Will's Story: Managing Culturally Irreconcilable Identities in Everyday Life

This paper presents a case analysis from a larger research project surfacing visually disabled men's experiences of masculinity and disability in everyday life. Using the Listening Guide, a voice-centered relational method of narrative analysis, and the work of Erving Goffman and Critical Disability Studies, I present Will's story of self-exploration and illuminate how he navigates and negotiates relationships and social life in American culture, where masculinity and disability are commonly constructed as irreconcilable statuses. This paper advances knowledge about the mutuality between identities and social-structural experiences, with impairment situated between these processes as an embodied tether, that gives meaning and provides nuance to one's understanding and experience of himself in the world as a visually disabled man.

Eastern-Western Women’s Self-Concept

Although cross-cultural influences on human behavior have been the subject of many scholarly works, few studies have focused on the life experiences of women from hyphenated cultural identities and how these experiences inform a woman’s view of herself as a sexual being, in particular, the influence of cross-cultural experiences on women with combined Western and Eastern culture references. This study analyzes four interviews with first-generation Israeli-Iranian women, who describe how their sexual self-concepts evolved as a result of living between both cultures, in the “space of the hyphen.” I used the Listening Guide methodology to inform the interviews and the data analysis, which reveal the influence of family power, patriarchal social practices, and the women’s desire to distinguish themselves from cultural norms. It introduces multilayered views and processes associated with each woman’s outlook of her evolving sexual self-concept.

CLIL Challenges: Secondary School CLIL Teachers’ Voices and Experienced Agency in Three European Contexts

This qualitative interview study focuses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher agency in three European contexts, Austria, Finland and Andalusia, Spain. The aim of the study is to understand how individual CLIL teachers experience their agency when encountering challenges in their work and to demonstrate the multifaceted quality of their agency. The study employs the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, 2015) to listen to the voices of three secondary school subject teachers from three diverse contexts. The analysis shows that CLIL challenges both empowered and disempowered the teachers depending on how meaningful they found their work and what their possibilities to act were in their specific contexts. Some of the teachers’ CLIL experiences were similar, for instance, struggling alone with lack of support. However, these challenges did not affect the teachers’ agency in a straightforward way. In spite of the seemingly comparable challenges, the teachers described their unique experiences and ways to cope with the demands of their work in different ways. For example, using two languages or making their own materials was for some invigorating and for others problematic. In addition, during the interviews individual teachers also reported about their experiences in various ways, explaining, elaborating and balancing their thoughts with varying expressions of agency. Particularly significant for the teachers’ experiences of agency appeared to be the beginning of their CLIL career, however, their initial experiences of agency did not endure. The study shows that CLIL teacher agency is multivoiced, dynamic and often vulnerable.