore how to inform the curriculum.” Lillian acknowledged, albeit with apparent reticence, that an intercultural goal could potentially be achieved in the inquiry being planned, but argued that there could be no guarantee that this would actually help learners to be better communicators, apparently because the project was not interested in communication.

We encouraged Lillian to articulate her understanding of what we intended. It seemed that, from her perspective, the goal was to see whether culture could be integrated with language and whether that integration enhanced students’ ability to communicate with TL speakers. Lillian thus wished to establish whether learners had increased in vocabulary knowledge of the target concept as well as whether or not there had been a shift away from stereotypical thinking. These conclusions gelled, to a large extent, with the direction of the project. Nonetheless, Lillian interpreted this stance as meaning that students would not be focusing on communication. She seemed adamant that what the teachers were looking for as outcomes were different from what the researchers were looking for, despite Christine’s reassurance that “I don’t think it’s that different, honestly.”

To draw the session to a close, Adèle added some important clarifications:

We are not looking to prove anything. It’s different ways to look at knowledge. We are not trying to prove that A equals B; or that if A happens, then B happens, and how to measure that. We are not looking to say what should be done for each of your inquiries. We are looking to see what is happening, how [it] is happening, how you are interpreting it … there is no right or wrong ... And I know you want us to say ‘this is exactly what we want from you or your students’. This is not that kind of study. We are not trying to find particular little things in a box. That’s why it can be a little bit frustrating.

Adèle concluded by clarifying that the design of the research project was not confirmatory but, rather, exploratory, and that our position as researchers was to support the teachers’ inquiries and decision-making.

This major critical incident was unexpected and disconcerting for us as researchers. Up to that point, we had thought that the teachers were clear about the aims of the project. After all, they had already been working with their research partner for almost a year and had already completed one interculturally focused inquiry cycle. That first year of the project had been designed to develop the community of inquiry and scaffold the teachers’ engagement in the inquiry (Butler & Schnellert, 2012). We thought that we had established a reciprocal relationship where the research team was following the experiences of the teachers in their classrooms, while supporting them in developing theoretical understandings of their practices and the Newton et al. (2010) principles as a curricular innovation. As mentioned before, when we planned the second two-day hui (which took place at the beginning of Phase III), we knew that there were aspects of the project where we felt the teachers needed further scaffolding. We had anticipated that the teachers would need support in identifying means to evaluate their students’ development of intercultural capability. However, we did not anticipate misunderstandings at the level of the goals of the project or uncertainties about the need to include an intercultural dimension in L2 teaching.

We concluded that the discussion that had taken place had probably made the teachers feel vulnerable and challenged when describing their practices. As Manfra (2019) asserted, “[a]ction research is predicated on changing practice through experience. This experience leads to disequilibrium, requiring teachers to question and affirm their professional knowledge” (p. 184). What we experienced as we were trying to co-construct knowledge with the teachers is described by Wall and Hall (2017) as the interaction of two principles: the principle of disturbance and the principle of dialogue. Our session based on critical dialogue had clearly created a disturbance in the teachers’ views of their practices, leading one of the group to question the researchers and query some fundamentals of the project, in a sense asserting their own professional knowledge in light of disturbance to the equilibrium. In turn, as researchers, we learned that the dialogue that emerged was “more nuanced than simply talk” (Wall & Hall, 2017, p. 48), that is, despite our best efforts there were likely underlying tensions as the teachers might have perceived us as the “experts” in the context. Furthermore, we recognised that different teacher members of the collaborative inquiry were engaging differently in the inquiry processes. As Johnson and Golombek (2011) put it, “critical to the uneven and rather idiosyncratic nature of their [the teachers’] conceptual development was their own learning and teaching histories, the institutional and cultural contexts in which they were situated” (p. 5). We trusted, however, that, overall, the teacher partners felt supported through our interactions. Furthermore, a careful review of other interactions and debriefings with Lillian seemed to indicate that she did have more clarity about the project than this critical incident would indicate, and certainly the incident was not mentioned again as she embarked (positively) on the second inquiry cycle.

