Hui Gao

This week, I listened to a short interview of having Dr. Wade Davis talk about his new book “The Serpent and the Rainbow on CBC radio with Peter Gzowski. The interesting story is about how modern medicine and cultural belief relate to the creation of Haitian “zombies”. Reflection from the transcribing activity, I feel that it was difficult to be focused on transcribing the questions only during my first few attempts. My attention was easily taken away by the interview content. During this interview, the setting seems to be quite informal although it was broadcasted on national radio channel. The interview was not conducted with a well structured framework; instead, it was more like having a daily conversation between two individuals. The interviewer, Peter Gzowski did not rely heavily on questions with open or close ended questions. In fact, he asked the interviewee, Dr. Davis to describe information with statements. For example, he used “Given me an example of…..”. By using this t

Below, please find three questions we would like to ask Dr. Urueta to elaborate further regarding her research: 1. What are the p ractice implications of her research to be applied in children education? (i.e.: for policy makers to review the effectiveness of garden-learning methods) 2. As a researcher,  what will you do when you discover a new theme originated from the interview data or something you missed when you design your first set of interview questions? 3. How cultural identities of the students play a role in fostering their understanding about healthy food and nutrition? Is this something she acknowledged when interpreting her data or something to be investigated separately via a different research Garden Based Learning – Dr.  Tathali Urueta

I am studying the transitional experiences of domestic undergraduate students at Simon Fraser University who are admitted  from the international pathway programs because I want to find out what are the unique but unmet needs of those students during their transitioning into a Canadian post-secondary institution, in order to better understand why the existing new student orientation program fails to provide sufficient transitional support and services to this student group so that we will know more how to develop a specific orientation program for them aiming to offer positive learning experiences and improve student persistence from an institutional point of view.  

The cultural and educational transitioning of first generation immigrant undergraduate students in Quebec, Canada Sinacore, A.L. & Lerner, S. Int J Educ Vocat Guidance (2013) 13: 67. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/10.1007/s10775-013-9238-y I really enjoyed this week’s reading as the topic is directly concerned about my profession as well as my passion  working as a student advisor in a Canadian post-secondary institution. Using phenomenological methodology, this article closely examines the institutional, societal, and psychosocial barriers faced by first generation immigration students during their transition into a Canadian university community. The study further examines the importance of those students’ unique needs of mentoring and career counselling in support of their cultural and educational transition. Along with discrimination, difficulties in mastering language proficiency in both English and French were identified as two major societal barriers for immigra

Through illustration of a particular research project on co-operative education, this week’s reading is focused on phenomenology. I had to admit that I found the concept of phenomenology a little bit abstract.. The first article briefly discussed the notion of phenomenology. Then, a research project using phenomenological framework was examined by discussing the selection process of the participants, data collection and analysis process. The goal of phenomenology is to “Back to the things themselves”, looking for the pure truth, pure realities. Anything unrelated to the facts or the pure realities are ignored. Phenomenology is focused on closely examining the lived experience of people involved with the research topic. The author states that “The aim of the researcher is to describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, refraining from any pre-given framework, but to remaining true to the fact.”-This is a “stop” for me as I am really curious on how researchers or what researche

Reflecting on my observation activity 1 and 2, I noticed that it is really a challenging job to keep myself, as an observer with an unbiased, objective, and neutral perspective. With my first activity observing strangers, I was more inclined to be “attracted” by people with characteristics which I may be more familiar with. For example, the crying baby and the mother may be related to the fact that I am a mother of two young kids myself. Also, my husband is a professional working in the bank and therefore, he wears suits very day. All those similarities unconsciously but actually consciously decide why I chose them and how I observe those strangers. During my first observation with strangers, I am more dependent on making observations with my  senses such as vision and sound. Also, when I was observing strangers, I noticed myself being more descriptive in describing their features with age, ethnicity, gender, height, color of cloth wearing, etc. In contrast, when observing my son, I

For this activity, I chose to observe my son, Cayden while he was having his breakfast at the dinner table. Date: Saturday, February 3 Time: 8:30-8:45 Observed person: My son, Cayden who is two and half years old Location: Dinner room at home It was a Saturday morning and I was observing my son, Cayden having his breakfast for a period of 15 minutes. As an observer, I am sitting on the sofa in the living room, which was right across his high chair. He was already sitting in his high chair, eating his cereal with his own blue bowl and Mickey Mouse spoon. He was wearing his favourite baby bib as always.  He seems to be still a little bit sleepy as he was yarning couple times. He held up his bowl to drink the milk out of the cereal. He intentionally made his sipping sound quite loud. Soon, he put down his spoon and looked at me. He said: “ Mom, Mom, more milk, more milk!”. His voice seemed to be impatient and he was also pointing his blue bowl when asking for more milk. I did not r

For this activity, I choose to observe shoppers at the Oakridge Mall. Below is some preliminary information noted for this observation: Date: Thursday, February 1st Time: 10:45-11:00 am Location: Oakridge Mall Observed group: people shopping at the mall As an observer, I sat at a bench located near at the mall entrance. Although it was raining that morning and it was actually a weekday, the mall seemed to be much busier than I initially anticipated. It was quite warm in the mall and pop music was playing as the background music. There was a coffee shop at the left side of the entrance door and a restaurant at the right side. Two men came through the door. They dressed very professionally and looked sharp. It seemed that they were both in the middle of their 20s. They are about 5 feet 8 or 5 feet 10. Both of them seem to be Asians but I cannot be sure.  As it was raining outside, they folded their umbrellas first as they walked through the door. Then, one of them took off his l