Chapter 12 The COVID-19 Pandemic, Teacher Identity and Language Education: A Duoethnographic Approach

Chapter 12

The COVID-19 Pandemic, Teacher Identity and Language Education: A Duoethnographic Approach

Maki Yoshida, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

Jindan Ni, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University

Abstract

In this paper, two language teachers—Maki and Jindan, teaching Japanese and Chinese respectively, will reflect on their teaching experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic through duoethnography. Duoethnography is an emerging research methodology for two or more researchers to share their personal history and experiences through dialogues to explore the multiple perspectives of understanding the world.

The abrupt transition to online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 required the authors to swiftly adapt to digital learning and the new pedagogical environment. However, being swamped with unprecedented tasks, we hardly had an opportunity to stop and ponder on the changes occurring around and about us in the tertiary language education context. This study aims at reflecting upon our experiences as language teachers during the pandemic and providing insights into how our identities are complicatedly intertwined with the past, present and future of our private and professional spaces. We invite our readers to enter our conversation and explore the meaning of language education in the time of uncertainty and conflict.

Keywords: Duoethonography, Language Education, Identity, Pedagogy, Digital Learning

Introduction

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit Wuhan, a city in central China, and spread across mainland China, vital personal protective equipment such as surgical masks and protective suits were in short supply. During this challenging time, many countries generously donated the necessary protective materials to China, and Japan was among them. A heart-warming couplet was subscribed on some of the donated goods from Japan, “山川異域, 風月同天 (Chinese: shan chuan yi yu, feng yue tong tian; Japanese: sansen iki o koto ni sure domo, fūgetsu ten wo onaji usu),” which means “though we may live in different lands, we share the wind and the moon under the same sky.” The couplet is an excerpt from a poem written by the Japanese Prince Nagaya (684–729) about 1300 years ago. Prince Nagaya sent the poem to the noted Chinese monk Jianzhen (Ganjin in Japanese), inviting Jianzhen to come to Japan and propagate Buddhism. The couplet caused a great sensation in news and social media in China and Japan (Hirai, 2020), reminding people of the importance of humanity in a time of crisis and the deep cultural bond between China and Japan.

This episode intersects with the life and professional experiences of this chapter’s two authors: Maki and Jindan, teaching Japanese and Chinese respectively at RMIT University’s Australian campus. The pandemic that started in 2020 brought unprecedented changes and challenges around us, resulting in a financial crisis that saw large-scale restructuring and redundancies to the Australian tertiary education sector. Language courses in some universities were closed without the prospect of re-opening.[1] The abrupt transition from face-to-face to online teaching necessitated our swiftly adapting to the new pedagogical environment. Besides that, the frustration against the pandemic, along with rising political tension between Australia and China, led to growing hostility toward Chinese communities (The ASIAN AUSTRALIAN ALLIANCE, 2021), to which Jindan and many of Maki and Jindan’s students belong. All these drastic changes have drawn us to ponder on our teaching practice and our identities as language teachers. We ask: What is the meaning of language education and what can we, as academics and language teachers, contribute to broader society in one of the most challenging times that contemporary societies have faced? The opening story symbolizes what we aspire to achieve and what we believe could be nurtured through language education: shared humanity and empathy toward the “other.”

In Australia (and arguably in other English-speaking countries), the status of language education as a tertiary-level subject has faced scrutiny, often from within tertiary institutions. In the midst of the financial crisis and massive redundancies at universities, in June 2020, the Australian Government announced the “Job-ready Graduates Package” in which languages were also included as part of the skillset that would be of benefit to Australian students’ employability. This package aims to equip students with necessary qualifications for their future jobs, bridging students, industry, and the wider society (The Department of Education, Skills and Employment, 2020). As academics teaching language, we welcome the government’s emphasis and promotion of language education. However, the “job-ready package” could underscore the preconception that language education is purely skill-based, divorced from “content,” and does not dovetail with the mission of producing and disseminating knowledge in the universities. Consequently, language programs would be confronted with an existential crisis because their scholarly and educational contributions to academia and society are underrated.

