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Little attention has been given to the experiences of refugee families parenting a child living with disabilities as they resettle in a new country. Using narrative inquiry, we inquired into the experiences of two Syrian refugee families' identity-making and agency in their efforts to secure services and programs for their children in Canada. We drew on field texts composed over two years that we spent alongside the children and their parents. The families experienced multiple and complex difficulties as they attempted to recompose their lives alongside their children. We identified multiple tensions and bumping places as the parents negotiated their and their children's experiences on school and other institutional landscapes. The families' stories showed the importance of using their experiences as the starting point for creating inclusive spaces for their children.

While refugees are part of patterns of global migration, their ordinary lives remain obscured. In a narrative inquiry into the lives of Syrian refugee families who came to Canada within the past 4 years, we focused on their experiences of belonging, agency, and identity as part of social inclusion. The main focus was the lives of young children and their families as they made sense of Canadian institutional settings. Working with two community-based Arabic-speaking women, we engaged with each family for up to two years. Data (field texts) included recorded and informal conversations, photographs, memory box artefacts, field notes on activities, and art work. In an initial analysis, we wrote narrative accounts of each family's experiences. Second level analysis involved collaborative identification of two narrative threads that cut across families' experiences: making and sustaining familial and community relationships and composing stories to live by as a process of becoming. We draw on one family's experiences to illustrate these threads. Learning to speak English is a central component within each thread. Tensions between inclusion and exclusion, which become apparent as families struggled to hold on to who they were, and as they worked to reimagine and recompose their lives, are visible.

In this interview, author, researcher, and professor D. Jean Clandinin reflects on her many years of experience as a narrative inquiry researcher, teacher, and teacher educator. She believes that growing up in a large, extended family with rooted engagement in the community set the stage for her later interest in narrative inquiry. She describes the many varied scholars who have had an influence on her and explains the basic tenets of narrative inquiry in both the classroom and research contexts. The challenges that face narrative inquiry researchers are described and she shares her vision of how things are changing. Finally, she tells one of her favorite narrative inquiry stories.

This paper offers a review of the research literature on the experiences of young children and their families who left Syria as refugees and resettled in Canada. We identify five key factors that influence Syrian refugees' experience of social inclusion within the context of the public-school systems as well as unveil the silences in and across the current studies. The five factors are pre-arrival experiences, mental health, social supports, acquisition of English language skills, and lack of preparedness of teachers and schools. Based on limited availability of research, we outline needed research to better understand social inclusion of Syrian refugee families with young children in Canada. There is a call to pay particular attention to their educational and social encounters.

We began this research by asking questions about the high number of teachers who leave teaching in their first five years of teaching. The literature on early career teacher attrition (Borman & Dowling, 2008; Guarino, Santibanez & Daly, 2006; Macdonald, 1999; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004) left us with wonders around the experiences of teachers who leave. The storied experiences of those who leave appear absent, for the most part, in the literature. In order to hear the stories of the experiences of early career teacher leavers we engaged in a narrative inquiry with four teachers who left teaching in their first five years. We are researchers, who are also teachers who have left classrooms. The stories of these early career leavers resonated strongly with us. As we engaged in the study, we awakened to how the early career teacher leavers' stories shifted and changed with each conversation, as the research conversations allowed them to make sense of their experiences with leaving.

In this paper, we focus on questions around who we are as teacher educators as well as our responsibilities in helping pre-service teachers compose forward-looking stories as they prepare to begin teaching. We draw on the results of two studies in this paper: one a semi-structured interview study with 55 second- and third-year teachers in two Canadian provinces and one narrative inquiry into the experiences of early career teacher leavers. These studies showed how early career teachers' stories to live by fuel their desires to become teachers. Teaching was a way to try to live out and sustain their stories to live by, that is, participants continued to live out their stories to live by shaped in early personal knowledge landscapes and embodied in their personal practical knowledge. We also learned that when teachers could not sustain their stories in the professional knowledge landscapes, their stories to live by shifted to stories to leave by, and they left teaching.

Composing lives that have a sense of coherence is part of the identity making of refugee families and shapes their attempts for social inclusion. Their struggles for narrative coherence are shaped by the bumping places and tensions that they experience as their lives bump against dominant narratives that structure the policies and practices of many institutions including schools. Using narrative inquiry, we inquired into the experiences of three Syrian refugee families as they bumped against institutional policies and practices. Drawing on two years spent alongside children and their parents we composed field and research texts that showed the importance to understand social inclusion in school settings through the experiences of individual children and families. It is important to focus on experience to redefine the significance of narrative coherence in relation to social inclusion and to create spaces for telling stories that can help transform school policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrative inquiry is both phenomenon and methodology for understanding experience. In this article, we further develop our understandings of narrative inquiry as a practice of social justice. In particular, we explore ways in which social justice issues can be re-framed and re-imagined, with attention to consequent action. Drawing on work alongside Kevlar, a youth who left school early, we explore our understandings. Being grounded in pragmatism and emphasizing relational understanding of experience situate narrative inquiry and call us to think narratively with stories. This allows for movement away from dominant narratives and toward openings to imagine otherwise in dynamic and interactive ways.

Framed by a question around vulnerability in narrative inquiries, we show the multiple ways that vulnerability is evident in narrative inquiry. We take up the concerns around vulnerability to show how, as narrative inquirers, we are searching to find ways to think with vulnerability and with what others have called neglected narratives. Drawing on one study with Aboriginal youth and their families, we make visible how questions of vulnerability need to be considered in framing of research puzzles, selecting participants, and moving from field to field texts to interim and final research texts. In composing final research texts, we struggled with the notions of vulnerability that are placed on Aboriginal youth by labels and single stories. These assigned vulnerabilities lead to interpretations that could create experiences of judgment. We returned again to the importance of making experiences visible, in order to shift understandings of who Aboriginal youth are, and are becoming, in a complex world that will not write over or 'erase their Indianness' nor their or our vulnerabilities. We showed the ways questions of vulnerability are inextricably interwoven into narrative inquiry.