Colloquium on Story and Narrative in Research

Please join us at the Queen’s Faculty of Education as we reflect on the role of narrative, stories, and storytelling in research. This one-day colloquium is rooted in dialogue. After brief presentations from leading and emerging scholars, we will engage in conversation as a group of researchers, practitioners, and students exploring the role stories play in our work.

Agenda

Coffee, tea and networking - 9:30 – 10:00

Session 1 – 10:00 – 12:00

Amplifying Voices, Reclaiming Futures: Women’s Stories of Education in Northern Nigeria

Halima Wali – 10:00 – 10:20

Personal Narrative in Research

Pamela Beach – 10:20–10:40

Hold Environments: Story Me a Lived Experience - Dr. Lalai Abbas

Lalai Abbas – 10:40 – 11

Discussion –   11 - 1

Lunch – 12 - 1

Session 2 –1-3

The Power of Story to Change Worlds

Patty Douglas –1 – 1:20

Emergent Epiphanies: Bridging Creative Storytelling, Pedagogy, and Research on Belonging

Sabrina Masud – 1:20 – 1:40

Weaving Wisdom: The Influences of a Writer

Rebecca Luce-Kapler – 1:40- 2:00

Discussion –   2 - 3

Register

Abstracts

Amplifying Voices, Reclaiming Futures: Women’s Stories of Education in Northern Nigeria - Halima Wali

Stories hold power. They shape how we understand the world, ourselves, and our place within it. In Northern Nigeria, women’s educational journeys are often told for them, framed by societal expectations, cultural norms, and institutional barriers. This presentation reclaims these narratives by centering women’s own voices, exploring how they story their lived experiences of education. Drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology, I examine how women’s personal accounts reveal both structural constraints and acts of resistance, how they navigate challenges, and how they articulate their aspirations for the future. Their stories do more than document experiences; they challenge dominant discourses, disrupt silences, and create space for new understandings of education, agency, and change. This presentation will also reflect on the role of narrative in research; how storytelling not only uncovers meaning but also serves as a method of inquiry that bridges the personal and the structural. What does it mean to listen deeply to the stories women tell? And how can narrative research amplify marginalized voices in ways that influence educational policy and practice?

Halima Wali is a researcher, educator, and storyteller passionate about amplifying the voices of women in education. As a PhD candidate in Curriculum Studies at Queen’s University, her research explores the lived experiences of women in Northern Nigeria, focusing on how they story their educational journeys, navigating challenges, resisting barriers, and shaping their own futures. Drawing on hermeneutic phenomenology, she examines the ways in which storytelling serves as both a method of meaning-making and a tool for advocacy. Beyond academia, Halima has worked extensively in teacher education and leadership, supporting educators in creating inclusive and transformative learning spaces. She believes in the power of stories, not just as research, but as a force for change, one that challenges dominant narratives and makes space for voices that have too often been overlooked.

 

Personal Narrative in Research - Dr. Pamela Beach

During her presentation, Dr. Beach will explore how personal narratives can serve as a catalyst for advancing research in language and early literacy development. She will share insights from her own experiences and illustrate how personal stories can provide deeper context and new perspectives in research. By examining the intersection of personal experience and academic inquiry, Dr. Beach will highlight the power of narrative in driving forward research-based language and literacy practices.

Pamela Beach is an Associate Professor of Language and Literacy and currently the Associate Dean, Research at the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Prior to joining Queen’s in 2016, Pamela was an elementary school teacher and taught a range of grades and subject areas from junior kindergarten to seventh grade. Her background as an elementary teacher has influenced her research which centres on the dissemination of research-informed literacy practices. Pamela's recently published book, Promoting Language and Early Literacy: Practical Insights from a Parent Researcher, combines teaching experience, research findings, and first-hand parenting stories, to capture the key elements necessary for a deep understanding of language and early literacy development.