In this chapter, we invite our readers to the collaborative dialogues through which we reflected upon our experiences of language education and negotiated our identities; wherein the past, present, and future of our private and professional spaces complicatedly intertwined. The dialogues reassured us that language education, especially in this era of uncertainty and conflict, not only provides opportunities and platforms for students to learn an additional language, but also cultivates and enhances their ability to empathize with people from diverse backgrounds. This capability contributes to dispelling the unhelpful antagonistic narratives built upon growing nationalism and racism that have often been reinforced by media (Herman & Chomsky, 1988, pp. 31–35). It also nurtures students’ sense of global citizenship that embraces “political, economic, social and cultural interdependency and interconnectedness between the local, the national and the global” (UNESCO 2015, p. 14). The sense of global citizenship is a vitally necessary disposition that enables everyone to negotiate their identities and navigate through complex globalized contexts.

Methodology

Right in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the authors thought it would be important for them to record the unprecedented changes occurring around and about them in the tertiary language education context to “make sense of (their) experiences” (Ashlee & Quaye, 2020, p. 6). After teaching two academic semesters that year, we decided to reflect on our experiences through collaborative dialogues with each other, in order to explore how the pandemic affected our teaching practice and teacher identity, applying duoethnography – a method that has attracted growing attention in the field of identity and educational research. The duoethnographic approach requires two or more people of difference (e.g., academics with different cultural and disciplinary background) to be engaged in collaborative dialogues about their life histories “to provide multiple understandings of the world” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 9). Duoethnographers use “themselves to assist themselves and others” and undertake the mutual and reciprocal journey “to better understand oneself and the world in which one lives” (Ibid., p. 13) through dialogic storytelling. In line with other advocates of the approach (e.g., Ashlee & Quaye, 2020; Laurence & Nagashima, 2020), we considered this methodology a powerful tool for personal transformation and teacher development. As our teaching philosophy and practice always evolve with the changing socio-political environment and our personal experiences, the continual openness of duoethnography allows us to constantly explore new directions, approaches and possibilities in the language classrooms. In addition, one of the key tenets of duoethnography, which has been identified as an approach to advance social justice (Sawyer & Norris, 2013), resonated with the overarching theme of the study (exploring our teaching experience and teacher identity during the pandemic). Through the pandemic, already-prevalent social injustice further deteriorated both at local and global scales, fragmenting our communities and countries. What the authors experienced and witnessed during the pandemic inevitably concerns unequal power relationships and social injustice. Although fully aware that duoethnography on its own cannot fix social injustices, we believe that duoethnographic investigations can contribute to advancing social justice by revealing and challenging dominant discourses and practices in order to “remove personal, institutional, national, and transnational structures that impoverish, disenfranchise, enslave, disempower, and humiliate people” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 6). Through duoethnography, through dialogues, we provide our readers with “polyvocal” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 13) texts in which readers can “witness stories and meanings” (Ibid., p. 15) and then construct their own perspectives.

The data of the current study come from five one-on-one online meetings (60–120 mins each, 420 minutes in total) that the authors conducted from December 2020 to February 2021. Before each session, we prepared several topics that we thought were relevant to the overarching theme of the study, i.e., our teaching experience and teacher identity during the pandemic. After each session, we kept and shared an online journal to reflect our discussions during each meeting, which provided the basis for the topics of the following session (cf. Laurence & Nagashima, 2020). All meetings were video recorded, and the audio data were transcribed by the Microsoft speech-to-text service. The transcriptions were then reconstructed to clarify information and increase reader accessibility in recognition of the active role readers play in duoethnography as they “enter (our) conversation” and engage in meaning making while “recalling and reconceptualizing their own stories” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 10). The following sub-sections explore the three key themes: our life trajectories in the past, present and future. These themes emerged from our dialogues and reflective journals about our journey of reconceptualizing our identities and their connection to the world in which we live.

