Project Description (Research Paper Pt. 11)
The street that runs through the middle of Whati. There are no street names in Whati.
In 2017, I began a degree at Trinity Western University in Education with a specialty in Special Education. My goals were to learn more about students with special needs in order to successfully fulfill my new role as a Program Support Teacher (Resource Teacher) and to conduct research on the importance of outdoor activity for children with cognitive disabilities.
I was severely passionate about the outdoors and the disabled community. I had spent the past 9 years volunteering and working in numerous settings that served families with children with disabilities, and for 5 of those years I volunteered with the Canadian Association for Disabled Skiing. I had seen first hand the possibilities and benefits of providing opportunities for children with disabilities to get outside and experience adventure, challenge, problem solving, accomplishment, fear, courage, and so on.
Many of the children at the school in Whati have Emotional Behavioural Disorders and as a classroom teacher I made sure to include outdoor activity in our daily routine. My goal with the research was to document our classroom programming and share the growth observed in students anecdotally and statistically.
Then about 2 years later (we had Marlene and my studies were slowed down a little), when it came time to start research, things took a drastic turn. I had been living in the north for a few years and I was still very passionate about serving children with special needs, but I was exposed to a new kind of challenge, one I couldn’t ignore. I began learning about critical theory through a podcast and I couldn’t help but see it play out in real life, right in front of me. I knew I needed to do more research on critical theory but I was scared to begin a conversation about it because of its divisive nature. I was worried my research supervisor would not approve, but I decided to pitch the idea to her and she agreed.
To be honest, it was really a moment of knowing there was a stirring in my heart and the Holy Spirit was guiding me to something, but I was scared - scared of what people would say, scared people would judge me, scared I would hurt people - but, God. Where was my fear placed? With people or with God? After much prayer, I proceeded, and like I said, my supervisor agreed - that was a green light from God. In my head there was no turning back. And so I continued on with my research on critical theory and ended up writing my final paper on how it interacts with the Gospel. And that it was the excerpts on this blog are from - my final paper. I have gone through and broken it down in to smaller chunks to share with the public. This blog is again, another stirring of the heart and prompting from the Holy Spirit, that I am taking a leap of faith with. The section below is the ‘project description’ from the intro to my paper and it pretty much sums up what I have said above with a little more technicality.
Excerpt from, “From social justice warrior to Gospel-centered servant of God: An educator’s reflection on critical theory and Christianity” (Linkletter, 2021).
This project is an autoethnography.
An autoethnography is an “approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis et al., 2011).
Specifically, this project summarizes my personal experience researching, analyzing, and synthesizing information I learned about critical theory and Christianity.
The aim of this project is share with the reader a synthesized description of current literature from critical theorists and share my personal experience interacting with the texts and learning how it interacts with my biblical worldview.
The goal of this autoethnography is to encourage others to investigate critical theory and think critically about how it affects their personal worldview and the lives of themselves and their family.
Rebecca