We decided to balance the hesitations and push-back of one teacher with the situation for the other three Phase III teachers. We also decided to guide the Phase III debriefing reflections with a revised set of questions that specifically addressed some of the issues that had arisen in the hui, and provided clear ownership by the teachers:

  • If we compare this inquiry with last year’s, what would you say are the changes you’ve made to planning the inquiry? What has caused those changes?

  • Have you taken into account the inquiry cycle in your planning? [Use the inquiry cycle diagram—Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 35].

  • Can you walk me through your planning to get to this lesson, or show me your planning?

  • We discussed in the hui possible ways to evaluate students’ language learning outcomes including intercultural outcomes. How do you plan to go about that? [reminder: pre- and post-Venn diagrams, or KWL tables—what we already know; what we wonder; what we have learned].

  • What evidence will you collect from the students for this inquiry? [prompt: ways of documenting students’ intercultural reflections].

We also made efforts to mitigate any sense of threat the teachers might be feeling as a consequence of a perceived power differential (Wang & Zhang, 2014) and brought it up with the group of teachers to convey how much we valued their own inquiries. To this end, a post-hui email to participants was sent by Martin:

We wanted to re-iterate something that is very important for us in this project: the work you do with your own students should be work that you CHOOSE to do in the context of your own school. We are encouraging you to consider how language and culture fit together, and how, in the context of language learning, your students’ intercultural skills may be developed. Within that overarching goal, we don’t want to impose on you what you should do; rather, we want to encourage you to explore what is comfortable to you in light of your knowledge of your own students, using the NZC ‘teaching as inquiry’ cycle.

Towards the end of the semester, the milestone report of June 2017 recognised advances in the teachers’ understandings of the Newton et al. (2010) principles and their own learning processes:

The evidence available suggests that teachers have grown considerably by virtue of participation in the project. Observations of Lillian, for example, revealed a deeper understanding of the six Newton et al. (2010) principles, clearer appreciation of how to facilitate students’ reflection on cultural similarities and differences, and greater awareness of the possibilities and challenges of including intercultural reflection into language learning (in particular, how to integrate language and culture—Newton et al.’s Principle 1).

It was also very pleasing to see Kathryn make a presentation to her peers at a recent New Zealand Association of Language Teachers language seminar.Footnote 1 Her presentation revealed evidence of Kathryn’s own professional learning and development by virtue of her participation in the project, but also of her students’ learning. Kathryn spoke of her students’ greater comfortableness not only with exploring cultural similarities and differences, but also with their own culture, and what they themselves brought to class. This, in our view (and hers), indicates a significant learning outcome on the part of her students.

We were pleased to see that, despite some uncertainties that had surfaced in the initial hui, the teachers were demonstrating in practice that their inquiries were having an impact on their learning, their students’ learning and their classroom practices. As they conducted their new inquiries, we expected the teachers to become more conscious of how they were integrating the Newton et al. (2010) principles into their language teaching practices. By giving them control over the focus of their inquiries, we were “demonstrating a trust in their knowledge of their students’ needs and the best way for them to be addressed” (Wall & Hall, 2017, p. 56).

As the Phase III inquiries began to draw to a close, the researchers and teacher partners realised that more time was needed to fully exploit the inquiry cycles. Therefore, a decision was made to extend the inquiry to the following school term (July to September), thus extending the original plan for Phase III. The end of that semester (early July) provided the space for the researchers to look back at the data collected so far in the second inquiry. We had the opportunity to meet as a research team at an international conference in Australia where we scheduled a full morning meeting. Central to the meeting were progress reports from each researcher on their work with the teacher partners, and key matters arising from Phase III of the project, as well as a discussion on Phase IV.

7.6.1 Challenges Emerging from the Inquiry Cycles

We were pleased with the developing evidence of comparison, contrast and reflection across cultures that appeared to be occurring. However, one core issue was emerging from our analysis of the teachers’ inquiries: a separation that we all noticed between linguistic aspects and cultural aspects. That is, despite our attempts to encourage the integration of language and culture, it seemed that, in their planning and delivery of lessons, the teachers—to varying degrees—separated the activities and discussions about cultural aspects from the teaching of the TL (see Chap. 6).

