Education Commons^™

Open Adoption From A Birth Mother's Perspective: A Story To Help Educators At All Levels Understand And Help Others Heal, Sara Elizabeth Villeneuve

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

When I was just 17, and in my first year of college, I found out I was pregnant and I had to navigate my way through adoption and healing after relinquishment. Adoption is a difficult choice. There is no one path that each birth parent follows, and there is no one road to healing that works either. Each birth parent's experience is unique. Adoption and being a birth parent has historically carried a stigma of shame for "giving up' a child. In just the last 40 years, an adoption renaissance has brought new understandings about the process, the opportunities for …

Letters From An Interdisciplinary Artist: Illuminating Korean Adoptee Identity Through Mentors And Metal, Tonya Ferraro

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Interdisciplinary integration and practice through meaning making and context can contribute to the reconsideration and revolution of research by supporting narrativesand creating space for public discourse. In researching my heritage as a Korean adoptee, I found that the literature has been predominantly from adoptive parents' perspective,focusing primarily on child and adolescent development. Lacking in the literature is the adult adoptee perspective, and specifically their experiential voices.

This interdisciplinary thesis has three major purposes (1) to explore how transracial transnational Korean adoption affects identity formation, (2) to illustrate how mentoring relationships can be a means to address and reframe the theme …