Dialogues

Life Experience at a Younger Age and Our Current Academic Positions

In the first duoethnographic session, the authors talked about their personal life experiences that led them to their current academic positions. We joined RMIT University at around the same time as early career researchers and shared the same office for several months. During those months, we had conversations about ourselves and our interest in the other’s home country (i.e., China and Japan). Still, the dialogues in this session provided new perspectives on ourselves and on each other and, most importantly, manifest how interacting with different languages and cultures at our young age has cultivated our interest in foreign countries and has affected our life trajectories. By returning to our past, we aim to achieve a better understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.

M (Maki): You said there were many people working overseas in your hometown. So, when you were a kid, was it something special to work overseas?

J (Jindan): Actually, when I was a kid, I dreamt of studying overseas and experiencing different cultures.

M: Why is that?

J: Foreign lands are attractive to me. I read many English novels when I was a teenager, and I was attracted to the places described in those novels, such as the vast grassland and the howling wind that often appear in the British novels. Stories from other countries lured me into dreaming about traveling abroad. I think it’s the power of literature. It makes people want to leave their own land and adventure into the unknown.

M: Yeah, and you said when you were a kid, you also watched Japanese anime on TV. Was it broadcast in Chinese?

J: Yeah, it’s dubbed in Chinese. I remember that every afternoon after school, I would rush home and watched Sailor Moon.

As the excerpt shows, Jindan’s childhood environment and interaction with foreign literature and popular culture developed her interest in other countries and cultures. She then started learning Japanese at a university in China, and “fell in love with” Japanese language and culture which led her to pursue a master’s degree in Japanese literature. During her master’s study, she was able to study in Japan as an exchange student for six months, where she built invaluable connections with Japanese academics. She went on to pursue her PhD in Japanese literature in Australia. After the first duoethnographic session, she wrote in her journal:

J: Reflecting upon my journey of learning English and Japanese, I realized how much my current life and job were shaped by my previous interest in reading books and watching animation. I am eager to explore more about how our life events and experiences make us who we are, as well as how those experiences affect our way of teaching and our understanding of language education (or education in general).

Maki also shared her life trajectories in the first session.

J: Maki, may I ask what brought you to Australia?

M: When I was young, my parents sometimes took me overseas, and I really liked it, including my trips to Australia and China. I was always curious about life overseas, like you. I was working in Japan after I graduated from university, but I had always wanted to go overseas someday. One day, one of my friends introduced me to a Japanese teaching position in primary and secondary schools in Australia. I applied for it and got the job. That’s why I came to Australia.

Like Jindan, Maki developed her interest in other cultures through her childhood experiences. After the first duoethnographic session, she wrote in her journal:

The session was quite interesting. Although Jindan and I shared an office for about six months and chatted a lot casually, I got to know her more after the first session. I was able to talk to her very comfortably. The relationship between Japan and other Asian countries, especially China and Japan, has been something I have cared about since I was a teenager, and has affected my career choice as well as my teacher identity. If Jindan does not mind, I would like to discuss this in the next session.

After hearing Jindan’s strong connection with Japan in the first session, Maki decided to talk more about her past, focusing on her connection with Asian countries in the second session as below.

