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Our contribution to ISATT's 40th Anniversary Yearbook focusing on Studying Teaching and Teacher Education grows out of our experiences across time in diverse Lands/Place, situations, and relationships. The knowledge we center have grown through relationships and experiences of great violence and harm alongside experiences and relationships where we have experienced abiding commitments to wholeness and healing. Our individual and collective attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions in the stories we live, tell, retell, and relive about striving to live in good ways, in ethically relational ways, has connected us over time. Living alongside and thinking with one another has shaped our movements beyond the colonial and human-centric understandings of stories of/as experience and thinking with stories that often dominate in (research for) teacher education and development. Attending the spiritual dimensions of stories of experience expands the educative potential of thinking with stories. As humans who are composing lives as educators on Indigenous lands where the colonial project continues to be genocidal for Indigenous peoples and Lands/Place, attentiveness to the spiritual dimensions of experience feels imperative if the next generations of children and youth in schools, and adults in teacher education and development, are to experience these places as educative and non-violent, and as opening potential to interrupt the pervasive colonial narratives that continue to dominate.

This chapter addresses a sensitive topic in the field of education: the relationship between and among narrative inquiry, critical analysis, and critical theory. It argues that narrative inquirers are critical – but not in the same way that critical theorists are critical, although they may draw on the same literature and terms. To make our point, we unpack three of our peer-reviewed articles and highlight our theoretical frames and research moves to demonstrate criticality in narrative inquiry. We specifically discuss (1) titles and topics, (2) research frameworks, (3) historical and contemporary data, (4) use of participants' voices (words and feelings), (5) themes, and (6) new knowledge. We mostly argue that narrative inquiry exists because of experience. From experience, everything else unfolds – including criticality – depending on where the researcher in relationship with research participants, takes the inquiry. This chapter explicitly addresses a lived issue known both inside the narrative inquiry community and outside of it.

My research is a personal effort to understand the experiences that have shaped my work, practice, and living of teaching mathematics. From the boy storied as being smart in mathematics to the man who was tasked in finding ways to Indigenize school mathematics, I have composed stories to live by that share the tensions, conflicting stories, and mis-educative experiences that have shaped who I am as a White Euro-Western mathematician in a Canadian prairie province. My research wonder serves a practical justification as I “attend to the importance of considering the possibility of shifting, or changing practice” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 36) in the context of cross-cultural teaching and learning. Much of the research around Indigenous mathematics education is shaped by misconceptions of Indigenization and inconsistent practices of how this is taken up by practitioners – topics that I analyzed during my doctoral studies. Through my inquiry described in the chapter, I hoped to achieve a nuanced understanding of how the experiences of diverse lives shape the learning of school mathematics.