Storycrafting refugee children’s lives. Presenting Ali and the Long Journey to Australia

Abstract

Refugee students may come to schools with fragmented educational histories and other exile-related stressors, but many also settle fast, enjoy school and live rather ordinary childhoods. These more positive stories are not told because they get overridden by well-meaning but counterproductive stories of victimhood. This article presents a storycrafting project with 13 primary school aged refugee children in Australia, with an aim to problematise this deficit-discourse. The outcome was the group’s “preferred narrative”, that is, a story combining fact and fiction within the dialogical process between the teller and the audiences. The story was published as a fictional book and an animated film entitled Ali and the Long Journey Australia. This article discusses this process and its outcome; how a child-led project combining fact and fiction can inform qualitative research, and how stories are welcomed by audiences which are out of reach by regular research outputs.