Cultural Identity Formation: A Personal Narrative

This paper provides an autoethnography of personal experiences and perceptions of being a minoritized individual. This is the story of a professional social worker learning to adapt to social norms and expectations of self. I discuss the struggles I experienced as an adolescent and as a young adult attending college. This narrative highlights the intersection of faith and social work at moments in my professional development. It is at this intersection that this social worker learns to live a holistic life without feeling discriminated against or ashamed of his identity. I begin to actualize a reality with imperfect beings who also struggle to maintain their own identities. Thus, in this paper, I provide a snapshot of my development as a minority in the United States

Underneath the Observational Snapshot: Looking For Sense and Meaning Behind the First Impressions of a Learning Interaction

Education practitioners, including Ofsted inspectors and Teacher Educators, try to make sense of behaviour in the classroom by observing the interaction of teachers and learners. They make judgements about what is good teaching, what is bad learner behaviour and what are inclusive and effective learning experiences. This article argues that such observations are inadequate for assessing and evaluating learning behaviour and insufficient to enable teachers to develop their own personalised teaching and learning strategies and their confidence as professional teachers. The article was written in response to examples of Further Education (FE) teachers describing the college classroom as a war zone and a battlefield (Lebor, 2013). The author argues that such metaphors reinforce the notion that teachers and learners are situated at opposing sides of an education institution with differing interests. They also ignore the position of the teacher as being a learner too. The author advocates using an existentialist approach to understanding and reflecting on the learning process. She models strategies she has used herself to attempt to step outside the conventional paradigm of learning in college and create a new framework for reflecting on what is good behaviour from a teacher and good behaviour from a learner

Rupture: an autobiography in earthquakes

Rupture is an attempt at building a relationship between a half-remembered childhood and an anonymous set of numbers. Rupture consists of three elements: a large display of data collected over the duration of my life; a collection of sixteen photographs; and audio recollections of my life in Jamaica. With this combination I explore the nature of memory and discovery. In particular I look for a way to bridge the space between memory and recollection. In my reading I travel from my own experience of cultural and political recollection through a contemplation of the poignancy within a personal snapshot to an examination of the fractured process in which our brains separate and later reassemble our past. The original impetus for this work was my memory of a night spent under the stars during a small earthquake. For a moment I was unsure if the sky was moving or the earth beneath me

In the Vernacular: Photography of the Everyday

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "In the Vernacular" at Boston University Art Gallery

Connected Citizens Detroit: A Snapshot of Civic Engagement

This report was commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement, to share insights from the "Detroit Civic Engagement Showcase & Learning Conference," which took place in September 2012