M: When I was a child, I often heard people saying that some Asian countries are “近くて遠い国” (chikakute tōi kuni) for Japan, which means they are geographically close but far away in spirit. Because of the Asia-Pacific War in the first half of the twentieth century and unfinished postwar reconciliation, some ill will and enmity remained among Japan and its neighbors. And, many Japanese people seemed obsessed with Western countries, distancing themselves from the Asian world. I didn’t like this idea. I was interested in Asian countries, and when I was in high school, I joined an exchange program and stayed in Thailand for a month. I studied Chinese at university for one year and wrote my thesis on a topic related to the Sino–Japanese relationship. After I graduated, I wanted to do something that could connect Japan with Asian countries, so I decided to work for a company with employees from Asian countries. My job was to teach Japanese to them. So, teaching Japanese wasn’t my first option; it was a coincidence. I wanted to do something for people from Asian countries, and teaching Japanese was just a tool to achieve that. I worked for the Japanese company for about five years, and then came to Australia and did my master’s degree and PhD, and I’m still teaching Japanese now. Yeah, so after I came to Australia, I think I deviated from my original purpose, that I wanted to do something to improve the relationship between Japan and Asian countries. My focus has shifted toward teaching Japanese.

Maki has been teaching Japanese in Australia since 2009. Over time, this has become her primary professional identity. However, through the dialogues with Jindan, she found out that teaching Japanese was originally merely a “tool” to achieve her aspiration of building an amicable relationship between Japan and other Asian countries.

Through the collaborative dialogues, both authors recalled their childhood and teenage memories, realizing how much their past experience had paved the way for their current academic positions. During our dialogues, we mentioned the Asia-Pacific War and its consequences for the Sino–Japanese relationship; these are sensitive topics that we had previously subconsciously avoided to maintain an amicable professional relationship. However, the dialogues of our personal experience in this study revealed that both of us developed an interest in each other’s country from a young age. In addition to our positioning each other’s status as “one of equals” (Norris et al., 2012, p. 21), this discovery helped us to construct a safe space to talk about our life history despite the often inimical Sino–Japanese relationship, enabling us to recapture what has been the core in our career trajectory. These dialogues, at the intersection of our professional and private spaces, strengthened our shared understanding of the importance of multicultural and multilingual education (formal or informal) and opened up a doorway into meaningful dialogues for the subsequent key theme of the study: the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected our teacher identity and teaching practice.

The Pandemic, Teacher Identity and Language Education

Maki: Reconceptualization of her Connection with Asian Countries

Since starting to teach Japanese at Australian universities, Maki has taught many Chinese-speaking students, who make up one of the biggest enrolment demographics for Japanese programs in many Australian universities[2], and has developed a real appreciation for those students’ enthusiasm for learning Japanese. However, despite having taught numerous Chinese-speaking students, Maki had not considered it as an opportunity to revive her previous aspiration of improving Sino–Japanese relations through teaching Japanese in Australia, as her career focus shifted onto teaching the language. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic and the abrupt transition from face-to-face to online teaching completely changed her perspective of teaching Japanese to those students.

M: Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, many international students in the Japanese program, mainly Chinese students, struggled because some of them were overseas. And that’s when I realized the connection between myself and China again. Before the pandemic, I knew some international students’ struggles in learning in Australian universities. They moved to a new environment, they had to become familiar with new Australian practices, and some of them were not fully proficient in English. But last year, because of the pandemic, their struggles became more salient, and I asked myself, what I can do to help them? I think the pandemic really changed the way I want to teach and my identity as a teacher and a researcher as well.

Regarding her concern about Chinese international students, Maki shared her and her colleagues’ experiences of some students not engaging in activities in online introductory Japanese courses.

M: While some students may have pretended to attend classes by joining the online sessions but were occupied with something else, some had internet connection problems and could not respond to teachers and peers. Apart from these issues, it seemed that some students didn’t respond to us because of their unfamiliarity with the teaching style or anxiety in [the] online teaching space. Students from Asian cultures may not be familiar with openly speaking up or doing pair or group activities, and I think if they are not familiar with those kinds of teaching styles and activities, adapting to them online is much harder. So, maybe that’s why some international students didn’t engage with classroom activities much.

J: Yeah, especially if they were in their first year. It’s different from China, the teaching style, and the group discussions in class.

