Through the use of autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2000) and ethnodramatic performance (Saladana, 2003) this thesis presents an articulation of how the practice of meditation and silence influences identity and communication. Through self-reflection, interviews and conscious performance, I hope to contribute to literature describing health geographies and wellness communication. The data for this paper was collected during ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Bodhi Zendo, a Zen Meditation Centre located in the hills of Kodaiknal, in the province of Tamil Nadu on the southeastern coast of India. During a four-week period between December 1st 2012 and January 2nd 2013, I participated as a practitioner and researcher where I conducted interviews with other retreat participants, documented my own experiences, and recorded my own and other participants' reflections through photography, video, and self-reflective field notes. During my time at the Zen Centre I meditated for ten hours daily and I completed both a silent mini-sesshin and a silent sesshin . This paper includes thoughts and experiences prior to the fieldwork in India as well as thoughts and reflections experienced during the five months upon returning home to Canada. The pupose of this paper is to demonstrate the experience of self through a meditative lens and describe the liminal and transformative states between silence and sound.

In this autoethnographic personal narrative, I share my multifaceted journey of developing ecological embodied cognition in the context of climate change, specifically in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. Through spending time alone with the other-than-human world and using a deliberate practice of mindfulness to develop a participatory postmodern worldview, I seek to integrate multiple ways of knowing to complement my existing strengths of scientific, positivist understanding of the world. I suggest that expanding my (our) metaphoric construct of self to include ecological self, is vital to deepening sustainable relationships with nature and with other humans. I depict and evoke for readers my personal experience as a potential model of adaptation and worldview change. As environmental educator and education leader in the public school system, I will bring these new skills and ways of knowing and being to the classroom, to more meaningfully promote sustainability initiatives and behaviors.

The “urban” mathematics classroom has become an increasingly polarized site, one where many middle-class White teachers attempt to bridge the divide between themselves and their relatively economically disadvantaged, non-White students. With its mania for high-stakes testing, current education policy has intensified the importance of mathematics in the school curriculum—both drawing attention to and reifying an “achievement gap” between White (and Asian) and non-White students (Martin, 2009c, 2010). Keeping in mind the Mathematics for all rhetoric as it affects the academic and life success of students (Martin, 2003), this cultural polarization in the mathematics classroom provides a rich site for exploring pedagogical practices that might improve mathematics achievement and persistence for all students. As a middle-class White man, I am a teacher in such a divided situation; I have spent the past 7 years working with almost entirely Black 9th graders as a mathematics classroom teacher in an urban high school. In this study, I employ a critical postmodern theoretical perspective (Stinson, 2009; Stinson & Bullock, 2012) toward an autoethnography (e.g., Ellis & Bochner, 2000) of my experiences as a teacher in this particular educational environment. Using writing as a “method of inquiry” (Richardson, 2000), with an emphasis on two particular intersections of critical race theory (e.g., Tate, 1997) and poststructural theory (e.g., St. Pierre, 2011)—the role of storytelling and the concept of “race” as metanarrative—I examine, theorize, and (re)tell of my life and teaching experiences. My aim is to provide assistance of sorts for a new teacher in a similar situation; the kind of educator—middle class and White—who, according to projections, will more times than not be filling the role of teacher in the urban mathematics classroom. The goal of this study is twofold: (a) to gain and share theoretical and practical insight into my teacher identity and pedagogical practices, and (b) to provide potential insight for and assistance to other mathematics teachers who may see themselves in the (re)telling of my stories.

This study explored the experience of engaging in reflective practice through the framework of Levelising. Reflective practice has been of interest to professionals and educators of professionals for many years. However, Levelising is a recently introduced approach. Levelising categorizes the reflective process into four modes. These modes include an awareness of what is occurring (Level I), considering one’s actions (Level II), considering one’s conceptual frame (Level III), and considering the conceptual frames of others (Level IV). This study focuses on my personal experience of improving my facilitation using Levelising as a framework for reflective practice. The context of the study was a professional development workshop conducted over a nine-week period with 10 participants attending. This study was conducted as action research in the form of an autoethnography. I kept a reflexive journal of my workshop experiences and used the journal entries to reflect after each workshop session. My reflections were the data I used to study my use of Levelising to improve my facilitation practice. I engaged in on-going formative analysis during the course of the workshop. A summative analysis was performed following the conclusion of the workshop to identify how engaging in Levelising as a framework for reflections informed the decisions I made to improve practice. Findings indicated that the use of Levelising in my reflection on practice increased my awareness of aspects of my facilitation that needed to be changed. Levelising revealed differences in my espoused theories and theories in practice. I became more aware of the need to question my assumptions, values, beliefs, and biases prior to, during, and following facilitation experiences.

As students in professional academic programs are socialized to the profession they refine their professional construct. Using an autoethnographic method, I describe the changes in my professional construct through participation in two international immersion experiences. I analyze how specific experiences contributed to changes in my professional construct. The mechanisms for professional socialization include interacting with professors and professional occupational therapists, personal reflection, interacting with others in a culture different from my own, and experiencing uncertainty and vulnerability. Examining how these experiences shaped my professional construct may inform future initiatives to socialize future occupational therapists to the profession.

