Guiding Frameworks
I contextualize myself within this portfolio as both the researcher and the researchee. As much as I seek to understand the world - and my world - through the frameworks presented, I continue to both know and unknow more about myself. This work is not easy.
Narrative Inquiry
Narrative inquiry is the foundational framework that weaves my portfolio together. While once considered “both phenomenon and method” (p. 213), narrative inquiry can be understood as a research methodology; however, Clandinin (2020) notes that there is considerable diversity in how researchers define and engage with it. Through my engagement with this work, I have come to see narrative inquiry not only as a methodology, but also as a pedagogy – one that actively shapes how I teach and how I learn, as both a student and a scholar. It is this pedagogical and relational orientation that positions narrative inquiry as a way of understanding human experience. Clandinin (2020) presents narrative inquiry as a relational approach to knowing, grounded in lived experience. As Johnson (2022) notes, “Our being is story. Our essence is story. Our vision is shaped by story; our hearing, our morals and ethics are all story” (p. 35). Narrative inquiry examines how individual stories are shaped and expressed through social interactions and within wider social, cultural, and institutional contexts (Clandinin, 2020). As Clandinin (2020) explains, “Narrative inquirers study the individual’s experience in the world, an experience that is storied both in the living and telling and that can be studied by listening, observing, living alongside another, and writing, and interpreting texts” (pp. 213–214). When we see lives as storied, we are better able to attend to how experience is lived, told, retold, and relived in relationship with others and within particular contexts. As an early childhood educator, narrative inquiry positions me not as an objective observer, but as a participant within the stories I seek to understand. I find myself transfixed in this space of storying - not a lens through which to make meaning, but as something more intimate: a key, and an invitation to step within. Jane Yolen notes, “We do not make history so much as we are made by it. And our stories reflect us as much as they re-create in our children’s lives all that we think and believe in… now” (as cited in de Vos et al., 2003, p. xix). Seen through this lens, lives are not linear but woven - entwined across past, present, and future, inseparable from the stories that precede and follow them. MacIntyre (1981) describes this as “a concept of self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative beginning to middle to end” (as cited in Clandinin, 2020, p. 212). We live in stories, and stories live within us. Because of this - because meaning is made through story - narrative inquiry provides a means of understanding the actions of others. However, narrative inquiry also recognizes that our stories are not static. As we live in relationship with one another, stories begin to collide and entangle, making space for new chapters. In this way, narrative inquiry supports the translation of theory into practice, attends to power and equity, and uses storying as a critical method for examining identity, belonging, and ethical responsibility in early childhood education. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) describe this as inquiry “within a stream of experience that generates new relations that then become a part of future experience” (as cited in Clandinin, 2020, p. 217).
Critical Race Theory
Each of the stories shared within this work is informed by critical theory - examining how power operates through social, economic, and institutional structures to produce inequality and shape dominant narratives about knowledge, identity, and worth (Clandinin, 2020). Introduced to education by Ladson-Billings and Tate in 1995, Critical Race Theory (CRT) examines how racism is deeply entangled within society's systems and institutions. Unlike views that frame racism as “aberrant, isolated and irrational acts intentionally committed by extremists” (Carlton Parson, 2017, p. 32), CRT argues that racism is systemic and perpetuated through laws, policies, and everyday practices (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023). From a CRT perspective, society actively constructs the social meanings of race, shaping what it means to be Black through historically produced and socially maintained structures. In his posthumously published essay, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr explained that “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws— racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (King, 1970, p. 315). Delgado & Stefancic (2023) argue that the permanence of racism is maintained through laws, policies, and institutional norms in which racism is deeply embedded, what they describe as "the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of colour" (p. 7). As such, even when overt discrimination declines, systemic barriers persist, reinforcing dominant narratives. CRT shows up in this work, and in my own stories, through narratives of colourblindness, in which those with power claim not to “see colour" and therefore deny the existence of power imbalances. CRT argues that such narratives obscure structural inequities by erasing historical oppression and ongoing systemic barriers, producing stories that appear neutral while sustaining inequality (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023). CRT further centres marginalized voices, challenging dominant narratives by elevating the lived experiences of Black people. Traditional education systems, including early learning, often centre whiteness in curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, dismissing the cultural and linguistic assets of Black, Indigenous, and other culturally and linguistically diverse children (Wynter-Hoyte & Smith, 2020). Wynter-Hoyte and Smith (2020) emphasize that "the whiteness of school curricula, policies, and practices is a form of anti-Blackness" (p. 407). Within this work, CRT also aligns with the notion of unbroken by affirming the endurance of marginalized stories - “the voices of Black knowledge… histories, experiences, and joy” (p. 408) that persist despite systemic attempts at erasure. Within these counter-stories, critical authors seek to challenge the status quo, disrupting “dominant scripts around race, racism, and power” (Carlton Parson, 2017, p. 35) and displacing the “myths contained within dominant narratives” (p. 35). “Narratives provide a language to bridge the gaps in imagination and conception that give rise to the differend. They reduce alienation for members of excluded groups, while offering opportunities for members of the majority group to meet them halfway” (p. 52). Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality deepens CRT by revealing how stories are not shaped by race alone, but by the entwinement of race, gender, class, and other social locations (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023). These intersecting identities produce distinct experiences of marginalization, reinforcing the importance of attending to multiple, layered stories rather than singular narratives.
Critical Sociocultural Perspective
Sociocultural perspective understands learning and development as fundamentally co-constructed through social relationships and cultural interactions within the various levels of an individual’s ecosystem. Children’s ways of knowing, being, and doing are deeply embedded within “constellations of cultural practices” (Rogoff et al., 2018, p.10) which are interwoven across family, community, history, and place. Building on sociocultural perspective, critical sociocultural perspective examines the enduring social and historical patterns of exclusion and unequal distributions of power and privilege (Esmonde & Booker, 2017). Within this framework, power is understood as relational, emerging through interactions, practices, and material environments, rather than being solely within individuals (Esmonde, 2017). Esmonde and Booker (2017) argue that “power is always already there” (p. 168), entangled within the everyday practices of teaching, shaping which stories are heard while silencing others. Babino & Stewart (2020) assert that “every instructional or curricular decision is a political act - there is no neutrality” and “no value-free knowledge” (p. 117). The foundations of power that influence who is more likely to succeed in life are unequal from the very beginning, as children enter early learning environments with varied access to ‘valued’ forms of cultural knowledge. Those from dominant cultural groups are more likely to possess the “right kind of cultural capital” (O’Conner, 2011, as cited is Massing, 2013, p. 5). Within this portfolio, I seek to acknowledge this disconnect and make evident the responsibility of early childhood educators to become “critically conscious,” (Vossoughi, S., & Gutiérrez, 2017, p. 142) locating themselves within these power relations and committing to social transformation. Recognizing that learning and teaching unfold in the everyday, moment-to-moment interactions, Esmonde and Booker (2017) explain that critical sociocultural work requires consideration not only of what is taught, but to how teaching occurs. Developing a critical sociocultural lens requires reflexive interrogation of self and the “dismantling of the mono-mainstream assumption[s]” (Babino & Stewart, 2020, p. 116), while recognizing the social hierarchies and power inequalities “concerning social status and membership that may be conveyed by cultural ‘insiders’ to “outsiders’” (Holloway, 2018, p. 97). Teaching must be an ongoing practice of noticing, reflecting, and re-visioning the interplay between learning, power, and belonging within children's lived stories as they unfold in everyday moments.
