Olivia Thompson

April 12, 2016

An explanation of works selected and their ability to demonstrate specific learning outcomes. A guide to use with the SCI Work Matrix for "reading" this eportfolio.

April 12, 2016

Part 1 walks readers through eportfolio and SCI SLO's

Part 2 is a personal reflection

March 24, 2016

This is a reflection after the big interview day during my internship. The point of the interview was to have our FCHS students bring together all of their skills that they have learned this semester about interviewing, archiving, transcribing, and the importance of collecting stories and personal histories, through 4 interviews with Floyd County Residents. As I mentioned in my Qualitiative Research Methods reflection description, this was a wonderful practice of my skills that I have previously learned. What I have enjoyed most about this internship is mentoring students, teamwork, and learning important oral histories.

December 04, 2015

Inside you will find an autobiographical reflection of my journey at RU. This was written for my Senior Seminar in Sociology. This was a Scholar-Citizen designated course, and helped me to organize my future goals, and brought me resources toward meeting my goals. As a part of this course we were asked to reflect upon our time spent at RU. In this autobiography I relate my ideas and experiences to sociological theories.

July 31, 2015

April 12, 2015

After this VM I lead an "Ask Big Question" discussion. This reflection shows my process for leading a discussion with a text.

December 10, 2014

Why Bother?

I began to bother when things started to bother me. I was sitting in philosophy class one semester a few years ago and began to see the world as a place filled with so many problems that I grew up unaware of. I was completely blind to so many systems and structures that effect our human experience. The human experience that I had little control over, profoundly impacted my perceptions and perpetuated my lack of understanding, just, as I assume, it does for everyone. But because of opening my mind to more truths about the world, I could all of the sudden understand why people become stuck in problems when they aren’t raised with autonomy. I wanted autonomy for myself, and autonomy for all.  When my focus of blame began to shift from the individual to society, I began to bother. As my knowledge expanded about world problems, my empathy for others that I grew up with, transformed from a guttural feeling of compassion to rationalized thoughts of realization. I have always wanted to help shed light on solutions to problems but I realized that you cannot force an understanding on someone and that they must arrive at their own conclusions.

As my conclusions developed through conversations with others, I realized that Ask Big Questions was an organic format for helping to promote learning and understanding for others the same way. I have been fortunate enough to learn what I have learned and fortunate enough to realize that I will never run out of new things to learn. Bringing ABQ to Radford has steered my passion in a new way. Not only do I get to provide an atmosphere for people to share their important thoughts and opinions, ABQ has provided me with the structure to create this place of sharing on my campus.

Of course there have been reservations from strangers to open up to me when approaching a room of new people with questions, but the moment when walls go down, is profound for all who experience it. This moment, I think, makes others bother. I try to inspire others to communicate more openly and honestly, but watching others share their truths has deeply inspired me.

April 23, 2014

I have lost love, and want to believe in myself. After years of support and encouragement, I need to find it in myself to strive towards what I want and what I believe. After years having support in juggling responsibilities I have to take care of myself entirely on my own. I had a very fundamental shift in thinking today. All of the sudden through all of the chaos and stress in life, I imagined all of the things I could do with my life, with what I have to work with right now. I imagine working out at the Selu garden and enjoying the summer sun, and the satisfaction of watching the world grow before my eyes. Working out to feel as good in my body as possible. I imagine being able to allow my creative and constantly moving brain an outlet in some new found hobbies. And I will watch myself grow as I watch the garden grow. Although I always look to the knowledge I have learned in a particular semester, as to why my life has changed, I think maybe the people that I meet might influence this more. I met Jessie, and he became my Vice President of my club, and has now introduced me to new people, and new clubs! With these new clubs, I am so looking forward to being able to write and be creative and be around people who I won't feel judged around. For a very long time, I felt like I almost alienated myself from people because I had a very stable relationship, and I had seen before what chaos people could bring into my life. I wanted with all of my power and control, to protect my partner and myself from interacting with bad people or allowing danger into our lives. This sounds a little dramatic, I am aware, but when you are young and in love and just got out of damaging years of high school, sometimes, dramatic and immature decisions were made. For a while, this made me very happy. But during times when I have isolated myself from people, I have also experienced extreme sadness, as well as a lack of motivation. People often motivate me, is that wrong? I think that I should have more will to motivate myself, but it is very hard to want to "do it" (and by "it" I mean, all of the challenging life tasks I must do to get to my goals). I will have to extend myself and trust people more, if I want to be more accepting of peoples influence in my life. I read a fortune cookie that said "the best way to navigate through life is to give up all of our controls." and I think a lot of this is true, because it is my constant need to have control over my life, that actually makes it spiral into uncontrolled chaos on its very own, or at least because of my very own doing.  While I sat here, in distress for hours about my life, a few visions of what life could be, popped into my head, and my brain felt like it unlocked, my eyes opened. It felt almost literally like a haze of stress was lifted from my vision. I realized that it will be much easier, to be happy, and be with people again. I just have to own up to who I am and not try to be anything that I am not. I always used to believe that I loved who I was, and I know that I will again. I have made mistakes, but I still love people.  People will love me for who I am. And I wont need to worry about finding someone special, because then I will also be able to have friends again, and learn how to take care of myself. I will learn to find motivation in new ways.

