Park’s paper introduces ‘interactive narrative inquiry’, an approach that encourages educators to immerse themselves in their students’ stories and examine how those stories reshape their own thinking and teaching practices. This approach to self-study stems from the notion of narrative as virtual reality. That reading, especially immersive reading, IS virtual reality, as readers are not only transported to the time and space in which the story takes place, but also find themselves interacting with the characters and the plot of the story. Furthermore, narrative as virtuality also has its roots in video games and virtual reality. Just as a player loses herself in a digital world and begins to shape its story, Park argues that researchers and educators can immerse themselves in others’ written narratives and let those stories pull new narratives out of them in return.
The method grew from frustration. Park had planned to interview her graduate students about their teaching identities, but found herself steering the conversations toward the answers she wanted. So, she turned instead to two years’ worth of reflective essays that her students had already written for coursework, reading them as a doorway into her own past rather than as data to be coded.
One student teacher’s memory of inventing pretend English while playing with a doll sent Park back to her own childhood, recalling the made-up language she and her brother spoke on a flight to America before she learned ‘real’ English.
The most pointed moments come when Park turns to the English-only policies common in English teacher educator programmes in Korea. Reading a student’s account of quietly taking expensive private lessons just to keep up in graduate seminars taught entirely in English, Park began noticing the same exclusion elsewhere.
A third student’s story, about being talked over by a friend while ordering food abroad, pushes the analysis further. Park connects it to her own memory of standing frozen in a graduate seminar, unsure which side of the room to join when a professor split the class into ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speakers. Both moments, she suggests, show how easily people are slotted into categories by others, and how easily those categories can be quietly refused.
Park’s wider point is that language teacher education has lagged behind other fields in adopting self-study, even though it has been standard practice elsewhere since the 1990s. Her method offers teacher educators a concrete way to use their students’ writing not simply as coursework, but as a catalyst for questioning assumptions built into their programmes. By helping educators see their students’ experiences through fresh eyes, interactive narrative inquiry may foster greater empathy and awareness of the barriers some learners face, ultimately informing more inclusive and responsive approaches to language teacher education.
