Meet Ph.D. candidate Jason Sawyer
Sawyer is a Ph.D. candidate and adjunct instructor in the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work. His scholarship interest and experience lie in critical pedagogy, community organization practice, positive youth development and arts-based interventions. His research encompasses studies on the use of the creative process in community organizing, youth arts-based program evaluation, community-practice model development and local historical research.
Sawyer teaches classes in communications in the helping process, human behavior in the social environment, community and organizational theory, and social justice in the graduate and undergraduate social work programs at VCU.
He works as a community organizer at the Neighborhood Resource Center in the East End of Richmond, Va. His background includes teaching theater at The Governor’s School for the Arts, teaching English abroad and working as a policy fellow at the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. His dissertation, “Crossing Boundaries: Building a Model to Effectively Address Difference in Community Practice,” will be completed in spring 2014.
In the future, Sawyer hopes to engage in teaching and mentoring the next generation of social work students and scholars, and pursue his passion for community-based participatory research in partnership with local residents, service providers and organizations embedded within local communities.
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