Sally Habana-Hafner (Ed.D. Univ.of Massachusetts, 1993) srhabana@educ.umass.edu
Sally Habana Hafner teaches graduate courses in community development, inter-organizational partnership, non-governmental organizations, and refugee education. Her main research interests include refugee/immigrant empowerment and development, and diaspora and transcultural studies, specifically as they relate to community education and development. She teaches undergraduate community service learning courses primarily focused on reaching out to youth and leaders in immigrant communities. For over 25 years, she has directed statewide and nationwide projects in community development, inter-organizational partnerships, citizen partnership, and leadership training. She has extensive experience in bringing together collective teams of action researchers and implementing community development projects. Born in the Philippines, Sally is fluent in English and Pilipino.
Since she joined CIE, she has directed the Center for Immigrant and Refugee Community Leadership and Empowerment (CIRCLE) and played a key role in establishing the Asian and Asian American Studies Certificate Program at the University. She continues to develop co-curricular and interdisciplinary activities in the areas of International Education, Community Service Learning, and Asian/Asian American Studies She works to integrate multicultural and global education in her teaching, research, and outreach consistent with her vision of "crossing boundaries" for CIE as she articulated in Bricolage, 1996:
Who I am and where I have been guides my vision as to where CIE ought to be in the next millennium. The vision of crossing boundaries between academia and community, research and practice, international and domestic, and intercultural and multicultural is shared by most students and colleauges. The hope is to bridge these domains on many levels from the curriclum to pedagogy, to research focus, to project activities, to the student body. The more we are able to cross traditional boundaries that separate domains, the more we become integrative and transformative in all aspects of the Center's activites. Implementing the vision of crossing boundaries makes us become more responsive and connected to the communities and people we supposedly are interested in assisting in development.