Faculty Research - Joy Wiggins
Peace-Building, Social Action and Feminist Theory
Dr. Joy Wiggins, Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, has developed a Global Peaceful Paths peace-building curriculum that allows students to explore interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution skills. With this curriculum, students learn how to manage stress and anxiety by practicing gentle yoga stretches in their Physical Education class. The program focuses on promoting peace first with the students and then with society. Students write poems discussing their backgrounds and emotional experiences that shape their view of the world. The students focus on how to positively communicate by replacing negative words and actions with positive ones. Students create art to depict what peace means to them. The final project is a conflict resolution skit that students perform for their community and school.
Dr. Wiggins received a Quality Enhancement Plan grant from UTA for New Media Literacy for a New Generation of Learners. This study seeks to understand what happens when digital tools, such as blogs, are utilized to determine what impact these tools have on students’ ability to understand and employ these skills within their teaching. To assess the impact of employing the use of digital tools, data on students who are enrolled will be collected and evaluated using ethnographic software that analyzes textual and graphic data. Blogs and face-to-face meetings will also be used in order to assess the impact of digital tools on pedagogical comprehension in content area reading and writing across the content areas. This grant runs through 2010.
Dr. Wiggins is currently working on research discussing women sabotaging women in academia entitled “Subversions and Transgressions: Woman’s Talk of Power and Place within the Academy”. In this pilot study, fifteen women were interviewed and sexist and subversive practices within the academe from not only men, but also women were revealed. The objective of this research is to highlight the messages that women receive from authority figures in academia and more specifically the ways in which women treat other women.
Dr. Wiggins was invited to discuss “Poetic lives: Poetic representations within spaces of Narrative and Feminist Research” at the Narrative Research SIG at the 2008 American Educational Research Association. It was the largest special interest group at AERA.
Dr. Wiggins’ research focuses on post-structural feminist theory and multicultural and social action in K-12 schools. For more information on Dr. Wiggins research, please visit her research website and blog.
Dr. Joy Wiggin's Research Profile