April 08, 2014

This reflection shows my challenges and the ups and downs that I felt during my Spring semester of 2014. It had been one year since I founded the Scholar-Citizen Student Club. You will see how I was striving to organize and make my club run smoothly, while struggling with my own needs.

February 18, 2014

The reason I joined SCI was because I thought that it was a program that agreed with what I already knew. I joined because I wanted to be in charge of the focus of my time and my education. I joined SCI because for the first time I realized WHAT learning was. I learned that my education was not only a structure forced upon me, but rather something that I desire to seek forever. I joined SCI because I decided to question everything, to use my theories to solve problems, to take away the importance of each day, and put it to good use through my research or my community work. I joined SCI because I wanted others to feel the incredible feeling that I felt, of WANTING to learn, and WANTING to make a change in the world. I joined SCI because I embraced my autonomy, and independence over being well-liked by people I do not like. I joined SCI to not waste my time, and so I could surround myself with people who wanted to help others see their value and academic and civic potential. The vision is long-term though and change is a slow process. I wonder if SCI can help students to realize what I've realized or if I am sending out the right messages when I promote the vision of SCI. I'm nervous that SCI will become a thing of the past, before people can even realize how important a program like SCI really is to RU's campus and students. I don't want to become apathetic because so many of my peers are. It seems miserable to be numb and just not care, I don't want a burn out to make me jaded. But I am tired, I am going to school, working two jobs (in the community, and on campus), managing two clubs, helping the clubs programming committee fund on campus events and student travel, trying to spread the message of SCI constantly at fairs, events, and in classes, and the work never ends. Last year when this was all really coming full force, I still enjoyed the responsibilities and I still had the energy to paint and dance and write and play games with my partner. When I get off of work, I don't want to work on my own projects anymore. I don't care right this moment about my own aspirations. I can see my passions going down the drain because of having to juggle so much other responsibility. I do feel like a leader, but working for SCI is different than being involved on campus. I was hired at SCI because they knew I was the type of person who wanted to do things on campus. The problem is that, I know longer do anything for myself, so I am not that person anymore. I feel like being overwhelmed is breaking away pieces of what makes me, me.

December 04, 2013

This course was a part of the Appalachian Teaching Project. I created a meta-analysis from the qualitative data that was utilized in creating original research under Dr. Melinda Wagner at RU. The project helped me gain so many skills that would later be directly used in my future internship. I was incredibly lucky to have taken this course before beginning my internship at Floyd County High School during my senior year. I was able to confidently go into my internship, having already learned the skills that I would be helping my FCHS students learn. I don't think I would have been as comfortable with my role as a student mentor during my internship, had I not already become familiar with qualitative research, interviewing skills, archiving, transcribing, and the people of Floyd County. The analysis findings from the project were reported at the ASA (Appalachian Studies Association) Annual Conference. To read the abstract click here.

