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Education Student Selected to Undergraduate Research Scholars Program

5/15/08

Kiki Candelaria, a 2010 early childhood education major in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture, was accepted into the Texas A&M University 2008-2009 Undergraduate Research Scholars Program.

Candelaria will investigate the role of theatre and embodied pedagogy on the lives of abused and neglected children at Sacred Heart Orphanage in Laredo, Texas. She will work closely with her advisor and art education and visual culture professor B. Stephen Carpenter, II on the study.

"I am interested in learning how embodied pedagogy functions as a vehicle for self-empowerment, emotional healing and a means of transcending the negative situations they [the children] have endured," Candelaria wrote in her research proposal.

The Undergraduate Research Scholars Program enables undergraduates to actively participate in independent research projects, to communicate their research as an author to the research community, to be more competitive for national fellowships, and to be prepared for graduate studies. Candelaria will be recognized by the Texas A&M Office of Undergraduate Research at an awards ceremony in the spring of 2009.