Browsing by Author "Jones, David"

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    Exploring the Contributions of Indian Philosophy in Cultivating the Inner Potential of Educators: A School Administrator's Quest for Self-Realization
    (2013-08-07) Mitchell-Pellett, Mary-Ann; Jones, David
    This qualitative auto-ethnographic study was an exploration of the relevance of personal wholeness in my life as a teacher and an educational leader. It allowed me to further understand the ways I became “divided” from my True Self through the “deforming” processes located in many cultural contexts, which included educational institutions. This study also examined the reasons that I - a middle-class white female Canadian raised in a popular Western Christian faith - embraced Eastern (primarily Indian) philosophy on my healing journey. My story revealed the “delusion of separateness” from True Being, and the ways that I was reunited with my fundamental essence through a transformational process supported by Indian teachings and practices. Seven other educator participants accompanied me on this journey: four from Canada and/or the United States and three from India – all practitioners of a form of Indian philosophy. This research project analyzed data obtained through participant in-depth interviews and was triangulated with other data sets including their personal narratives, and a focus group. Self-data that was analyzed and shared throughout this study include personal journals, autobiographical writings, and essays and assignments collected over a ten-year period. This study identified three interconnected processes that were crucial to the unfolding of personal wholeness: Calling - Honoring the Call to Wholeness; Turning - Discovering Portals to Wholeness; and Walking - Living into Wholeness. This unfolding of Being, not only personally benefitted the participants, but also provided a variety of benefits for their students, colleagues, and educational institutions they served.
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    Preserving and Sharing the EMI Music Canada Archive at the University of Calgary
    (2022-06-09) Murray, Annie; Gilbert, Robb; Johnson, Elizabeth-Anne; Jones, David; Nichols, Andy; Ruddock, Kathryn
    Members of the EMI project team at the University of Calgary will present a 60-minute roundtable overview of their work to receive, describe, preserve, and provide access to a significant portion of the audiovisual recordings from the EMI Music Canada Archive, which was donated to the University in 2016 by Universal Music Canada. With the support of the Mellon Foundation, the team has developed methods for the large-scale digitization and migration of nearly 40 audiovisual formats. All recordings that undergo migration and digitization are imaged. The team has implemented an access and a preservation system to deliver and preserve this collection over time. Using artists and recordings from the EMI fonds, experts from the team in Calgary will demonstrate the project’s overarching goals, methods, and decisions on how to make this collection available and useful to researchers now and in the future. We will provide an account of the kinds of challenges inherent in a preservation project of this scale, and the ways we have sought to mitigate those challenges.
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    Toward a Deeper Awareness: Becoming a Mindful Educational Leader
    (2015-08-14) Karrah, Deborah; Bearance, Deborah; Jones, David
    This study explored the meditative practice and non-meditative process of mindfulness and its application to educational leadership. The definition of mindfulness that guided this research was – being attentive and aware in the present moment. Mindfulness was viewed as being more than meditation; it was seen as clear comprehension of a situation and being prepared and willing to address whatever happened. It was a way of understanding one’s self and one’s self in relation to others and the world. The purpose of this research was to construct a conceptualization of mindful educational leadership. This Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004; Nash & Bradley, 2011; Nash & Viray, 2013) study provided a conceptualization of what it means to be a mindful educational leader. The conceptualization came from the application of a review: of mindfulness; of leadership as expressed in a way closest to mindfulness, and through the application of Scholarly Personal Narrative to the researcher’s experiences as an educational leader, and as a participant in major life-changing events. Data collection included: epistolary letters, journal reflections, as well as narrative and poetic life texts. A parallax vantage analysis was utilized to uncover and identify universalizable themes within the narrative. These themes offered an understanding of the duality of mindfulness (awareness of self and others) that was linked to the duality of leadership that, at its base, is about the leader and the follower, and thus it is both self and relational. The resulting construct of mindful educational leadership would fill a gap in the academic literature on leadership and would offer to educational leaders, a reflective and purposeful way of being in the world.