November 19, 2013

With what I'll call, my "new knowledge" or the sense that I can now see the world in a more open way, I always think about my past education and wish I could relearn all of the things that they were always trying to teach me. Today I had an interesting insight when thinking about elements, like
lithium, and oxygen, and potassium, and magnesium, all of those...I was picturing the table that I have been learning my entire life and asked my girlfriend, "what even is an element?". She started to say it was a molecule, and that some molecules could not be broken down into single cells any further because of their balance of protons to the nucleus. All of these terms, "single-cell", "protons", "nucleus", "molecules"..all of them resounding in my head and reminding me of many different years of science class, picturing myself in 3rd grade, 8th grade, junior year of high-school...all at once, my-selves all blending together. I remembered a time, when I was in high-school and we had to draw a cell in biology, and color it in and make it accurate. I remembered things that I didn't ever at the time, think I would remember, because I remembered the experience. Looking back for years now at high-school, I felt betrayed because I felt like it was almost as if they didn't want me to actually experience my education like I can now. I feel as if I was being taught lies, to socialize me, which is in part true, but I also feel like mostly everything I learned at school during all of my education until Radford, didn't teach me to understand the world that I am experiencing, didn't allow me to make any interrelations, or connections between one "subject" to the next. But I wonder if they know, that this will happen, but that you will be able to remember what you have learned, even though you didn't remember it at the time. This reminds me of having a photograph of yourself. A photograph is an experience, a memory encapsulated. Would you remember this experience the same way without the photograph? I feel like my memories are strong and when there were years of my life when I was on facebook and social media, and had hundreds of photos taken of me, I feel as if I forget everything else that happened that didn't have a picture of it taken.  I don't like relying on social media to remember my experiences, which is a part of the reason why I deleted my online presence. But it makes me wonder, what have I forgotten because I didn't encapsulate it? How can I experience my education, so that I may encapsulate it into my memory? I told my girlfriend that I wish i could relearn all of these scientific theories, because now I know what the words mean. Even though I was taking English class my whole life, I never really thought of how I was learning my own language, and my lack of understanding of so many words, really hindered my ability to learn things. When I say "understanding" of words, I don't mean their definition, I mean the context, the way it is literally at this moment in my reality. I realized that I needed to take science before leaving Radford, because it could seriously change my life. I have wanted to take science for many semesters now, but still haven't because I was worried about learning science that I didn't believe in. A large part of my time at Radford has been spent reflecting on many scientific issues that translate to the care and protocol of western medicine on humans. It really interests me to see how and why "science" has deemed so many "disorders" onto humans. I think the incessant need to classify disorders of something natural, is a disorder.

July 31, 2013

I never thought that building planters in the park this last April, would lead me to such an awesome volunteer experience. In Summer 2013, I got to volunteer every friday during the summer as a camp counselor. The children involved were high-risk youth from Radford, a few of which I had met at the park service day. I spent around 45 hours with these children and we got to take them on so many activities. We spent a day at the museum in Roanoke, a day at Dixie caverns, a day at the indoor water center in christiansburg. We got to do so many fun things with the children, and even got to have a tie-dye party at a beautiful Bondurant house (A local family) near the river. Besides all of the other fun things that we were able to do for the children, we also spent each day walking from different churches in the community to the library. We helped the children learn how to ride the bus, get a library card, and how be responsible for their borrowed items. Radford is a beautiful community, and they local churches fed us all lunch every single day. These children do not have much, and many of them experience abuse and neglect in their lives. It may not seem like it day to day, but the work that Radford Social Services does to put on this camp, is really truly an amazing thing for these kids. I enjoyed every single minute of my time spent with these children. While this experience was fun for the kids and myself. I never lost sight of the fact that these children are having a hard time. These children all came from different lives and lived in different conditions. Some of these children came from abusive homes, neglectful conditions, and impoverishment. I remember driving them home at the end of each day, realizing that at the end of a day of fun, the reality of their lives would hit me in the face. This was my first time working with social services. This experience was hard, because you don't like to see a child suffering, or sad. It is admirable how strong these children have become, and I can see the benefit of a program like this in their lives. The dedication of Radford Social Services, in helping to show the children compassion, and support is very commendable. Through looking at developmental psychology, as well as the vulnerable nature of poverty, statistics and research all associate childhood poverty and abuse, as precursors to crime, violence, risk, and destructive behavior. When these children are categorized as "high-risk", it is not only to indicate high-risk now, but also for their futures. I can still remember experiences as a child that shaped me, and it is the hopes of programs like this, that although they cannot be there for these children all the time, hopefully they can feel involved, and supported enough during their time in camp, to help them throughout their development.

June 20, 2013

Four days, four counties, 24 high school students and so many souls in one room. And all very different. One thing I do remember from high school though was how everyone wants to pretend to not be interested in what is going on and look “cool” but you have to own your “inner nerd”, before you can stop caring what people think of you. Every time I look around I see people craving so much wealth and fame, but when I think of what’s inside my own head I am the richest person in the world. Its good for the soul to delight in your own creations and inventions of thought and it feels healthy for the spirit to enjoy traveling through personal insights of the world. I remember back when I was in high school I could recognize the differences between myself and everyone. I could also see how different people who went to Deep Run were, from people who went to Tucker, or Hermitage, or Freeman, or SGHS or Benedictine. Or if people lived downtown in the city, if they were from the wealthy or not so wealthy country south-side, or even more country Goochland, or Louisa. I could see the difference in the suburban rich west-end off of broad street and the older west-end on its parallel partner, Patterson ave. In north-side (old rich and new poor) vs the east-side, and my perception of its poverty. Once I left and went to college I realized how different people were from NOVA than Richmond or Roanoke and NOVA, or Blacksburg and Radford, and how weirdly I tended to naturally migrate toward Richmond because of our cultural similarities. It made me realize that not only are people different within their own city but also within their own state. Once I started working actually within the different towns of Christiansburg, Blacksburg, and Radford I could see how people from Christiansburg had the middle amount of money, but were of the worst temperament, because of this attitude and self-perception of being better than people from Radford. Blacksburg stays over there and doesn’t really like to associate itself with Radford especially. Radford has some probably the most drugs problems, and is definitely the poorest of the three but is by far still not the poorest of the area. It took me really learning about the people in Radford, and here hundreds of stories from different Radford locals while working in a Pizza Place in Radford with a rich history, and regular families and customers of 40+ years. These families have been in these surrounding towns, (Giles, Pulaski, Christiansburg, Blacksburg, Snowville, Hiwassee, Dublin, Fairlawn, Alisonia, and more for over 200 years. Slowly unveiling levels of culture and socialization to me as I learned more realistically about more and more places and their histories and problems. But for a while I have been just working on the campus and forgetting overtime just how differently everyone could be in such a small area such as NRV and Montgomery county. I cant judge people, I only seem to care about people which is hard for me sometimes because I feel like I am so much more emotionally invested in people then they are in the situation, and maybe this is just my inner teacher calling out or something, but I get so attached! So it almost feels like a movie, like something unreal now that it is over.

