The aim of this paper is to identify and describe the key traits of research with life histories. Previous studies on disability and my own work conducting research with the life histories and university experiences of students with disabilities help to explain how these key characteristics manifest themselves in practice. There are six traits…

This study, framed with a socialization lens, discusses the impact of using stories about early contributors in engineering education (via results of the Engineering Education Pioneers Project) as a mechanism to help socialize the first cohort of graduate students in a new engineering education Ph.D. program. Two instructors designed a new course…

The life narrative is an oral genre grounded in Indigenous tradition and teaching practice. In Canadian Indigenous communities, the expertise and content transmitted by life narratives are a part of their oral heritage. Drawing from their personal and professional experiences in Indigenous school environments, as well as the results from…

Drawing from Cervantes-Soon's (2012) framework of "testimonios" as confessions, counter-narratives, and "consejos," we explore how writing letters to our children serves as a process of historical documentation, healing, and a passing down of social justice principles and family history. Additionally, we expand on…

Six pre-service teachers participated in a component of narrative inquiry that took place the week before their teacher education program began. The component offered the teachers a variety of multimodal activities, such as body biographies, teaching museums, and paper tearing representations, all making use of repurposed materials, to critically…

This article is the second in a series of narrative studies of leaders in the field of multicultural education researched and written by Cheryl Hunter and several of her graduate students at the University of North Dakota. The first in the series appeared in the Fall 2017 issue and other articles will appear in future issues of "Multicultural…

To understand long-term motivations for second language (L2) learning/socialisation, this study analyses the biographical narratives of 30 Hong Kong Chinese who are proficient in Japanese by using ethnographic interviews. From a situated learning perspective, our research findings originate in the participants' transformational episodes and centre…

In this article, we discuss three cross-cultural memoirs used in three different university courses that introduced students to the complex identities that form both inside and outside of language classrooms. In arguing for the value of using such memoirs as content in university courses, we provide a detailed thematic analysis of Peter Hessler's…

People's true selves comprise a life story that may be considered as a narrative. With that idea in mind, the purpose of this article is to report on a pedagogical intervention that bridged life stories and a narrative perspective to examine nine, out of eighty, pre-service English language teachers' (re)construction of their true selves while…

Given that the expectation of the British Educational Research Association Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy Special Interest Group Scholar Lecture is to position yourself throughout the paper, I will start with sharing my academic/career biography, acknowledging that our biographies are inextricably linked to our work and life practices. I…

In this article, I define self-knowledge and describe how it can serve as a basis for creating contexts for multicultural engagement. The article describes a course where teachers critically reflect on media, biographies, their personal narratives, and professional application projects. Media, biographies, professional application projects, and…

Purpose: Social theory of learning speaks to the social nature of our lives and our attempts to understand both what and how we learn from it. My experiences are built upon and reside with the social context in which they evolved. In this lecture, I will focus on my own experiences and how I interpreted them through social theory of learning that…

Developing teacher education programmes founded upon principles of critical pedagogy and social justice has become increasingly difficult in the current neoliberal climate of higher education. In this article, we adopt a narrative approach to illuminate some of the dilemmas which advocates of education for social justice face and to reflect upon…

This paper reports on a project that examined teachers' reading identities and explored ways in which those identities were manifested in reading pedagogy and were adopted by students. The paper focuses on one purposively selected teacher and his class. Tom Ziegler's personal and pedagogical practices were deeply aligned, and his…

In 2007, Indian Residential School System (IRS) survivors won a class action settlement worth an?estimated 2 billion dollars from the Canadian Government. The settlement also included the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Despite the public acknowledgement, we posit that there is still a lack of opportunity and the necessary…