Shifting Paradigms: Reimagining Experience Alongside Urban Aboriginal Youth

• In Event: Roundtable Session 42
  In Roundtable Session: Counterstories and Playfulness: Reimagining Experience

Abstract

In this paper we share how our ontological and epistemological commitments to narrative inquiry as conceptualized by Connelly and Clandinin guides our work within an urban Aboriginal youth after-school program. Recently, we completed a thorough literature review pertaining to after-school programming for urban Aboriginal youth. The literature illustrated how programming can be framed within a number of paradigms and that each of these paradigms offer different purposes as well as questions. We engaged with the common threads within the literature to illustrate how post positivist, Neo Marxist and narrative frames position work alongside Aboriginal youth differently. We pose wonders about how thinking narratively might allow possibilities to pose different questions, and engage in research with Aboriginal youth in different ways.

Authors

• Brian Lewis, University of Regina

• Lee Mason Schaefer, McGill University

• Sean Michael Lessard, University of Alberta