A crucial catalyst for our discussion on the language–culture divide was a keynote at the conference we were attending (Spada, 2018). With regard to the teaching of language, Spada revisited a question that had been at the forefront of her thinking for many years—whether attention to grammar should be integrated into, or isolated from, communicative activity and communicative language use. As we related what Spada was saying to New Zealand’s three-strand model for Learning Languages, there were clear implications for the language knowledge strand: fully interwoven into the communication strand, standing as a separate component, or both. We started to contemplate whether that same analogy (integrated or isolated) could be applied to the cultural knowledge strand, and therefore to the data emerging from our project.

In particular, our analysis indicated that the students’ intercultural reflections were carried out in English (the L1 of the majority of the students) as these seemed to be impossible in the TL for the beginner language learners. Of greater concern was that the teachers seemed to be conceptualising intercultural work as being achievable only by using English. We wondered whether we had inadvertently put teachers on a track where they had separated the language from the culture. We questioned our roles in the teachers’ inquiries: had we failed as facilitators and knowledge brokers? Should we have directed the teachers differently? Despite the critical incident where one teacher had resisted a perceived attempt by us to impose a particular (separationist) agenda, we had decided to take a “non-interventionist” approach to our work with the teachers, refraining from judgement, for example, when we observed a language lesson that we perceived could have been improved. We had also decided to trust the teachers with their choices, since they knew their students and the possibilities of the project in their classrooms. However, in this critical incident, we wondered if that decision had been the wisest. Should the co-construction have been more directed? Furthermore, and again in light of one teacher’s expressed reticence, we considered whether the teachers “misunderstood what was expected of them … interpreted things differently” (notes from July 2017 meeting).

Alternatively, were the teachers actually revealing in their emerging practices an important practical reality with regard to meaningful intercultural reflection of which we needed to take note? For example, compared to the first inquiry, Mike was using French less extensively in his teaching. Kathryn had almost abandoned any attention to linguistic aspects in her teaching and had, according to Constanza’s observation notes, “moved 180 degrees to (inter)cultural teaching.” Her planning had now focused exclusively on her students’ group inquiries into Japanese food. Lillian had decided to teach Chinese language and culture in separate lessons. Mindful of a risk, Mike had already pointed out for himself, our meeting notes pointed to “the danger of this becoming a social sciences class.” We acknowledged that, in the first two-day hui with the teachers (Phase II), we had foreshadowed (and aimed to guide the teachers away from) the possibility of the language–culture separation. We were disappointed at the emerging evidence that, despite our efforts to avoid this separation, a deeper separation of these two aspects was emerging in the teachers’ classrooms. We were also puzzled about how to deal with this reality in what was left of the project and implications from the conclusions we would ultimately draw. As we noted in Chap. 6, the teachers expressed a concern that focusing on the intercultural appeared to detract from learning the language. In spite of several genuine efforts to embed the culture within the language (e.g., by facilitating intercultural exploration in clear alignment with a specific language focus), teachers struggled with a perceived incompatibility between L2 learning and intercultural reflection.

This critical incident and its resulting reflections on the classroom realities we were observing and their implications found expression in East et al. (2017), anticipated as a parallel publication to Spada (2018), where we speculated:

Is intercultural understandingFootnote 2 better developed in an “integrated” model whereby intercultural noticing is interwoven with language in actual use? Or is it better developed in an “isolated” model whereby intercultural incidents are examined and reflected on outside of, or as an adjunct to, language in use? (p. 25)

As a result of our reflections, we drew several important conclusions which we take up in some detail in Chap. 8. At this juncture, it is important to note that our experiences and reflections were crucial as we embarked on the final stage of the project (Phase IV), where the focus would be on synthesising and publishing what had emerged from the teachers’ journeys.

