Hoa Pham - Doctor of Education

“My thesis that explores young Vietnamese children’s identity formation through living stories in Vietnam and New Zealand sheds light on how they raised their voices across different cultural contexts.

“Contemporarily, young Vietnamese children's voices and their stories are marginalized in research. The Vietnamese community is a minority group in New Zealand and no empirical studies have been done to identify narratives and identity formation of young Vietnamese children living there. My study promotes equity in research with young children and early language.

“Based on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, I created the term living stories to call children’s spontaneous narratives that they told in daily interactions. In my understanding, each story never dies. It is composed of multimodal languages, including nonverbal actions, verbal speech, and arts. It also travels from an individual to another individual, from one context to another context, from one generation to future generation.

“Children’s stories live because they are created in multimodal forms of languages and always exist in an open-ended chain with other stories (parents’ and teachers’ narratives of/about children). Children are stories waiting to be told.”

“I have been truly satisfied with the diverse and strong support that I received from the University of Auckland during Covid-19. When I was in lockdown, I still could attend virtual courses, workshops, and seminars, which sustained my connection with campus life and academic network.

“The University also provided financial funding to support my hardship due to Covid-19. My supervisors, Jan Gaffney and Marek Tesar always cared for my wellbeing over the time of the pandemic. They always asked me about my personal life, my family in Vietnam and have supported me unconditionally.

“The most important lesson I received from my supervisors is not to colonize my thinking. I’ve learnt to interconnect global ideas of childhood with Vietnamese Indigenous values of children to make my case. Under their supervision, I know that when I can reach the deepest line of my Vietnamese-ness, I will see the universal values of humanity and childhood.

“The most significant experience I’ve had during my studies was in last December when my colleagues and I virtually attended in Literacy Research Association Conference in the USA. There were five presentations in this session and I was honored to be one of five presenters.

“For me, studying at the Marie Clay Research Center of the University of Auckland has opened a significant threshold to sail the boat of my research into the great ocean of academia.”