M: Yeah, and they’re learning Japanese via English, which is not their first language. So maybe that also made them more nervous. Their non-engagement may be because of their limited English ability or unfamiliarity with the teaching style, or something else. But there may be teachers who judge those students’ non-engagement negatively. I think we need to think about how they felt about the online learning environment in Australian universities and what made them hesitant to engage with the class activities or classmates.

J: Yeah, and there might be some cultural factors that prevent Chinese students from speaking up in class. It might seem daunting to them to articulate their opinions in the classroom.

M: Yeah, exactly. In terms of how I think about my students, I was aware that many Chinese international students were in a disadvantageous situation during the pandemic. Despite the situation, some of them still chose to study Japanese. I was grateful for that and thought I should do something about the situation through teaching and research. Having said that, I’m fully aware that this year’s [2021] learning experience was also challenging for local students. So, I think I need to attend to local students’ voices as well.

In accordance with Maki’s reflection, some studies have explored (Chinese) international students’ different learning styles from Western ones and challenged the imposition of the monolithic, monolingual Western perspective of “capable” students in the Australian tertiary context (Lu & Singh, 2017; Sit, 2013). This issue concerning diverse learning styles intersects with the way those students’ linguistic capabilities are perceived and evaluated—formally or informally—in classrooms. In the field of applied linguistics, “translanguaging,” have been widely recognized and explored, being contextualized in “the complex linguistic realities of the 21st century” (Wei, 2019, p. 9). It refers to using “one’s linguistic repertoire, without regard for socially and politically defined language labels or boundaries” (Otheguy et al., 2015, p. 297). While translanguaging may represent the complex linguistic realities of this era, the multicultural and multilingual speakers’ creative and fluid linguistic practices that blur language labels or boundaries can be challenged and marginalized in (language) classrooms due to the prevalent discourses and practices that worship “a pure form of a language” (Wei, 2019, p. 14). If classrooms disregard and marginalize culturally and linguistically diverse students’ different learning styles and fluid linguistic practices, those students will not be able to embrace their existing capabilities, linguistic repertoire, and hybrid identities. Although this issue existed before the pandemic, it is conceivable that the abrupt and chaotic changes the pandemic brought to their (university) life aggravated their struggle in adapting to a new learning environment.

The collaborative dialogues with Jindan enabled Maki to reflect on and reconceptualize her teaching experience during the pandemic, raising her awareness of the issue that international students may have been confronted with more difficulties in the online teaching and learning space during the pandemic. Consequently, she decided to examine students’ voices regarding their experience with Jindan and Jing—another colleague in the Chinese program—to explore a better online learning experience for students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The duoethnography thus served as a locomotive for her to act on possible educational inequalities that may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, transforming her research and educational aspirations.

Jindan: Complex Feelings as a Chinese-born Australian Citizen

The previous section illuminated the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected Maki’s identity and professional practices as a teacher and a researcher. The pandemic affected Jindan, a Chinese-born Australian citizen, in a completely different manner because “the global attitude toward China and Chinese has dropped into a historical lower point,” as she explained. The Australian government’s call for the origins of the pandemic to be investigated on an international stage fractured the bilateral relationship between Australia and China (Packham, 2020). While looking into the origins of the pandemic is needed, the issue had been intensely politicized and led to hostility toward China and Chinese people. Along with the pandemic, a suite of political issues concerning China and Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Uyghurs sparked worldwide outrage and dominated the media coverage in Australia (Sun, 2021). The dialogue below illuminates Jindan’s complex feelings about the image of China and Chinese people that were constructed in the Australian media.

J: TV and other media platforms tend to strengthen the image of a country through constant emphasis on certain aspects of that country. TV can easily be propaganda. Media show some impactful images to people, and they can really changes people’s thoughts about certain nations and their cultures. The images are also posted on Facebook, Instagram, changing and transforming our perceptions towards a country.

M: Yeah, it’s really true. And as you mentioned, I think that tendency has intensified because of SNS [Social Networking Service].

