LEAD California, IARSLCE and GivePulse are proud to announce our next speaker:
Dr. Shilohna Phillanders
Moderator: Claire Mc Cann is currently Chair-elect of the Graduate Student Network of IARSLCE and a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford.
About our Next Speaker: Dr. Shilohna Phillanders is an internationally recognized educator, practitioner- scholar, and educational consultant whose work centers on service-learning, critical pedagogy, and socially responsive community engagement. Grounded in a commitment to social justice, her research and practice center on empowering learners and educators to interrogate and transform systemic inequities through experiential and community-rooted approaches. Guided by her commitment to equity and empowerment, Dr. Phillanders is laying the groundwork for a consultancy initiative that supports educators in emergent regions like the Caribbean, in embedding justice-centered, community-rooted pedagogies into transformative teaching and learning practices.
Dr. Phillanders holds a PhD in International Comparative Education from Beijing Normal University, China, and earned both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in International Relations and Global Affairs, respectively from The University of the West Indies. She also holds professional certification in NGO Professional Management, equipping her with cross-sectoral insight into community-based organizational leadership.
Her scholarship and practice focus on empowering learners through transformative, experiential education that addresses the root causes of systemic injustice, particularly within the Caribbean and other emergent regions. Dr. Phillanders has lectured at the university level in China with guest lectures in the Philippines, designed interdisciplinary curricula, and led international student engagement initiatives, all while advancing critical conversations around equity, identity, and power in education.
An advocate of qualitative and participatory methodologies, her expertise includes autoethnographic research, educator development, and student-centered support services. Among her scholarly contributions, one of her most personally meaningful is a chapter in the award-nominated volume Caribbean Quality Culture, Persistent Commitment to Improving Higher Education (2021) where she explores the transformative potential of service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) to enhance and support quality education in contexts such as the Caribbean, through asset-based approaches. Dr. Phillanders’ work is grounded in the belief that education must be a catalyst for liberation. With her commitment to critical scholarship and deep community partnerships, she continues to educate, engage, and empower; guiding institutions and individuals alike to imagine and enact more just futures.
Title: Echoes Between Us: Introducing Echo-Autoethnography as a Reflexive Method for Critical Pedagogy and Community Engagement
Abstract: This presentation introduces echo-autoethnography, a reflexive research methodology developed through my doctoral study in service-learning and community engagement (SLCE). Emerging at the intersection of critical pedagogy and narrative inquiry, echo-autoethnography expands traditional autoethnography by positioning the researcher-self not as a solitary source of meaning, but as a site reverberating with the echoes of community voices, collective memory, and the ethical tensions of engaged scholarship. Developed through my experience as a Caribbean practitioner-scholar navigating transnational academic terrains, this method captures the layered interplay of power, place, and positionality in shaping educational research. Echo-autoethnography centers relationships between self and others; between researcher and community, as foundational to knowledge production. It provides space to interrogate complicity, agency, and transformation, offering a justice-oriented alternative to extractive research practices and affirming reflexivity as essential to community-engaged pedagogical work.