7.7 Phase IV

An important goal for Phase IV of the project was to capture each teacher’s story through their eyes and their voice and complement the stories with alignment to the Newton et al. (2010) principles. We were hoping that these final reflective moments of looking back at the two years and the individual inquiries would provide further insights for all involved, including valuable insights into practice. We framed the stories as Engaging Examples of Practice, envisioned as short, teacher-friendly vignettes, to be made widely and freely available, so that other teachers of languages could read about the journeys of fellow teachers inquiring into the development of intercultural capability. As teacher educators, we knew that other L2 teachers would benefit from such a resource.

Thanks to additional funding, we were able to print a short-run of the stories in booklet form (East et al., 2018). The final publication integrated teaching, learning and research in ways that demonstrated how, through the project, we had co-constructed “pedagogical knowledge through dialectic interaction and critical exchange” (Burns, 2009, p. 294). The booklets were launched and distributed at the biennial international conference of the New Zealand Association of Language Teachers, held in Auckland in July 2018. We invited the teachers to participate in the launch as a way of giving closure to the project. After all, the booklet represented their journeys and their stories. Furthermore, the stories continue to be made available online as a key resource for L2 teachers in New Zealand (Ministry of Education, 2019).

7.8 Conclusion

The focus of this chapter has been on presenting our journey as researchers as we worked with the teacher partners who undertook two inquiry cycles in their schools, following the journey chronologically through each of the four phases of the project.

In all we did, we tried to balance the competing demands of the goals and expectations of a research project with respecting the rhythms and realities of each teacher’s work. Similarly to the different paths the teachers took regarding their inquiries (as seen in Chaps. 5 and 6), their engagement with the larger inquiry was also diverse, no doubt reflecting their own prior knowledge, school context and experiences with L2 learning and teaching.

We were also mindful that, contrary to ideals of action research, the project had been developed by the research team and we ran the risk that teachers’ ownership and agency could have been limited. In setting up different formats of meetings and opportunities to discuss issues, we aimed to open spaces for the teachers to contribute their ideas to the development of the project. We wanted them to be part of the process of inquiring into and reflecting on the inclusion of interculturality in their L2 programmes, and, through that, contributing to our understanding of bridging the distance between theory, curriculum and practice.

Throughout the project, the teachers were given opportunities to engage in productive and sustained reflection on different aspects of the project. We strongly believe that the inquiry process supported the teachers’ developing understandings of their practices, in this case exploring the development of intercultural capability in their students. We found value in giving the teachers opportunities to understand the situated nature of learning and the relationship between practical and theoretical knowledge (Shulman, 1986). Through their inquiries, these teachers explored alternative solutions to pedagogical problems (Timperley et al., 2014).

When we conceived the collaboration, we were fully aware of the support that teachers require to embark on a project like ours. Despite the funded release time that we were able to provide for the teachers, and evidence of their engagement in the project and apparent genuine interest in the development of their learners’ intercultural capability through their L2 teaching, we faced an important reality: the availability of time from the teachers was always limited, and did not allow for as full participation and commitment with the aims of the project as we would have liked.

A great deal occurred that was positive. Nevertheless, in this chapter, we have documented the realities and complexities of the processes of collaboration and inquiry that we experienced. Along the way, we identified key critical incidents that emerged as we undertook our own journey. The journey was by no means as straightforward as we had envisioned in the planning stages. Critical incidents represented significant points in the journey. In this chapter, we have aimed to tell the whole story and present a honest account of our project (McNiff, 2014). By sharing the process and its complexity, alongside unpredictable and surprising moments, and the ways that we addressed them, we join others who have described these endeavours as “messy” (Adamson & Walker, 2011; Butler & Schnellert, 2012; Timperley et al., 2014).

We started the project with the goal of giving the teachers a voice and valuing their knowledge and experience. Along the way, we found that listening to the teacher partners provided many insights not only on their work as teachers of languages but also on their efforts to grapple with a new construct and the difficulties they encountered. In turn, those reflections became central to our own understandings of the opportunities and challenges of implementing the intercultural dimension in L2 programmes. In the final chapter, we discuss the implications of all that we have presented in this and the preceding two chapters in light of the findings of research in other contexts.