kelleyjburke-qoumt

Brand Statement:

I am Kelley Burke, a returning English major, a newly certified Narrative – Focused, Trauma Therapy practitioner, and I will graduate with a major of English literature and a minor in counseling in May 2027. I hope to attend Auburn University as a graduate student in the fall of 2027. I read literature the way I hope to one day listen to clients – closely, listening to the silence, as well as the speech, and letting the text revise the frame I bring to a book or client. My undergraduate work has been a sustained study of women’s voices. I have learned how women’s voices are made, denied, performed, but especially reclaimed. An interesting journey in the discipline of research and essay writing and letting evidence reshape my early thesis has been transformational in what I have learned this semester.

Coming Back to English:

I always wanted to be an English literature professor. Marriage and four children put that dream aside for a while – 28 years away from university, raising a family and being a stay at home mom is something I would not trade for any career. Now that my children are grown and out of the house, I have come back to something I love that. Something I didn’t even have a vocabulary for in my early years. Auburn has been home for the last seven years, and I count the chance to study at Auburn and hopefully to graduate school next fall among the greatest gifts, not only of this season of life, but of my entire life. I earned my certification in Narrative – Focused Trauma Therapy this year, with the long-term goal of working with women and students in clinical practice.

ENGL 2020 and the Research Journey

This Eportfolio is the work of ENGL 2020 but the writing it represents reaches further than this single course. ENGL 2020 is where I learned how to write at the level of university scholarship; how to close read a peer-reviewed article, how to build an argument and claim that earns it it’s conclusions and how peer-reviewed work with honest conversation helps with my own critical thinking skills. I have included my ENGL 4310 research essay in this portfolio not because it belongs in this course, but because it could not have been written without it. In that paper, I started with what I believed was a strong thesis; unfortunately, it did not survive sustained research and contact with evidence and I had to pivot. The pivot itself is the story I most want to tell, not because the new argument is more interesting than the old one, but because the journey from one to the other is the journey ENGL 2020 first taught me how to take. My hope is that other students working through their own research projects will find something useful in watching how my journey unfolded over the spring semester.

A Few Other Things About Me:

I love all things tea. I will talk tea, different types of tea, the best way of brewing tea, scones, the small rituals of tea for as long as anyone will listen, and I love nothing more than sharing a cuppa with friends. As I look toward Auburn in 2027, I am wondering how the close reading habits I have built in courses like this one will translate into clinical listening, and what it will look like to bring training in voice, story, and silence into clinical work with women and students who often arrive at a mental health clinic having never told their story out loud. I will also talk Auburn athletics to anyone who will listen. Auburn is a very special place to me in my gratitude to be able to call it home has no bounds.