Young Vietnamese children’s identities-in-flux in Vietnam and Aotearoa New Zealand: A focus on their living stories

Abstract

This is a study with young Vietnamese children in Vietnam and Aotearoa New Zealand, designed to understand their identities-in-flux through their stories. Framed within dialogical and semiotic approaches, the term “living stories” refers to young children’s everyday narratives that exist in multimodal forms and in an unfinalized chain with stories of others (i.e., parents and teachers) about children. Guided by a Bakhtinian lens, children’s identities-in-flux is conceptualized as an ongoing process in which they articulate others’ words to make sense of themselves and the world. A dialogical narrative case-studies design was used with four Vietnamese focal children aged 4–5 years old, two live in Auckland, New Zealand, and two in Hanoi, Vietnam. Families and early childhood education centers/preschools were selected as settings for this study. I chose to become a friend to engage with young children and listen to their narratives. Living stories were collected through diverse resources (i.e., close observation, informal conversations, fieldnotes, and artifacts). Semistructured interviews and informal conversations were conducted to access parents’ and teachers’ narratives about children. Data analysis was completed through three steps (i.e., transcriptions, the four-layer analysis of living stories, and narrative analysis to compose case stories). Findings revealed that the four young children played, combined, and transformed multimodal language (silences, art, early literacy, and imaginary stories) in their narrative chains to express themselves. Based on a Bakhtinian notion of unfinalizability, I found that children’s ideas and interests traveled across modes of language, time, and settings. Findings also conveyed the children as active agents who, through prior experiences and special interests, articulated resources from culture, friendship, and adults’ responses in multimodal ways to build their worlds. Findings from this thesis promote a reconsideration of children as interbeings with adults and an approach of being present with children for parents, teachers, and educators to comprehend and engage with children’s worlds.