J: It’s also about “eyeball-catching.” What wording is chosen to report the news? Which image is chosen for broadcast? It’s all, as you said, political. I think the word “China” should denote more than just the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] and more than what we see in the media.

Although Jindan has lived in Australia for ten years and has become an Australian citizen, she values her Chinese cultural identity. As with many migrants in Australia, she constantly negotiates her hybrid identities concerning her “original homeland” (China) and “adopted homeland” (Australia) (Leong, 2000, p. 60), as well as her sense of belonging to a broader global community. When the pandemic started, some Chinese international students were randomly abused by strangers simply because they were positioned as “Chinese” (Tao 2021). Many of Jindan’s Chinese friends experienced racist verbal abuse during the pandemic. Although such incidents were not limited to Australia (Addo 2020), the above collaborative dialogues illuminate Jindan’s complex feelings towards the ideological and monolithic image of China and Chinese people in the media, which contributed to escalating physical and verbal attacks on Chinese in Australia (Australian Human Rights Commission, n.d.).

While revealing her complex feelings, Jindan commented on Maki’s concern for Chinese international students as below:

J: I think, because of the pandemic, more people criticise and attack China and the Chinese, but you go into the opposite direction. That is really wonderful.

M: I think my connection with you and [colleague] Jing, as well as my college study of China and Chinese language helped a lot because I know you guys. That affected my relationship with Chinese people. And I think that relates to what language teaching can develop, the local level connections.

J: Exactly.

While Maki is determined to address educational inequalities through research, the experience during the pandemic made Jindan rethink her teaching practice in order to encourage  students to engage in critical thinking and question the “bipolarity” of cultures, nations or ideologies.

M: These days, media constructs particular ideological images of certain countries. Because of that, I think it’s important to build real, local relationships through language education. Because if you know real people, you won’t be affected by that kind of rhetoric and imagery too much. So, I think we can achieve real strong local relationships through education.

J: Yeah, absolutely. When I talked about cultural behavior or something like that in my class, I did my best to explain that “Chinese culture” is really diverse, and Chinese people too. We have different beliefs. So, we can’t judge people from just like one sentence or one image on TV or Facebook. I really hope that our tertiary education can do more on that. And I really hope that Australia can become a place where the younger generation will not be judged by their ethnic background.

M: Yeah, and like we said before, that’s where education can help us, so that people won’t judge others based on their specific social category only.

For Jindan, teaching Chinese language and culture is far more than teaching grammar and syntax, or listing the Chinese festivals. It is, of course, important for language teachers to introduce the unique cultural and societal aspects of the country where the target language is used. However, as Garrett-Rucks (2013) reminds us, language instructors are prone to “objectify the target culture and present members of the target culture as monolithic entities with marked cultural difference” (p. 862). Language teachers should avoid reinforcing or essentializing the images of some countries because, as Bennet argues, people from the same culture tend to “take for granted some basic shared assumptions” about the nature of their cultural background (Bennet, 1998, p. 2). In other words, while teaching language and culture to language learners, it is vital for us to bring the specific historical context into consideration so that instead of a fixed image or meaning, we provide our students with the transformation of representations and meanings. Through this practice, we may be able to help students to establish an understanding of the multiplicity and fluidity of a country and its language, culture, and people.

Besides teaching Chinese to Chinese language learners, Jindan also teaches Chinese history and literature to Chinese international students. She shared her current teaching practices and aspirations in regards to this course.

J: The younger generation doesn’t know much about China’s past. They don’t even know much about the Cultural Revolution, and I think that’s dangerous. If it is forgotten, we might fall into that situation again. So, in my class, I teach a lot about the Cultural Revolution. This course is not only about helping students strengthen their ability of articulating in their native language; it is also about history. I think it’s important for the Chinese students to know more about China from a different perspective. This is an opportunity for them to see China “from outside.”

M: Do they comment on the content in the class?

