Description:
This study has shown how stakeholders of a new Self Access Learning Center (SALC) co-construct views about the center’s development though conversational narratives. Conversational narratives are a means in this study to provide important insights into SALC’s growth and also represent sites of valuable social practice to strengthen collegiality among its participants. This dialogic process illustrates a diversity of perspectives which have emerged over the first year in its growth, and which inform the center’s management on metaphors of self access, language policy, its integration with university curricula, and how it and its staff are positioned in the organization. As part of a larger ethnographic study into the center, these unscripted, free-form dialogues are valued because they mirror the flat hierarchical structure which the center aims to support in its community of practice to legitimize its participants’ voices.