Chasing Encounters

Three parents came to Chasing Encounters podcast to share their experiences about being graduate students and how their families supported them throughout their journey. We discussed how rewarding is when they feel the support of their children in difficult times.

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Biography:

Meng Xiao is a scholar on international student engagement and the founder of Dream X Education Inc., an educational agency supporting international students engaging in North America.

Latifa Soliman is a faculty of English communication at Durham College and is proud to be teaching a diverse group of adult students who decided to re-join school after years of abandoning it, aiming to fulfill their goals and invest in their education.

Yi Liu is a spiritual teacher who helps to elevate awareness, happiness & parenting skills. Her insight on spirituality stems from both Chinese and western wisdom.

Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, October 20). CES6E1 – parenting while being a graduate student. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces6e1-parenting-while-being-a-graduate-student

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Sources:

Xiao, M., Liu, Y., Soliman, L., & Chudaeva, E. (2021). Being a Parent—Rethinking Parenting Philosophy from Global Perspectives (X. Qian, Ed.). Dream X Education.

Dr. Katie Entigar joined us to have a conversation about their first experiences in Toronto as a new assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Katie enlightened us about what is meant by adult education. Dr. Entigar discussed how education, learning and meaning-making need to go beyond the school years as these take place in different contexts formal, informal and non-formal. In our conversation, we talked about various forms of adult education that fall into the concepts of communities of practice in which people learn from each other. Also, we considered how adult education is conceptualized depending on different contexts as different meaningful approaches to engage communities are enacted in what is called Diacultural Pedagogies.

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Biography:

Dr. Katie Entigar’s agenda focuses on nonprofit education with.of.by.for adult immigrants. As a scholar, they draw upon sociocultural theory, critical applied linguistics, women of color feminist philosophy and praxis, intersectional analyses, queer theory and thinking, and poststructuralist and decolonizing approaches to unearth and work creatively with concepts of contribution, silence, inclusion, and coalition in educational research and practice. They seek dialogue and coalitional practice to collectively radically imagine alternatives to our current violent and dehumanizing reality, which is not a given but always in the making. They take an ethically engaged, restless posture of radical unknowing in my work, seeking to center and uplift Black, Brown, and immigrant perspectives while recommitting daily to a praxis of accountability as an ally, accomplice, and educator

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Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 1). CES5ESSE – 2021 Summer Special Episode

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Sources:

Entigar, K. E. (2020). Unintelligible Silence: Challenging Academic Authority in a New Socio-dialogic Politics of the Real for Collective Justice and Transformation. Outlines. Critical Practice Studies, 21(1), 06–18.

Entigar, K. E. (2020). From Support to Solidarity: Writing Tutors as Advocates for Multilingual Writers in College Composition Courses. NYS TESOL Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 35-37.

Born in Peru, Fernando Calderón-Figueroa accompanies us to learn about how cities have been designed to welcome or not their citizens. His research focuses on geography and territoriality with a focus on different international cities. He describes his fascination for how amazing humans have developed technology to adapt to their needs and create shelter. However, he questions the impact of built environments in urban design, and the concept of trust among people in relation to those contexts. He posits that there is a history of displacement, gentrification and social mobility that responds to how cities evolve and change over time. Listen to know more about our favourite spaces in the city of Toronto and our relationships with them.

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Biography:

Fernando Calderón Figueroa is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto. Fernando’s main interests are urban and political sociology, social policy, and quantitative and computational methods. His dissertation addresses the relationship between the built infrastructure of cities and social capital in three different contexts: Canada, Peru, and Colombia. Fernando is a member of the Urban Genome Project, where he conducts interdisciplinary research on urban social policy and neighbourhood change.

