In Brief: Research News — Fall 2024
4 November 2024
Probing the path to Paralympic glory
Canada’s Women’s Sitting Volleyball Team was ranked seventh in the world going into the Tokyo Paralympic Games in 2021, and the team didn’t reach the podium. Three years later, Canada was ranked first, and returned home from the Paris Paralympic Games last month with its first bronze medal, defeating Brazil, who had been the team’s main rival in Tokyo.
It was sweet vindication for the team, and a demonstration of how much the athletes sacrificed to get there, says Kate Rozendaal, a University of Alberta doctoral student in counselling psychology who serves as assistant coach to the sitting volleyball team along with fellow doctoral student Chelsea Hobbs.
Rozendaal was first introduced to the Canadian team eight years ago when she was a student playing volleyball with the MacEwan University Griffins. That serendipitous path led to her current research on the experiences of elite athletes in women’s Parasport and the systemic conditions that allow them to flourish.
“I want to explore how we can support athletes in women’s Parasport because I think they’re in a unique position,” she says. “Historically, they’ve been marginalized compared with disabled men.”
Scholarship recipient works to improve refugees’ access to essential services
As someone hailing from a tropical climate, Augustine Botwe says he was relatively well prepared to move to Edmonton to pursue graduate studies in January of 2022. The Ghana native’s years of working in program evaluation for UNICEF, as well as obtaining his master’s degree in social research and evaluation in the UK, had taken him to four of the world’s six continents and familiarized him with chillier temperatures.
“I remember my supervisor mentioned, it’s pretty cold here. I said no it’s fine, I’ve lived in Mongolia, which is also pretty cold, so I will survive,” Botwe says.
But, he admits, of all the places he’s lived, Canada has presented the biggest challenge for a newcomer integrating and accessing essential services, particularly healthcare.
“Canada is welcoming a lot of people but you arrive here and you are faced with so many challenges related to accessing services. Where do you go for services? How do you get your children into school, for example?”
His background in program evaluation and community-engaged research approaches, combined with his interest in using the tools of data science — data mining techniques, machine learning algorithms and analytics — to improve how systems work, led Botwe to focus his PhD research on the current healthcare model of how services are delivered to refugees and its impact on health outcomes for refugee children.
Botwe is conducting his research at Edmonton’s first community-based, principles-driven health centre, New Canadians Health Centre. The centre provides integrated culturally safe holistic services to refugees guided by its principles, grounded in social justice, equity and social inclusion. This is accomplished by improving and facilitating refugee access to healthcare and community resources to help them integrate into the community.
“I want to contribute to the literature about refugee healthcare by offering valuable insights into research practices in this field and to broaden our understanding of refugee healthcare challenges and opportunities for refugee children,” Botwe says.
Vanier Scholarship recipient explores “big auntie energy” in education
What is "big auntie energy"?
Megan Tipler, a Métis educator and PhD student in Secondary Education, says she has experienced the impact of 'big auntie energy' in abundance while working and learning alongside Indigenous women.
"In nehiyawewin, the term for my aunt, or my mother’s sister is more accurately translated to 'my little mother,’ which implies a shared responsibility to nurture and uplift young ones,” Tipler says.
These understandings influenced Tipler's personal life and professional path as she transitioned from classroom teaching to serving as a program support coordinator for the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program (ATEP). Before accepting the position, she reached out to a friend and ATEP graduate who shared her experiences in the program.
"She talked about the Cree aunties who loved on her, kept her motivated and held her accountable,” Tipler says. "She also talked about the importance of representation and how inspiring it was to see Indigenous women with PhDs."
Inspired by her personal and professional experiences, Tipler is set to embark on a research project entitled Big auntie energy: Storying sâkihitowin and experiences of Indigenous aunties as a pathway for reimagining and rematriating educational practices, which the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship recently funded.
"The simple translation of sâkihitowin is love, but when you break down the meaning, it relates to the blooming and blossoming that occurs in the springtime and the creation process emerging at that time. My experience in the Faculty of Education has involved a lot of blooming and blossoming. It hasn't always been pretty, and sometimes it's been painful, but so many people around me have nurtured a little seed, making this possible."
A leading light for diversity
While reviewing research on marginalized populations as a student, Evan Westfal was often struck by the same dilemma.
“I felt like people were making a spectacle of a given social problem and not working towards active solutions,” says the programs manager for the Fyrefly Institute for Gender and Sexual Diversity.
“That’s why I love the Fyrefly Institute— we run actionable strategies to push human rights to the forefront.”
The Fyrefly Institute has had a number of names since it was founded in the Faculty of Education in 2004 as the only institute of its kind in Canada. But over its 20-year history, community service has always been at the centre of its research agenda.
The institute takes its name from Camp fYrefly, also founded in 2004 by former Faculty of Education researchers and educators André Grace and Kristopher Wells, to meet the needs of sexual and gender diverse youth.
From the beginning, it has made an immeasurable difference in their lives. It is now Canada’s only national sexual and gender diversity youth leadership camp affiliated with a major research university.
Some Camp fYrefly alumni from the past two decades are now working as organizers for Camp Dragonfly, a camp for queer and trans children under 13, or for the Edmonton Lesbian Event Network, says Westfal. Others have become journalists, fashion designers, researchers, grassroots activists and award-winning drag artists.
But the Fyrefly Institute’s outreach doesn’t stop there. The non-profit organization serves more than 10,000 people in communities throughout Alberta — all participating in robust programming to help 2SLGBTQ+ youth grow into healthy, happy and resilient adults.