An Autobiographical Narrative Inquiry Into the Experiences of a Vietnamese Mother: Living Alongside Children in Transition to Canada

Authors

  • Hang Thi Thuy Tran University of Alberta

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37119/ojs2019.v25i1.410

Keywords:

familial curriculum making, tradition, culture, narrative inquiry

Abstract

Since my family came to Canada, family story nights have become our daily practice. Within such moments, I explore how I, as a mother, have been sustaining the Vietnamese language and traditions in my family and how, when transitioning to a new land, this has become the core of our familiar curriculum making (Huber, Murphy, & Clandinin, 2011). As I share Vietnamese stories with my children, they reply to me in English. Also, they only have a distant understanding of Vietnamese culture and the intergenerational traditions of our great family back home. Acknowledging these transitional processes allows me to nurture their love and understanding of Vietnamese language, culture and traditions. As I inquire into my own experiences as a mother, I trace my ancestral heritage in my homeland, where, in Thúy’s (2012) words, “a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.” Meaningfully, the following questions have shaped my research puzzles: (a) What are possible ways to build our familial curriculum in integration with our homeland language, culture, and traditions; and (b) How could I as a mother sustain these three essential areas in my children’s lives in Canada? I embrace autobiographical narrative inquiry as the methodology for my paper. Narrative inquiry draws attention to story as both the phenomenon under study and narrative as the methodology for the inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). I will be living, telling, retelling, and reliving (Clandinin, 2013) my storied experiences and my children’s in our familial curriculum making through cooking, reading, and painting. By attending to my daughters’ experiences, I inquire into their transitions differently, that is to understand their own transitions narratively (Clandinin, Steeves & Caine, 2013). Significantly, this paper will bring understandings on Vietnamese newcomer mother’s and children’s familial curriculum making as a way to sustain the homeland’s language, culture, and traditions and to support the children in their transition to a new country as well as inform related realities, knowledges, and approaches in education.

Keywords: experience; transition; curriculum making; language; culture; traditions

Author Biography

  • Hang Thi Thuy Tran, University of Alberta

    Ms. Tran, Thi Thuy Hang is a lecturer of English at Ho Chi Minh University of Technology and Education, Vietnam. She is currently doing a PhD in Elementary Education at Center for Research for Teacher Education and Development, University of Alberta, Canada. She has been a trainer for Primary English language teachers in Project 2020 of Vietnamese government and actively engaged in educational research. Her research interests consist of international perspectives on teacher education, teaching and learning English as a foreign language, early childhood education, higher education, experiential learning, and narrative inquiry. She can be reached at: hangthit@ualberta.ca.

Downloads

Published

2019-06-13

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 1 (2019): Spring 2019 [Teaching and Learning] in education

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).