‘I don’t want sad stories’

Abstract

Foregrounding the agency and voices of families who sought refuge in the United States, we investigated their storytelling by asking: What kinds of stories do parents/guardians choose to share? And what are the purposes of their storytelling? Assisted by interpreters, we worked with nine families with children aged from five to eight years, who had come from Nepal, Somalia and South Sudan, observing their storytelling and conducting interviews. The storytelling and interview sessions were video-recorded and translated/transcribed. Adapting Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework, we employed emergent coding and constant comparative analysis to identify themes of stories and purposes for storytelling. Our findings revealed two important patterns. First, the families focused on traditional stories with explicit moral lessons and these stories illustrated six forms of CCW: familial, navigational, social, aspirational, resistant and linguistic capital. Conspicuously, stories of forced displacement over-represented in literature were missing. Second, the storytelling was intended for their children to learn moral lessons, maintain home cultural heritage and language, and have fun. They also expressed the desire to share their stories in schools. Our study highlights the efforts of families who experienced forced displacement to counter dominant narratives of trauma and deficit. Based on the findings, we discuss how schools and society can leverage the CCW of communities to support their children’s learning and development.