Education Commons^™

A Mother's Spiritual Journey With Her Disabled Son: An Autoethnography, Margaret C. Higgins Edd

Dissertations

Abstract

This autoethnographic research delves into a mother’s experiences with her disabled son over thirty-five years. Beginning with a thick description of the crib accident that resulted in physical and cognitive disabilities that profoundly change the course of both mother and son’s life, this research chronicles the search for meaning, community, and healing as they negotiate the realms of medicine, education, career, family, and spirituality. Models of disability that seek to explain various ways in which society often views disability are examined, but none resonate with the researcher’s intimate experiences nor satisfies her deepest needs for insight and healing. Making …

The Spirituality Of Immersion: Solidarity, Compassion, Relationship, Michael E. Lovette-Colyer

Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE)

While the term spirituality can be problematic, obscuring as much as revealing, immersion experiences cannot be understood fully without exploring the contours of what can only be described as spirituality. To the extent that they work, immersions effect change when they speak to the deepest longings of the heart. While manifesting in many different ways, the spirituality of immersion revolves around three major components: solidarity, compassion, and relationship. The spirituality of immersion is a developed relationality, a desire to enter into richer, wider, more expansive relationships with others, which naturally leads into deeper relationship with God.

Spiritual Frameworks In Pediatric Palliative Care: Understanding Parental Decision-Making, Lindy Grief Davidson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parents of seriously ill children are charged with making complicated medical decisions, and many of those decisions are made during their children’s hospitalizations. As medical staff seek to support parents, it is important for them to understand what resources parents are drawing upon for decision-making. This project explored parental decision-making by examining the following research questions: RQ1: What resources do parents draw upon to make medical decisions for their seriously ill children? RQ2: How do parents enact their spiritual or religious frameworks in clinical settings when faced with medical decisions for their seriously ill children? Methods of research included ethnographic …

Rare Or Well Done? A Waitress Wonders How To Best Serve Environmental Education, Katherine Renz

Summit to Salish Sea: Inquiries and Essays

Environmental education (EE) promises to facilitate the transformation of attitudes and behavior on a broad scale. Yet the field has not fulfilled its potential. This article takes an auto-ethnographical approach in considering the reluctance of environmental educators to discuss environmental problems. How is the discipline weakened by equating critical thinking and ecologically motivated despair with a negative attitude rather than honestly acknowledging the grief and promoting resiliency and empowerment instead? Through the lens of a professional waitress, this article argues that the service industry offers a privileged though overlooked venue for EE. Rather than framing EE as an isolated event …