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Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate “walking alongside” in the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, as explored through the field texts of two teacher educators, one mentoring the other through layered stories of “place.”

Approach – The authors use several interpretive tools to explore the question, “What sustains us as teacher educators?” The dialogue deepens as the authors make their professional knowledge landscapes more visible, bringing sacred stories, stories of gender, stories of hierarchy, stories of power, and stories of race forward, exploring how these stories are held in tension with one another. The authors ponder the questions: what happens when the small stories’ educators living in “place” become so far removed from authorized meta-narratives also underway in “place”? And, how can we remain wakeful to the numerous story constellations of others that revolve around us?

Findings – The analytical spaces described by the researchers helped them to realize and share with others that researchers may more fully respect the vulnerability our research participants feel that comes along with their own restorying. Vulnerability brought forward a common bond found in the experiences of “place” in the field texts. Narrative inquirers who write field texts, then restory their own narratives of place, add to the empirical dimensions of narrative inquiry and its attentiveness to lived experience.

Research implications – This demonstration, through its examples of the three-dimensional space of narrative inquiry, shows how interpretation emanates from the various cracks, corners, and even the air within this important analytical space. Narrative researchers may continue to unpack this space in their work. Narrative inquirers are also reminded that place is storied and that human beings are narratively anchored in place, an important consideration for relational research ethics.

Value – Readers can interact with the tools used by narrative inquirers, in this case, “tracing” and “burrowing and broadening.” Narrative inquirers may also recognize vulnerability as an effect of interpreting within the three-dimensional inquiry space, and understand the necessity of vulnerability as a part of thinking narratively.

As narrative inquirers in the midst of our journeys as researchers and teacher educators, we restory a portion of our journeys here, as an invitation for readers to live alongside us – living, telling, reliving, retelling (Clandinin & Connelly, 1994). What resonance, tension, questions, or stories emerge as we enter the past?

In the introductory chapter to this book, we invited the reader to join us along the banks of the braided rivers of narrative inquiry research. We hoped to convey through that metaphor the interconnections we find among the work of our contributing colleagues. As we conclude this book, we ask the reader to join us as we visit the headwaters and tributaries of this research tradition. Nearly three decades ago, Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin embarked upon a study at Bay Street School (Clandinin, 1986; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Connelly, Phillion, & He, 2003) to investigate teachers’ personal practical knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1985). Using narrative as both phenomenon and methodology (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992, 2000; Clandinin, 2008) for this study, their work in the field was integral to the adoption of narrative inquiry as a research methodology in the, then, burgeoning study of teacher knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988, 1990, 1999), teacher education (Clandinin, 1991, 1992; Connelly & Clandinin, 2000), and curriculum studies (Clandinin & Connelly, 2002). In these areas, as well as in others (i.e., Nursing; Chan, 2008; Chan & Schwind, 2006; Lindsay, 2006a, 2006b), this research, which focused on experience, became well-established and expanded.