April 28, 2013

This event was held Saturday April 27, 2013 on a perfect spring day. The purpose of this project was to help rebuild planters in the local park, Bisset Park, with 7 high risk juveniles from the surrounding community, afterwards thinking back my favorite memories from this project was actually the times when I found myself interacting with the children. I wished I had interacted with them more, because it was just as much as an experience for me as it was for them. It makes me sad to imagine them feeling like they were alone or not given attention when they wanted it. But I hope that they were happy by being able to be outside on a beautiful day and help by doing something that is a useful skill to learn, and also by seeing the older students working on projects like this to inspire them to continue this type of work. A few of them told me that they did this last summer as well and learning commitment is so important for these children who come from little opportunity because of some certain reason. I want to get more involved with this project in the future months and help the children grow over the summer. The women created a camp that would take children out every Friday to do things that are important like getting things they need that they wouldn’t otherwise ever get to learn how to do, like learning how to ride the transit.

March 31, 2013

Last week marked the end of a very powerful and eventful Women’s History Month at Radford University. While we are sad to see this month fly by so quickly, the annual production of Eve Ensler’s, Vagina Monologues, presented by Women’s Studies Program/Club and the Scholar-Citizen Initiative, is always an exciting conclusion to March. In the shows fifth year, the Scholar-Citizen Initiative director, Dr. Erin Webster-Garrett, introduced the last performance by describing how far RU has come in its acceptance of the Vagina Monologues, to show us that our awareness really does spark change over time. Paired with Ensler’s global movement of, One Billion Rising, this year RU recommitted itself to, “Strike, Dance, and Rise!” in hopes to create the change needed to end violence for women in our campus community, local community, and world-wide. This year the three performances collected over $1000 in donations for the New River Valley’s Women’s Resource Center, which helps directly aid women in need from the NRV community. The Scholar-Citizen Initiative would like to thank Lucinda McDermott for directing this year’s Vagina Monologues as well as all of the talented players involved, who showed us how important it is to be impassioned about human rights.

February 15, 2013

One Billion Rising was a pledge to help end violence towards women in conjunction with Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues.This reflection was written the very first time that I had organized the clothing drive. After this event, I organized a clothing drive two more times during my time at RU. The Women's Resource Center helps women and children out of terrible situations. Although barely any cases of sexual assault are actually reported, those that do make it to the hospital must leave their clothing for evidence. The New River Valley is constantly struggling to keep enough resources available for assault victims. This clothing drive was to held re-stock clothing, so no person has to leave the hospital in a gown, feeling naked and afraid. It is important what a simple pair of sweats can do to help a victim regain comfort. I am constantly inspired by their dedication and service to this community.

May 03, 2012

This was my first SC-Class before SC had even designated it! Dr. Ren was a very influential person in shaping my thinking, and her teaching style lent perfectly to the vision of SCI, and subsequent years her WMST 101 class became SC-designated. This reflection showcases my very first experiences with female genital mutilation. FGM is an extreme form of female oppression that shocked me. After learning about FGM I was able to draw connections to how American Plastic Surgery can be a chosen form of FGM. Although chosen, this surgery is still barbaric. Women in the United States are highly critical of themselves because of constant feelings of inadequacy. Although women in the US will justify by explaining that it makes "them feel better about themselves", there are certainly underlying factors that influence them to desire this type of procedure. This was the first time I was able to realize how the medical industry was tied to genital assemblages. I would later apply this idea to transitioning transgendered individuals as well as intersex individuals. Women's Studies 101 ignited my passion in gender studies, and influenced me to pick up the minor.