My journey of authorship
My journey of authorship began with Homing In, an autoethnographic account of adoption and reunion. The promise of autoethnography is showcased in Crafting Peace, where I develop the Transformagram Learning Model and offer examples from my students at Creighton University. My most recent book Autoethnography as a Tool for Integral Human Development and Wayfinding is for life long learners. It provides a conceptual presentation along with practical autoethnographic exercises for writing your own story mandala. The Transformagram Approach expands autoethnography by incorporating transformational, pedagogical, spiritual, and environmental forms of autoethnography. These methods provide holistic tools for integral human development that open new flyways.
Homing In: A Story Mandala Connecting Adoption, Reunion, and Belonging
I published my first book in March 2020 with Writelife Publishing. It is an autobiographic work in progress describing the reunion process and the important role synchronicity played, bringing two adopted sisters back to their birth family.
Feel free to explore my book's dedicated website, where you will discover the videos and blog posts that accompany my teaching story!
Bellow is the trailer to Homing In.
Crafting Peace
In Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography: Reflexive Pedagogies for Navigating Difficult Times, I share my autoethnographic methods that employ a transformational pedagogy for conflict resolution and peace studies. I recollect the autoethnographic process, connecting theoretical frameworks to lived experience. The transformagram learning model is presented as a stepwise approach with a scaffolded template. Student's transformagram portfolios are showcased, offering examples of the transformational process.
Conflict narratives emerge from the autoethnographic and duoethnographic methods that become tools for activating the inner compass, providing directionality for homing in to better-formed storylines and potential flyways. In this creative and reflexive space, story mandalas shapeshift, opening a transformational passageway. Conflict wisdom is enkindled through narrative conflict resolution approaches that increase connectivity and narrative coherency giving rise to mediatorship.
Autoethnography as a Tool for Integral Human Development and Wayfinding
Autoethnography is a powerful research method for exploring integral human development by acknowledging lived experience as an insightful source. In this book for lifelong learners, I explore the transformative potential of autoethnography as a method for personal and communal growth. I demonstrate how autoethnographic practice helps with the navigation of complex life experiences, offering a path toward integral human development. The Transformagram Approach offers a conceptual model and practical exercises in this guidebook for beautifying story mandalas.
As a tool for wayfinding, it supports deeper self-awareness and ethical orientation in complex environments. Autoethnography bridges the inner experience with external meaning-making systems, contributing to a more holistic understanding of human growth that integrates, cognitive, emotional, cultural, and spiritual dimensions.
Narrative Transformation and Autoethnography
Here are several papers that I wrote for conferences that present the narrative model of mediation as well as writings about autoethnography, both are methods that generate relational transformation.
For the ESREA Conference 2018, Torino, Italy:
‘Togetherness’ and its discontents - Connectivity as well as belonging, cooperation, conflict and separation in biographical narratives of adult education and learning, I wrote a paper contribution about linkedness. "Linkedness: Relational Transformation and Conflict Resolution".
The 2017 ESREA Conference in Copenhagen brought together professors and researchers to share about biography and life long learning. Here is my paper "Writing A New Story".
At a Medical Anthropology at Home conference in Tarragona, Spain in 2015, I wrote a paper addressing 'Autoethnography and Self Transformation'. Here is my paper "Writing to Transform Relations".