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Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 29). CES5E8 – geography territoriality and land. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e8-geography-territoriality-and-land

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Sources:

Olson, A. W., Calderón-Figueroa, F., Bidian, O., Silver, D., & Sanner, S. (2021). Reading the city through its neighbourhoods: Deep text embeddings of Yelp reviews as a basis for determining similarity and change. Cities, 110, 103045. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.103045

Colombian born and educated in Europe, Dr. Diana García shares her thoughts about her experiences being a woman in different contexts and how these have shaped her work with youth communities in urban and rural areas in her home country. She discusses how youth have been excluded from the Colombian sociopolitical conversations at local and larger levels. She questions her own privilege and positionality as she reflects on what she can do to support marginalized communities to challenge corruption and inequality. She asks how the national identity is constructed and what citizenship means for young students and how they can be empowered to fight essentialist views of what it means to e Colombian. We finished our discussion by questioning the role of elite private schools and organizations to help Colombia build a prosperous future for all.

Biography:

Diana C. García Gómez is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Childhood Studies Department at Rutgers University—Camden. Drawing from the fields of childhood studies, memory studies, and employing qualitative and ethnographic methods, Diana’s research focuses on children’s and youth’s political participation in peacebuilding, collective memory, and social movements in post-accord Colombia. Her dissertation - Cultivating Hope - centers children’s and youth’s participation in transitional contexts by examining their engagement with collective memory processes in urban and rural settings. Diana holds a BA in Political Science from Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and a MA in Cognition and Communication from the University of Copenhagen. Diana has also written on children’s representation by the Colombia’s truth commission’s social media in “’I have the right’: examining the role of children in the #DimeLaVerdad campaign” (forthcoming).

Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 17). CES5E7 –Youth as peacebuilders. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e7-youth-as-peacebuilders

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Sources:

García Gómez, D. C. (2018). The Perfect Computer? Children’s Experiences with ICT in Rural Colombia. In A. Mandrona & C. Mitchell (Eds.), Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods (pp. 218–232). Rutgers University Press.

With a vast language teaching experience, Dr. Heng Hartse describes his first experiences in ESL education as he tried to understand students’ backgrounds more in depth and trying to build bridges among the international students. He talks about second language writing and the difficulties some have when it comes to adapt to the Western forms of academic writing. He also discusses the tensions, challenges and possibilities of an EFL/ESL teacher. In understanding these, Dr. Heng Hartse explains translingual practice, world languages and English as a lingua franca (ELF) as concepts that respond to the emerging multilingual students in today’s classrooms.

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Biography:

Dr. Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches academic literacy and TEAL teacher training courses. His work focuses on academic writing at the intersection the internationalization of higher education and the globalization of English, and has appeared in the Journal of Second Language Writing, Asian Englishes, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, the Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, and English Today. He is co-author of the book Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (TESOL Press) and vice president of the Canadian Association for the Study of Discourse and Writing. See more at www.joelhenghartse.com

Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, June 1). CES5E6 – Problematizing academic writing. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e6-problematizing-academic-writing

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Sources:

Fazel, I. & Heng Hartse, J. (2020). Gray areas of academic publishing: ‘Predatory journals’ under the lens. Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes 1(2). 157-67. https://doi.org/10.1075/jerpp.20008.faz

Heng Hartse, J., Lockett, M. & Ortabasi, M. (2018). Languaging about language in an interdisciplinary writing course. Across the Disciplines, 15(3), 89-103. https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/trans/henghartseetal2018.pdf

Heng Hartse, J. (2018, October). On the possibility of a non-error-based approach to second language writing. TESOL Second Language Writing Interest Section Newsletter. Retrieved from http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolslwis/issues/2018-10-23/2.html

Heng Hartse, J. & Kubota, R. (2014.) Pluralizing English? Variation in high-stakes academic texts and challenges of copyediting. Journal of Second Language Writing 24, 71-82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2014.04.001

A true American Southerner born in Georgia and with a vast experience in South America, Dr. Jason Mizell discusses some if his work with Testimonios as a form of research methodology.

His work stems from his culture, family, and community efforts to bring the voices of the most marginalized peoples (Latinx) to the front. He describes how he uses his skills and privileges to support them and questions how linguistics can really be anti-racist from both pedagogical and empirical approaches. Dr. Mizell briefly explains what is necessary to become a researcher who uses Testimonios as a methodology, as such, you need:

• To be invited

• To build relationships in communities and gain trust

• To be humble and learn with them

• To know why you want to do the work with the communities and educate yourself

• To be willing to push against the system

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Biography:

Dr. Jason Mizell is an Assistant Clinical Professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Connecticut. He has taught in and directed various P-12 dual-language and ESOL programs, including having taught at some of the most prestigious bilingual schools in Latin America.

Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, April 13). CES5E5 – Testimonios as methodology. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e5-testimonios-as-methodology

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Sources:

Mizell, J. (2020). Testimonios and apprenticeship: Developing relationships that nurture active civic engagement and learning. In R. Harman & K. Burke (Eds.) Culturally sustaining systemic functional linguistics: Embodied inquiry with multilingual youth. Routledge. pp. 39-63

Accurso, K., & Mizell, J.D. (2020). Toward an anti-racist genre pedagogy: Considerations for a North American context. TESOL Journal. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1002/tesj.554

Dr. Niyozov grew up in Tajikistan, former Soviet Union, in a small village and a large family. He is a true plurilingual person with a vast international experience in education and research by engaging with numerous cultural groups along the span of his life. These experiences provided an ontoepistemological rationale that has driven the work he currently does with immigrant and refugees and with religious education. In today’s episode, Dr. Niyozov argues that religious education is important because there are subjects that have not been taught in some parts of the academic world or engaged as they have become taboo. It is important to provide the space for different religious dimensions from different parts of the world, engage, question and challenges how education is or not welcoming these experiences. He points out that we need to find spaces for challenging and pushing back ideas and to allow space for conflict and disagreement so we need to be able to handle controversy; this way it takes away the fear of being able to engage in academic conversations respectfully.

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Biography:

Prof. Sarfaroz Niyozov is an Associate Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Development and Comparative, International and Development Education at OISE, University of Toronto. Prof. Niyozov is highly experienced in teaching and conducting long-term research on marginalized communities in Canada and internationally. Niyozov has authored and co-authored more than 70 publications, including books, journal articles, chapters, editorials and reviews. He teaches courses on cross-cultural teacher development, religious education, comparative education and researching in the Global South. He has held a number of leadership positions at OISE (co-chair of Curriculum & Pedagogy program of CTL (July, 2019-present); director of the Institute for Educational Development at the Aga Khan University, co-director of CIDE Program (2013-2019). He leads and co-leads education interest groups at OISE such as South Asia Education, Muslim Education; Central Eurasia Education groups and is on the Steering Committee of the World Congress of Comparative, International Education Societies.

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Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, February 24). CES5E4 – https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e4-religious-education

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Sources:

Niyozov, S., & Punja, Z. (2009). The role of spirituality in the life and work of Ismaili teachers. Insights from Central Asia. In J. Lin & J. Miller. (Eds.), Spirituality, religion and peace education. Greenwich CT: IGA Publishing.

Maria Montejo was in our episode to help us understand the many nuances of Indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. From animal spirits and nature, she embarks us on a journey of respect to mother earth and other living and non-living creatures. She describes the presence of a Spiritual intelligence as a way to connect through life to a deeper understanding of who we are in convergence with all elements of nature. She posits that humans would not be able to truly understand others unless we go through a process of healing the trauma and pain of our past experiences.

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Biography:

Maria Montejo (Deer clan) is a member of the Mam Jakaltec/Popti (Mayan) community of Indigenous people who reside in the Xajla territory of Guatemala. Many years ago, Maria and her family came to Canada as refugees and settled in Toronto. Maria works to introduce Canadians to the basic knowledge of the worldview of Indigenous Peoples, as well as their spiritual and cultural values. In addition to her formal schooling, Maria has been mentored from a young age by various Elders, Medicine people and Traditional Teachers on Turtle Island and from Central and South America. Maria has had the privilege of being exposed and participating in various ceremonies and traditional cultural practices that have fueled her passion to develop programming that will bridge the Newtonian/allopathic model of wellness and an Indigenous/multi-dimensional approach.

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Cite this podcast (APA):

Ortega, Y. (Producer). (2021, February 10). CES5E3 – Indigenous Knowledges. https://soundcloud.com/chasingencounters/ces5e3-indigenous-knowledges

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Sources:

https://ncct.on.ca/programs/dodem-kanonhsa/

http://accessola2.com/SC2016/speaker/maria-montejo/