Investigating Language Tutor Social Inclusion Identities

This article explores the identities of tutors working in one-to-one instructional arrangements, which entail a tutor and an adult English learner working together to meet the particular language learning needs and goals of the learner. The tutors in this study are matched with their partners through an organization in New Zealand which aims to provide a community-based service that supports settlement for immigrants and refugees through English. The findings are presented through an analysis of a series of short stories,' short excerpts of data extracted from a larger set of interviews with the tutors. They are analyzed thematically for their content. In making sense of the content, attention is necessarily paid to the narrators' orientation within micro, meso, and macro spatial and temporal contexts; stories, Stories, and STORIES. Specifically, the tutors' identities are examined as social inclusion tutor identities; that is, identity is conceptualized narratively as co-constructed and situated in the (short) stories they tell about their lived and imagined tutoring social inclusion experiences. In the case of these tutors, their experiences include primarily and intimately the lives of their refugee and immigrant English learners.