Korea TESOL Journal

Korea TESOL Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2
scholarly articles on the topic (Rudolph, Selvi, & Yazan, 2015). Graduate
seminars were designed as a forum to discuss NNEST experiences
(Brutt-Griffler & Samimy, 1999) and edited volumes captured narrative
experiences of non-native English teachers and summarized research on
the topic (Braine, 1999, 2010). These strident efforts raised an awareness
of the inequalities and discrimination faced by non-native teachers in
their efforts to obtain jobs, publish their research, and legitimize their
practices in a professional landscape grounded in the fallacies that
Phillipson outlined in Linguistic Imperialism.
Though my previous teaching experience in Japan, Nepal, and China
had in one way already placed me squarely into this political arena, it
was not until I got involved in a group project for one of my graduate
courses that I joined the conversation. The project asked students to
research an area of TESOL that related to language and power. Along
with a Korean classmate, a woman who had 15 years of teaching
experience in Korea, we read about the topic and created a simulation
for our classmates in which they looked through job advertisements, first
as if they were native speakers of English and then as if they were not
(personal class notes, 2007). We then jointly presented a list of possible
solutions, culled from our research and our own perspectives, in
addressing the inequitable conditions faced by non-native English
teachers. Below is an abbreviated list:
Possible Solutions
1.Create non-discriminatory hiring practices.
2.Raise awareness of World Englishes, not only American
English.
3.Change labeling of NS/NNS dichotomy into “international
English teacher.”
4.Change construct of “native” as along a continuum.
5.Raise awareness in teacher education programs with diverse
student populations.
The project would become a professional “epiphany,” which is
defined in autoethnographic terms as “remarkable and out-of-the-ordinary
life-changing experiences that transform us or call us to question our
lives,” events that “create impressions that ... persist long after a crucial
incident is supposedly finished” (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015,
p. 26, 37). For autoethnographers, epiphanies have ranged from events
14 Steve Iams