Congratulations Dr. Hang Thi Thuy Tran!

Congratulations to the CTRC’s Post-Doctoral Scholar Dr. Hang Thi Huy Tran!

American Educational Research Association’s

Outstanding Dissertation Award

Dr. Tran joined the CTRC in 2021, and we can think of no one more deserving of this award. Below you can find the abstract for her award winning doctoral dissertation entitled

Narrative Inquiry into the Experiences of Vietnamese Children and Mothers Composing Lives in Transition to Canada.

In this narrative inquiry, I attended to the experiences of three newcomer elementary-age children and their mothers of Vietnamese heritage who were composing lives in transition to Canada. My passion for this inquiry came from my experience as a mother as I lived alongside my young daughters and their struggles, tensions, and tears when we were first composing our lives in transition to Canada. Many of my daughters’ storied experiences of their new schools were upsetting. As I began to think narratively with my daughters’ and my stories, I better understood my children and myself and was able to dwell in/with my tensions in educative ways. Attending the child and mother co-researchers’ lived and told stories of their experiences, I came alongside them in their family and community places. The child and mother co-researchers and I came alongside one another for two years as we explored the mothers’ stories of their homeland culture. We attended to past and present intergenerational narrative reverberations in language, culture, and education traditions and experiences that shape their familial curriculum making and too, the child and mother co-researchers’ lived and told stories of composing lives in transition to Canada. … Our narrative inquiry shows significant aspects of the everyday fabric of the children’s and mother’s lives in the making, including the spatial, linguistic, and temporal nature of their lives in transition as well as the children’s familial curriculum making worlds. Our narrative inquiry opens potential avenues for understanding cultural ethics within the relational ethics of narrative inquiry, as well as familial narratives in relation to institutional and social narratives. Our narrative inquiry encourages teachers, researchers, cultural brokers, immigrant facilitators, education policy makers, teacher educators, and newcomer parents and families to more deeply understand and support, by travelling to their diverse worlds, children and families who are composing lives in transition to Canada.

You can find Dr. Tran’s dissertation at: https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-3xcz-wt20

Her work will also soon be published as book!