Education Commons^™

Mic Check? Mic Check! Amplifying Our Voices, Kirsty Nicole Bocado

The Vermont Connection

Content Warning: discrimination, suicidal ideation, violence

When I write about mental illness, I use the terms: disability, identity, and relationship. However, no word captures what mental illness means to me. Mental illness is somehow both a part of me and a separate, intangible entity. Every day is an exhausting struggle to live with and understand it, and during my first year of graduate school, I experienced covert ableism. This harm caused a long and tedious recovery process on top of ongoing unlearning and healing. Through recovery, I adopted the practice of “embracing the whole” of emotions, feelings, symptoms, and triggers. …

Developing Community Through Energy: The Impact Of Student Extracurricular Collaboration, Tiyana L. Dorsey

The Vermont Connection

Students collaborate in order to educate one another and to develop community. Students often use their own personal experiences for collaborative events in order to appeal to their fellow classmates' empathy to inspire change. Discussions centered on objective systems of oppression can be less effective than subjective experiences and require more student affairs professional assistance to create a fruitful experience. I examine two student events, Happy in a Hijab (HH) and Real Talks: The Race Thing (RTRT) to demonstrate how the discussion's subject relates to its effectiveness. I review the timeline of the events, what type of energy, and how …