1,721,006 research outputs found
Voices of Ethiopian blind immigrants and their families : facing the challenges of life in Canada
Get PDFWhen educated professionals with a disability immigrate to Canada with their families, they are full of hope. Because they were told that Canada is a land of opportunity, they expect to build on their past careers and become fully employed. Nevertheless, the experience of many immigrant families with an educated adult member with a disability has been long years of poverty and unemployment in Canada.
My phenomenological and heuristic study was designed to explore the central research question, "What is the lived experience of Ethiopian immigrant families in Canada in which one adult member is blind?" My study also examined several sub-questions: I-low does the fact that one family member has a disability affect the family as a whole, in their experience as immigrants in Canada? What are the social barriers that the blind immigrant and his or her family have encountered during the experience adapting to Canadian society? What are the strengths and coping mechanisms of the family members? What changes do immigrants suggest to improve the lives of immigrant families with a blind adult family member?
Using interviews, I gathered the family experiences of six blind participants, as well as two sighted participants whose partners were blind. All were adult immigrants from Ethiopia. I chose to use methodology that would give participants a "voice" and would allow their own words to be used when describing the findings. Transcripts went through a process of narrative analysis. Data was divided into categories and then separated into themes.
Twelve metathemes emerged from data analysis of 323 themes: Comparison of Ethiopia and Canada's treatment of blind people, High Achievement, Persistence and perseverance, Ethiopian expectations about a blind child or student, Social construction of disability, Importance of Advocacy, Unemployment in Canada, Desire to be independent and self-supporting, Personal and family strengths, Importance of social support network, Participants' experiences accessing help from CNIB and employment agencies, and Recommended Government Policy Improvement.
The emerging metathemes supported the view of scholars who hold that "disability" is a social construction and is merely a characteristic. Despite "disability", my six blind participants achieved academic education and entered fulfilling careers in one country. Afterward, they endured long years of poverty and unemployment in a second country. The sighted partners of educated blind professionals verified their partners' experiences of poverty and ableism since immigrating to their new country. The two contrasting experiences demonstrated that "disability" was framed either positively or negatively by the social environment in which the educated blind professionals lived and worked.
Participants' experiences revealed that Canadian employment agencies lack accountability. As well, employment agencies and organizations for the blind are providing ineffective help for blind people seeking employment. Several participants noted the need for "organizations of the blind, not, for the blind" in order to improve the services of such organizations.
In contrast to the stereotype that successful blind people must he special or talented, the study revealed that blind people can become educated and employed in their careers when there is motivation, opportunity, and some small amount of social support. The participants all believe that employment is part of full citizenship.
The study revealed that certain personal and family strengths of sighted and blind participants have supported them to stay together as a family and to persist in seeking employment without losing hope. Despite hardships related to long term unemployment, participants continue to live fairly peaceably within their families. Their support for each other within the family, and their persistence and refusal to give up hope was striking. All participants called out for increased activism and advocacy for both Canadian-born and immigrant blind people, on the part of the Canadian government
Feeling the race issue: how teachers of colour deal with acts of racism towards them
Get PDFInspired by my own struggles with racism, this narrative and phenomenology study investigated how teachers of colour in the Canadian schooling system dealt with the pain of racism and how this process informed their teaching practice. I addressed this issue of racism and its relevance to the schooling process from an anti-racist theory of education theoretical framework. The study comprised of six women of colour who shared their experiences with racism through written narratives, face to face interviews, as well as electronic communications. While the study focused on the schooling experiences of the teachers, their narratives comprised of holistic experiences that included experiences in the schooling system as well as the general society. The data collected, revealed the following themes as central to the questions of the study: Knowledge of cultural, family, and political history gave the participants strength to stand against racism. However, most of the women carried the shame of being and knowing they were different. Trying to attain a form of standardized beauty was an ongoing struggle for the participants. All participants pointed to one teacher whose care was instrumental to their choice to become teachers. To the participants getting a good education was more important than worrying or paying attention to the pain of racism. However, all but one of the participants admitted to receiving treatment for racism related anxiety. Finally, the participants shared that by participating in the arts or having personal faith and beliefs was helpful tool that helped them negotiate the worlds of their cultural beliefs and traditions and that of mainstream (White society) society
Explorations through digital video
Get PDFPrevious learning experiences, that transformed my understandings of learning as a student learning to use digital video at Gulf Islands Film and Television School (GIFTS), resulted in an interest to learn more about the experiences of others while working with digital video and film, hence this study. This study involves the use of digital video to gather information and digital video as a form of representation for the study. The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of one's experiences while working with digital video and film, with a focus on what matters and what makes a difference for students and mentors while learning and teaching about digital video and film during a one-week session offered to youth and adults at GIFTS. Data were gathered through on-site observations, field notes, questionnaires, and digital video recordings of participant interviews, conversations and activities. The video recordings provide visual, auditory and contextual detail about the film school and the participants and their learning experiences for both the thesis and video components of this study.Graduat
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
From action research to knowledge democracy Cartagena 1977-2017
No full textI (Budd) was working in Tanzania from 1970-1975 as the head of the research department of the Institute for Adult Education at the University of Dar-es-Salaam. I was part of a community of young researchers, both Tanzanian and expatriates, who had been attracted to work in Tanzania because of the vision of the late President Julius K Nyerere. Mwalimu (teacher) Nyerere was an engaging intellectual as well as the leader of the Independence movement. He had a vision for building Tanzania from an African political framework. His political philosophy was called Ujamaa, a Kiswahili word related to familyhood. His vision was often referred to as African socialism. Among the principles of this approach was the call to build on the knowledge and skills of ordinary women and men. The Tanzanian approach was one of the earliest examples of participatory development. As he said at times, “Poor people do not use money for a weapon, they use ideas and leadership”. Over a period of time, we began, as an informal network of researchers, to find that the epistemological tools that we had been trained with, positivist, quantitative, and survey research methods, did not fit well with the Tanzanian emphasis on participatory development. Our research methods, developed in the seats of colonial power, centralized meaning making and the naming of the world. Researchers sitting in the capital city of Dar-es-Salaam were thinking up research topics, gathering data in large-scale field survey, only to make meaning of the subsequent findings based on the logical imagination in the minds of the researchers. Over a period of several years, many of us evolved an approach to research that we believed fit the vision, political aspirations, and reality of the Tanzanian context more adequately. We were encouraged in this work by a visit in 1971 of Paulo Freire who spoke to us about his approach to research that he called thematic investigation. His sophisticated theoretical approach to conscientization and the call to both read and write the world were very similar to the vision and practice that Nyerere was calling for. We called this way of working; participatory research. We first published a series of articles on participatory research in the journal of the International Council of Adult Education, Convergence in 1975 (Hall, 1975)
Socially Responsible Higher Education
Get PDFIs higher education contributing to our global crises? Does it offer stories of hope? The editors feature authors and viewpoints from often excluded groups of emerging scholars and parts of the world seldom read in literature on higher education and social responsibility.; Readership: Higher education students, scholars and administrators. Ministries of higher education, policy makers, networks, foundations, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Climate crisis and social justice activists, University World News
Socially Responsible Higher Education
Get PDFIs higher education contributing to our global crises? Does it offer stories of hope? The editors feature authors and viewpoints from often excluded groups of emerging scholars and parts of the world seldom read in literature on higher education and social responsibility.; Readership: Higher education students, scholars and administrators. Ministries of higher education, policy makers, networks, foundations, UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Climate crisis and social justice activists, University World News
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