 

Hold Environments: Story Me a Lived Experience - Dr. Lalai Abbas

My phenomenological research was about naming the material, the conceptual, and the affective of our lived curricular experience in Canada. As a collective of female diasporic Pakhtun-Canadian students at the university level, we decided to become co-researchers to fully allow our messy, fugitive, dislocated-whole-dispersed selves/onto epistemologies into the space of research. Much was complicated. Existence/finding form for hpyhenated onto-epistemologies does not come easy to women whose lives have been pockmarked by epistemic violence. We gathered seven different times to feel whole and to make meaning of our disjuncture/lived experience. Our gathering was a mother's womb - a holding environment - where we found refuge and wherefrom, we emerged as new becomings. As the lead researcher, I was responsible to articulate the disjuncture: the cataclysms and subsequent transformations. In story, I found a potentiating space: a holding environment for the dislocated, the ineffable, the antinomies and the aporias of existence and growth in the interstices between two distinctive cultural and academic-cultural worlds. Although, story is imbricated in the world's consciousness, it protects and preserves our consciousness - lived experience/memory - in its infancy/vulnerability from the harsh outside/without. To story is to find refuge to grow, to push the limits of body/mind/world, to transcend and expand into ether. To story, then, is a spiritual act. 

Lalai Abbas is a researcher and instructor in the Faculty of Humanities, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. She is an active member of Ontario College of Teachers and has her B. Ed., M. Ed., and PhD from Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Her research interests include curriculum theory, transformational learning experiences, multimodal onto-epistemologies, multimodal teaching and learning, international education, hermeneutic inquiry, narrative hermeneutics, multimodal memory-work, cultural identities and Pakhtun women.

 

The Power of Story to Change Worlds - Dr. Patty Douglas

How can we—educators, researchers and community members—tap the power of research and story to imagine and create a world that affirms, and even desires, disability and difference? This presentation explores storytelling in educational research as a vehicle with the power to transform hearts, minds and worlds in difference affirming ways. Story has the power to touch lives in ways that most research cannot, inviting whole selves into relationship with difference in ways that are self, other and world changing. The talk engages the audience in two short films to shift understandings of disability from deficit to gift, and to invite new insights around the power of story to change worlds and instill hope.

Patty Douglas uses the power of the arts and story to rethink disability and difference in education in affirming ways, and to reimagine education by cultivating collaboration and care. She is an Associate Professor of Disability Studies and the Inaugural Chair in Student Success and Wellness in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. Patty has published widely in her fields. Her book, Unmothering Autism: Ethical Disruptions and Affirming Care is available from UBC Press. For more information, see restoryingautism.com.

 

Emergent Epiphanies: Bridging Creative Storytelling, Pedagogy, and Research on Belonging - Dr. Sabrina Masud

In this paper, I explore the interconnected relationship between my creative work, teaching, and autoethnographic reflection, forming a cohesive narrative that bridges my thesis and practice. By examining a thematic thread emerging in one of my creative pieces, I will illustrate how it informed my engagement with students on issues of power, privilege, and ecological belonging. I will demonstrate how these works foster critical dialogues in the classroom, while also reflecting on how teaching informs my creative process. Central to this discussion are ‘epiphanic moments’ of realization that challenge perceptions of invisibility and agency. This presentation highlights the dynamic interplay between creative expression, pedagogy, and personal experience in shaping both academic and artistic development.

Sabrina Masud holds a Ph.D. in English from Queen’s University, specializing in Environmental Justice and Literature. Her research explores the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism, subaltern studies, and literary representations of resistance. She has published in leading academic journals, including the Journal of Black Studies, and contributed a book chapter to The Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader (Lexington). A BBC award-winning playwright, Sabrina has actively promoted performance literature in Bangladesh and is involved in social justice initiatives through community advocacy. She seeks to expand her research on environmental justice and marginalized bodies in literature.

 

Weaving Wisdom: The Influences of a Writer - Dr. Rebecca Luce-Kapler

This presentation is a retrospective acknowledgement of the most significant influences on my writing and research. These influences ground my beliefs about writing and teaching writing in a practice that I find fulfilling and joyous.

Rebecca Luce-Kapler is Dean of Education at Queen’s, a professor, and a writer. Her research interests focus on the integral role of literary practices, particularly writing, in developing human consciousness and identity. For her writing, she has won the Michener Medal in Fine Arts. She has published over 50 poems and two books, most recently The Negation of Chronology: Imagining Geraldine Moodie. Her academic book, Writing with, through, and beyond the text: An ecology of language, is the most significant example of how her writing and academic interests influence each other.