This article looks at the American Dream as a merit narrative to understand how it supports barriers to educational success for educators working to improve the lives of students in urban schools. Hard work/perseverance and individualism are interrogated as components of merit narratives used to sustain the American Dream. We analyze data from six…

This article examines immigrant students' stories through the documentation of their "testimonios." Given the high number of immigrant students in public schools, it is imperative for teachers and teacher educators to have an idea of their perspectives, experiences, and identities. In educational settings, "testimonios" have…

Prior research shows that many teachers feel ill-equipped to deal with students experiencing loss, and teachers of Black male adolescents, in particular, sometimes mistake grieving for misbehavior. This multimethod case study investigated the way teachers and their Black male students at a single-sex school related around encounters with loss. We…

This article highlights McKinney-Vento awareness and implementation as experienced and understood by unaccompanied youth facing housing instability and the adults charged with its implementation in schools. A qualitative inquiry was used to capture the perspectives of youth experiencing housing instability as they navigated a large urban school…

This article revisits questions on the utility of identity in literacy studies. Following a review of the range of conceptions of identity and framings of its uses, we argue that "identity-as-position" is needed as a pragmatic tool in the field of literacy studies, and grounds responsive critical literacy practices. Drawing on a…

The purpose of my study is to explore the stories of the ethical tensions K-12 educational administrators navigate when implementing high-stakes assessment policy in a culture of measurement during testing season. Some educational leaders, in particular K-12 school and district administrators, struggle with the tensions existing between their own…

While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the…

Purpose: This paper aims to focus on the construction of a third space within a high school. Specifically, the authors consider how youth of color engage the educational context of an 11th grade English language arts (ELA) class as a basis for (re)imagining their history, culture and themselves to construct counter-narratives away from framing…

This study examines changes to Jewish day school students' narratives of the history of Israel after a two-and-a-half-week trip there. Seventeen students were interviewed about the history of Israel before and after the trip. Before the trip, most students' accounts lacked logical connections among the different events. The observations on the…

"Thru the Lenz" was a youth participatory action project in which a group of urban high school students explored their lives and communities through art, photography, and narrative. Drawing on data from Thru the Lenz, I deploy CRT to reimagine the research space as a place for counter storytelling. Majoritarian stories are stories that…

This narrative inquiry highlights the experiences of three high school students labeled Long-term English learners (LTEL) in a North Texas high school. This narrative inquiry study uses semi-structured interviews to restory the students' lives, emphasizing the emergent themes of family (the strongest pillar) and the language of the home (Spanish).…

University libraries globally launch coronavirus memory archival projects inviting the documentation of personal experience. Elicitations such as journal entries and oral history interviews fall under the category of life-writing. This Narrative Inquiry focuses on creative nonfiction stories produced by an online high school community and edited…

This paper explores interweaving conceptual and substantial problems of teaching writing skills for analytical and hortatory exposition texts. Under the narrative inquiry, five English teachers' personal life experiences were analyzed. Having been analyzed, the findings reveal: (1) students were still weak in understanding the concept of the two…

Art education history takes many forms and serves many purposes. I argue that it is useful to think of art education history as a collection of stories that we can call on, identify with, and integrate to help us know our field and ourselves as artists and educators. Utilizing the theoretical lens of new histories, I present one student narrative…

This article describes high school students' responses to events in the novel, "The Things They Carried," leading to their collaborative rewriting to create their own narrative versions of these events. It draws on "enactivist" theory of languaging, an approach to language that focuses on its use as social actions to enact and…