Narrative inquiry is a methodology that frequently appeals to teachers and teacher educators. However, this appeal and sense of comfort has advantages and disadvantages. Some assume narrative inquiries will be easy to design, live out, and represent in storied formats in journals, dissertations, or books. For the authors, though, narrative inquiry is much more than the telling of stories. There are complexities surrounding all phases of a narrative inquiry and, in this article, the authors pay particular attention to thinking about the design of narrative inquiries that focus on teachers’ and teacher educators’ own practices. They outline three commonplaces and eight design elements for consideration in narrative inquiry. They illustrate these elements using recently completed narrative inquiries. In this way, the authors show the complex dimensions of narrative inquiry, a kind of inquiry that requires particular kinds of wakefulness.

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It is sometimes a difficult journey receiving ethics approval for research involving vulnerable populations, research involving our own children, or innovative research methodologies such as autoethnography. This autoethnographical account is a story about one student who wanted to write a PhD dissertation in a very different way and also the story of her cosupervisors who supported the student in using autoethnography as a creative way to share her "secrets of mothering" and who also supported her through an ethics-approval process that was both challenging and rewarding. This article reflects on a personal journey through the ethics-approval process at a Canadian university integrating components of the Tri-Council Policy Statement (TCPS), that guides university ethics committees across Canada, and asks the questions: What is the purpose of research and how can research ethics boards support research and stories that are difficult to tell and difficult to hear? It is an inquiry into secrets and difficult knowledge, and how reluctant we are to talk about difficult topics such as developmental disabilities, sexual abuse, divorce, accidents, and illness. Recognizing how messy writing about intimate others can be, I have wanted to treat all [my] stories with love and care, while at the same time present [my] life as complex and many-sided . . . My goal has been to balance my ethical responsibilities to participants with my truth-telling obligations to readers while accepting the risks and taking on the burdens that come with writing intimately about myself and my relationships with others.