Team of two

Stephanie Selvick: Project Leader

bio coming soon...

Sydney Owens: Pedagogical Leader

Sydney is an English Ph.D. student / lecturer at the University of Miami focusing on African and Caribbean literature. She is currently teaching a composition course titled “Writing About Caribbean Art and Visual Culture.” Students in her course engage with contemporary Caribbean artists whose works interrogates the term “Caribbean.” Sydney has also taught at the high school and secondary school levels in both rural and inner-city environments (Zuni reservation in Gallup New Mexico and the Dallas Independent School District). She has worked extensively with children, as a day camp counselor at Albuquerque Academy, a sports camp coach, and as a childcare provider. Sydney strongly believes in the power of optimistic expectations, and feels that every student, regardless of age or life circumstance, can become an actively involved learner. Her pedagogic mantra is: be open, flexible, and daring; to encourage students to own their work, to think in new ways, and to actively negotiate with life long learning. More important than the content she teaches, she aspires to foster a comfortable environment that allows students to push themselves beyond their perceived limits.

Prior to her doctoral work, Sydney earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology and English from Southern Methodist University. She worked as a Clinical Research Specialist at the SMU Family Research Center on two longitudinal studies: The Family Project and Safe Start Project Support. The former is sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health including over 650 families with school-aged children in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and is designed to better understand how family interactions and family conflict can affect children’s adjustment. The latter is a longitudinal intervention study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention that offers diverse services to mothers and young children who have come to domestic violence shelters. Service is offered immediately following departure from the shelter, a point at which there is a clear gap in services for this group of women and children. The overarching objective of this research is to assist families characterized by domestic violence and to reduce the harmful effects of children's exposure to such violence. Project Support required that Sydney locate accessible, affordable, and sustained community resources/services ranging from transportation, shelters, food drives, clothing drives, treatment centers, healthcare, and employment opportunities and required that she worked with both mothers and their children to help them interact positively with one another.