OLIVEIRA, Fernanda Cunha. As cores violetas: a construção da memória afetiva através da autoetnografia visual. 2012. 106f. – Dissertação (Mestrado) – Universidade Federal do Ceará, Programa de Pós-graduação em Comunicação Social, Fortaleza (CE), 2012. / Submitted by Gustavo Daher (gdaherufc@hotmail.com) on 2017-10-10T17:02:45Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_dis_fcoliveira.pdf: 3813099 bytes, checksum: 059bc56dbaa28bdf96b965078e8193d6 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Márcia Araújo (marcia_m_bezerra@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-10-10T20:14:11Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_dis_fcoliveira.pdf: 3813099 bytes, checksum: 059bc56dbaa28bdf96b965078e8193d6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-10-10T20:14:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2012_dis_fcoliveira.pdf: 3813099 bytes, checksum: 059bc56dbaa28bdf96b965078e8193d6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / This work is the result of an autoethnography process, realized from the experience of building a photographic self-narrative as an essay that will discuss issues which comes from this process related to memory as a key issue, offering an invitation to a reflection on the construction of my affective memory as a man in society and his representation in family albums. This research questions how the albums can represent the values of established rites in western culture and how the photography has a special place in the history of societies. It also investigates how my subjectivity and my anthropological and sociocultural heritage define the formation of images on my mind and the construction of my memory. And this is not only a question of my own, but as the work of every artist that is within his work. I use my experience as an artist to think about an issue beyond me. It is not a matter of just another one, but a matter that goes beyond me towards the other. Thus, we propose a visual autoethnographic methodological route in which the reality is the researcher’s universe. The project constructs a visual narrative at the end of the work resulting in a family album, but for that I develop this dissertation based on three correlated bases: image, memory and autoethnography. The picture as a form of dialogue and writing is the cornerstone of this work. / Este trabalho é resultado de um processo de autoetnografia, realizado a partir da experiência de construção de uma auto-narrativa fotográfica como forma ensaística e que vai discutir questões que vem desse processo relacionados à memória como uma questão fundamental, oferecendo um convite à reflexão sobre a construção da minha memória afetiva como indivíduo na sociedade e sua representação nos álbuns de família. A pesquisa questiona como os álbuns podem representar os valores de ritos estabelecidos na cultura ocidental e de que maneira a fotografia ocupa um lugar privilegiado na história das sociedades. Também investigo de que maneira a minha subjetividade e a minha herança antropológica e sociocultural definem a formação das imagens em minha mente e a construção da minha memória. E esta não é uma questão só minha, mas como o trabalho de todo artista que está dentro de sua obra. Utilizo-me da minha experiência como artista para pensar uma questão que me ultrapassa. Não é uma questão do outro apenas, mas uma questão que me ultrapassa em direção ao outro. Assim, proponho um percurso metodológico autoetnográfico visual em que a realidade estudada é o universo do pesquisador. O projeto constrói uma narrativa visual ao final do trabalho tendo como resultado um álbum de família, mas para isto desenvolvo esta dissertação fundamentada em três bases correlacionadas: a imagem, a memória e a autoetnografia. A imagem como uma forma de diálogo e escrita é o pilar deste trabalho.

The university classroom is an invaluable site for social activism. In this study, I focus on the university classroom in order to consider how university instructors care for students. More specifically, I consider what I call critical care--that is, care underscored by critical and critical communication pedagogy. I start by defining care, critical pedagogy, and critical communication pedagogy. Then, I focus on my own experiences autoethnographically to understand some of the ways I have come to understand care. After conducting interviews with teachers and those teachers' former students, I conducted dyad interviews between the teacher and the teacher's former student. I use the transcripts of these interviews as the data for an analysis of how these teachers and students understand care in their relationship. Because the teachers selected must have some background with critical and/or critical communication pedagogy, I also use the transcripts to build a case for critical care. I argue that critical care is the best way to build more humane and equitable classrooms.

This thesis explores the storytelling strategies utilized by Mexican migrant workers and their families. Through the use of autoethnography, I examine how these storytelling strategies are created and how they function. Juxtaposing formal and informal interviews of my immediate family with my own personal narrative, I identify five Mexican storytelling archetypes: la llorona, el machismo, el güero, el patrón, and el indígeno. Using a methodological framework provided Kristin Langellier and Eric Peterson, I analyze how these storytelling strategies are used to sustain cultural norms and create family identity. Finally, I discuss a performance I created titled “30 Days: A Story of Confinement” that staged conceptualizations of these storytelling strategies.

Autoethnography is a research method that relies on connecting personal narrative to larger social issues, using writing and/or performance to draw those connections for an audience and critique those issues along the way. Autoethnographers, in a vulnerable act, tell their own stories to make these connections and critiques, and ask their audiences to help them change the way society functions, to help achieve social justice by engaging with and helping to solve these issues. This project explores a specific autoethnographic work—The Wolf Inside, a solo performance piece dealing with the dis/ableist experiences of the author in their journey toward diagnosis, treatment, and good quality of life with systemic lupus erythematosus. It examines the implications of autoethnography as a method of educating audiences about invisible disabilities like lupus, confronting harmful dis/ableist behaviors, offering solutions to these issues, and functioning as a coping mechanism for the author/performer who lives with invisible disabilities.

This project documents the complex and interwoven relationship between mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people—a task inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in a white working-class family and neighborhood and how she came to understand herself through watching films and television shows. Theoretically guided by Foucault’s recognition that people are constituted in and through discourse, the author specifically analyzes how reality television articulates certain ideas about white working-class people and how those who identify as members of this population, including the author, negotiate such articulations. A focus on white working-class people is important considering their increasing presence in reality television and the ways in which they are frequently ridiculed in U.S. cultural discourse. Through a combination of qualitative methods, including critical autoethnography, interviews, interactive focus groups, and close textual analysis, the author focuses on three findings: (1) the lived experiences of white working-class people are complex and can be used to challenge essentializing stereotypes about this population prevalent in the media; (2) films and television shows are polysemic as evidenced by the varied responses of white working-class people; and (3) listening to those who are implicated in media sites can render more complex the analyses and critiques scholars provide as well as contribute to the recent increase of media studies that speak across multiple methods and boundaries.