J: Yeah, I encourage students to discuss. Not everyone, but many of them are quite comfortable with sharing their views. I encourage them to disagree with me, but if they just say “I disagree,” that’s not enough. They need to provide evidence of why they disagree.

M: So your purpose is to provide multiple views and let students choose their own voice.

Again, Jindan’s teaching practice is deeply related to her background as an immigrant from China, the way she was educated there, and her academic pursuit of literary studies. She further revealed how this background intersects with her teaching philosophies.

J: After I came to Australia, after I started my PhD candidature here, I began to see China and Chinese literature in a very different way. I’m interested in bringing those different perspectives, different understandings of China to my Chinese international students. I hope they can learn something that was not encouraged in their classes back in China. I want the students to formulate their own thoughts about certain issues. I think nowadays, when news and information seem easy to obtain online, people can know what’s happening in the world as long as they have internet access. But at the same time, it seems that some people don’t know that well, and it’s very dangerous if people follow media opinions. I want my students to build up the capability to think about issues and problems independently.

As a literary scholar, Jindan is acutely aware of the impact of media narratives and how media can be used for propaganda. While the above excerpt concerns Chinese media, she observed a similar mechanism in Australian media as well, as previously discussed. Consequently, she is determined to teach her students that “the truth can’t be easily obtained, and we are always on a journey to seek the truth.” Jindan’s determination is deeply rooted in her life trajectory and her academic pursuit, which has been reaffirmed during the pandemic and reconceptualized through the dialogues.

Our Teaching Experiences During the Pandemic and Future Aspirations

The transition from face-to-face to online teaching was one of the most significant changes to teaching practices during the pandemic. Most classes at RMIT University officially transitioned to online in week four of Semester 1, 2020. In the fourth session of our duoethnographic dialogues, we reflected on our teaching experiences during the pandemic, focusing on the virtual teaching mode.

J: Overall, are you happy with last year’s teaching experience? Do you feel it was very hard, very frustrating, or do you think it’s acceptable, normal, not different from face-to-face teaching?

M: It definitely changed my teaching practices as well as my identity as a teacher, and how I think about my students. We were forced to change our teaching practices at such short notice, and it was of course challenging. But at the same time, teaching online was, in a sense, exciting. I wish it hadn’t happened this way, but I was always interested in online teaching. The way the change happened was not ideal, but I learned from it and gained confidence in teaching online courses. As we’ve been offering face-to-face classes, of course, we are familiar and comfortable with that mode. I know face-to-face delivery has its advantages, but online teaching and learning can offer what face-to-face classes can’t as well. Yeah, so both modes have pros and cons.

J: Yeah, it’s worth exploring online teaching in depth. I agree with you. I am actually a very “against-technology” kind of person. Very old-fashioned. I would say face-to-face would be easier for me, but I don’t think face-to-face is the only way to teach language. Online is also workable, feasible. So, I agree with you, because last year I survived, as a person who doesn’t know technologies very well.

M: How about your reflection on your teaching last year?

J: Yeah, as I said, I’m not ‘techy’ at all. I was really reluctant to teach online and to do assessments online, but after doing it for a year, I think it worked out pretty well. Not as daunting as I thought before, and I think online teaching also gives students more flexibility. That’s very important because students are also very busy, occupied with their own life-centered subjects. Yeah, it’s flexible, and it also fostered more trust. I think teaching online requires us to trust each other more than ever before. It’s like—we have to trust students, and students have to trust us that we’re doing our best to make this online teaching possible and interesting. Even if sometimes we know some of them may do some improper things, but we have to trust them first. So, it was a very special experience for me. In this, I think trust between teachers and students is really important, especially in a challenging situation.

M: Yeah, that’s true. If you don’t trust them, they can sense it.

J:  Yeah, they can.

