Targeted on tertiary education, this edited volume discusses how the study of narrative texts can lead to increased reflexivity about educational ideas and practices in which the question of identity and its construction is central. The book is in three parts preceded by an introduction (Martin Solly) proposing a rationale for highlighting narrative inquiry in higher education.

Part 1 focuses on narrativized identity. The first chapter (David Block) is a methodological consideration of how sense-making approaches to narrativized identity can be constructed in a theoretically informed and structured way. The second chapter (Lawrence M. Solan) exposes the gap between society at large and the legal system in sincerity requirements upon lawyers' discursive practice. In the third chapter (Davide Simone Giannoni), genre analysis is used to establish that biomedical specialists present themselves as actors rather than observers in their laboratory narratives. The fourth chapter (Ying Danjun & Huang Aifeng) explores how interactive narratives in a teacher-development classroom can be a vehicle for the communication of teacher knowledge and the co-construction of a coherent sense of teacher identity. The relationship between narratives and social identity is examined in the fifth chapter (Solly) as culturally defined, dialectical in nature, and central to discursive strategies reinforcing governments' policy-making initiatives for language learning.

Part 2 foregrounds digital literacy and multimodality. The first chapter (Robin Goodfellow) uses a critical analysis of multimodal texts coming from technologized study activities to uncover a power struggle between academic values and popular media ones. A semiotic deconstruction in the second chapter (Carey Jewitt) of what English is, what is to be learned and how it is to be learned offers a new outlook for theorizations of pedagogy, curriculum, and learning in the English classroom. In the third chapter (Sandra Campagna), the multimodal concept of “mood” and the corpus linguistics notion of “semantic prosody” are used in an educational identity analysis of Harvard Business School's websites. The fourth chapter (Margaret Rasulo) puts its linguistic, social, and interactive lens on discourse behaviors of participants in some online professional learning sites to show how they established membership in the online learning community. The fifth chapter (Anthony Baldry) discusses multimodality as a university discipline. This requires syllabi to transcend a compartmentalized vision of multimodality for different disciplines and to pay attention to how and why multimodality is studied and used in general.

Part 3 centers around culture and context. The first chapter (Felix Banda) contrasts the language use of South African urban and rural black students, and points to the marginalization the rural black students may suffer in English tertiary education and social mobility. By contrast, the second chapter (Robyn Woodward-Kron) proposes a register perspective on learner medical discourse to help understand how students from nondominant cultures can benefit from tertiary clinical communication education in Australia. The third chapter (Michelangelo Conoscenti) shows how cultural and power variables discursively and interactively shape the online learning culture of an international Virtual Diplomacy Special Interest Group communicating in English. In the fourth chapter (Maria Cristina Paganoni), semiotic features of Al-Jazeera's English-language website are explored for their potential to make readers see its identity as negotiated between global and local dimensions. Finally, the fifth chapter (Giuseppina Cortese) explores the formative role of learning against the premium on “marketable” skills, exemplifying narrative inquiry working from a combination of the naturalistic, constructionist, and bottom-up perspectives.