Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography: Reflexive Pedagogies for Navigating Difficult Times

This month, I had the joy of sharing my book Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography: Reflexive Pedagogies for Navigating Difficult Times in two presentations—first at Creighton University on October 7, 2025, and then with the Taos Institute online on October 24, 2025.
Both sessions offer a window into my journey of developing the Transformagram Learning Model, a pedagogical framework that integrates autoethnography, peace education, and narrative transformation.

From Personal Story to Pedagogical Framework

The process began years ago with Homing In: An Adopted Child’s Story Mandala of Connecting, Reunion, and Belonging—an autoethnographic inquiry into identity, relationship, and reconciliation. That personal narrative became a teaching story, a living curriculum for exploring how reflective storytelling can nurture peace within and beyond the classroom.

Through this evolution, life-o-grams—the narrative patterns of lived experience—became transformagrams: dynamic, reflexive processes that invite students to engage their own conflict or illness narratives through a stepwise Transformagram Portfolio. This portfolio guides them to see their stories not as static accounts but as pathways for transformation and relational repair.

The Mandala of Narrative Peacebuilding

In my presentations, I share a theoretical mandala that grounds this approach in both narrative conflict resolution theory and experiential learning practice. The mandala represents how self-storying becomes a practice of crafting peace: weaving together emotion, reflection, and relational awareness into a holistic understanding of Self and world.

Through these layered perspectives, Crafting Peace proposes a form of peace education rooted in reflexivity, creativity, and interconnectedness—where the classroom becomes a microcosm of the world in transformation.

An Invitation to the Glovircal Landscape

I invite you to explore this glovircal landscape—where the global and the local meet through virtual spaces and homescapes. Here, we learn to navigate our shared humanity through relational approaches that foster integral human development and wayfinding.

Watch the two presentation videos to experience how Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography unfolds in theory, story, and practice. Join me in exploring how our lived narratives—when written, shared, and transformed—become acts of peacebuilding.
 
Taos Institute links:

• Watch and/or share the recording. Available in the Event Replays library of the Taos Institute Commons (free) and on YouTube: https://youtu.be/17VjZ4Mc7y8.

Share your reflections. How did this webinar inspire you? What will you do differently in your own work? Click here to post a comment in the Commons. We would love to hear from you! 

Creighton University campus

Creighton University presentation