With the high percentage of international students in some of the Chinese courses, Jindan and her colleague, Jing, decided to move those Chinese courses online before the university’s official announcement that all classes would be moved online. However, many international students enroll in Japanese courses as well. Maki attended workshops for online teaching and was mentally and technically prepared to some degree before the transition commenced. She remembers those workshops were inundated with colleagues after the university’s official announcement about the drastic change of course delivery mode, which resulted in delays for some academics receiving support for online teaching.[3] By proactively preparing for the upcoming turn towards online teaching, both Maki and Jindan were able to gain some advantages to navigate through the unprecedented change in the pedagogical environment. As Gacs and others have pointed out, sudden remote teaching is by no means comparable to planned online teaching because the latter is well-prepared in materials, resources, and most importantly, staff training, technical infrastructure, and the required digital literacy for both students and teachers (Gacs et al., 2020, p. 382; Maican & Cocorada, 2021, p. 1).

Although our overall teaching experience during the pandemic was never easy, mentally or physically, we strived to provide the best teaching and learning environment we could and obtained some positive results in those challenging times. For instance, we saw the possibility of expanding online teaching and learning, as well as trust-building between teachers and students. With the acceleration of technology developments and the precarious future of the Australian tertiary language courses, the incorporation of online teaching and learning may continue to be one of the key course delivery modes for tertiary language education in Australia. In this context, language teachers and academics are not only required to equip themselves with online teaching skills, but also need to conduct extensive research on the effectiveness of online teaching versus face-to-face teaching (Tarone, 2015, p. 393). To navigate through the predicament caused by the pandemic, both teachers and students need to develop competency in exploring and endorsing the new possibilities of language education in this challenging and uncertain time.

In/Conclusion

In this chapter, we described how our personal experience—particularly our experience during the pandemic, educational background, linguistic abilities and disciplinary expertise—were entwined, and how these intersections guided our life trajectories and helped us to understand who we are and what we can do as language teachers and academics. As our dialogues unfolded, we came to a deeper understanding of the significant role that language education can play in developing and increasing intercultural understanding and communication, especially in uncertain times. We began our conversations recalling why we were interested in foreign languages and different cultures as teenagers and how this interest profoundly transformed our life journeys and professional commitments. We then focused on what we considered indispensable in language education and what we had been striving to bring into our language classrooms during the pandemic and into the future. Beyond the ability to speak an additional language fluently, there are other important abilities, such as the ability to empathize with the “other,” that language teachers need to impart. In the last section of our dialogues, we focused on the institutional and pedagogical changes that the pandemic brought along and how these changes required us to adapt swiftly. We also exchanged our perspectives on teaching practice and motivations during the pandemic and we believe it is more urgent than ever to establish and strengthen the bond among people who come from different ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic and other backgrounds.

Language education can be both a platform and a stimulus for multicultural and multilingual communication and global citizenship. It is achieved not only by teaching grammar and syntax but also by raising students’ critical awareness of ideologically constructed otherness and providing opportunities to negotiate their identities vis-à-vis existing and new norms in language classrooms. It is common that academics who teach languages at tertiary level are from diverse disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. For instance, Maki’s research interest is gender and sexuality in Japanese language education while Jindan’s research focus lies in comparative literature and translation studies. Language teachers are keen to incorporate their scholarly interests and findings into the classroom to enhance students’ capacity for “critical and systemic thinking, collaborative decision-making, and taking responsibility for present and future generations” (UNESCO, 2014, p. 12).

As this section is titled “In/Conclusion,” we would like to remind our readers that one of the most important characteristics of duoethnography is to avoid definitive statements and conclusions. As Sawyer and Norris eloquently state, “generalizability does not rest with the researcher; rather, readers take what they read and generalize from particulars in one context, create a universal parallel connection, and apply these generated meanings to their own contexts” (Sawyer & Norris, 2013, p. 93). Instead of providing our readers with a fixed conclusion drawn from our dialogues, we hope that the dialogues in this chapter would work as a conduit to connect and resonate with our readers, assisting them in pondering further on language education and the way it intersects with individual experience.

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Notes