Educational Leadership, Counseling,
and Foundations Faculty

Angela Alexander , Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Office : ED 182
Phone : 504.280.6454
E-mail : aalexand@uno.edu

I am from a small Caribbean country called St. Lucia. I have lived in New Orleans for the past 13 years. New Orleans in many ways is my home; I have learned and grown professioanlly and personaly here. My experiences at UNO have contributed greatly to this growth.
I embrace teaching as an opportunity to inspire and empower. I believe that the learning process is best when it is collaborative between students and the instructor. I expect students to learn from me and from each other, and I learn from them as well. As an instructor for the past five years in Qualitative Research Theory, Methods and Evaluation, as an instructor in Group Counseling, Marriage and Family Therapy and Advanced Supervision techniques, I have been honored to be part of the learning and growth experiences of many aspiring researchers, counselors, and educators.
I believe that adults learn by doing, being, experiencing, and most importantly through reflection of their experiences. My goal is to enhance student learning as a transformative experience, as a growth experience. I believe it is in reflection of our experiences that we learn and become truly self-actualized, and we can then fulfill our destinies. Ideally, I want students to feel personally changed by their participation in any course that I am teaching.
I use a variety of methods to accomplish learning in the classroom. Most importantly I believe presence and participation personalize learning, so I invite students to be physically, mentally and emotionally present. In the classroom, I use who I am personally, professionally, as an academic and as a practitioner to help students understand and apply concepts to their own experiences and personalities. I am at times very direct, at times I use wit, at times I am supportive and let learning take place on its own. The connection and energy established between students and me is a powerful teaching technique that I utilize in creating an optimal learning experience. I challenge students to push the envelope on what they believe is possible for them to achieve and to challenge the boundaries that society places on individuals, families, communities, and marginalized groups like the elderly, the poor, the homeless, and the adult learner.
My passion for qualitative research and family therapy lies in their support of the concept of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. By so doing, I have watched students become more self-aware, and question what they have come to believe about themselves and the worlds in which they live.  I believe our personal, social and academic realities have been constructed by our families of origin, by our communities and the world at large, and in so being, can be reconstructed into what works best for us, our families and the worlds in which we live.
I believe transformative learning is most likely to occur when students become personally engaged with the material and perceive the subject matter to be directly relevant to their own lives. Understanding the diversity of learning styles and student experiences is a key to enhancing this engagement. I try to understand students individually and as a group, their inter- and intra-personal influences and in so doing help foster them into a collaborative community inspired to learn and grow.
As an adjunct and visiting instructor of Qualitative Research over the past four years, many of my students have had little understanding of the nature of qualitative research, design and analysis. For most of these students, the introductory course may be their first and perhaps the only qualitative course they would take in graduate school. To facilitate their learning, I aim to foster an understanding and appreciation for qualitative research, to provide fundamental knowledge and tools applicable to qualitative research, and to enhance self-awareness and understanding of the value of qualitative inquiry to education and counseling.
As an instructor of Marriage and Family therapy, my first goal was to help students understand the family as a system by first exploring and understanding the familiar and strange in their own families of origin. Ethics and guidelines to family therapy were then explored along with the major theories of family therapy, counseling and psychotherapy used in working with couples and their families. Students then learned to describe and use core counseling skills in working with couples and families and brought in their own families and volunteered to be interviewed by their classmates using various theories and techniques. Finally students were introduced to a constructivist approach to family therapy, to understanding the meaning of behaviors and experiences for families and how to work within these boundaries and challenge families to grow outside these boundaries.

Education

PhD - Education,Leadership and Counseling, University of New Orleans, 2002
M.A. - Counseling, Xavier University of New Orleans, 1995
B.Sc. - Social Work, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 1993