ERIC Number: EJ1358069
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2022
Pages: 18
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1927-6117
EISSN: N/A
Shadows and Light: Professional Women Educators Transitioning to Academe
in education, v27 n2a p3-20 Spr 2022
Many professional women educators make the transition from school settings to academe after significant graduate work in their field(s). This transition, which often occurs on a mid- to late-career trajectory, places such individuals within liminal spaces on many levels as they inevitably must navigate unfamiliar, often alien, territory that frequently does not recognize or respect the experiences with which they enter their new university contexts. The collaborative autoethnographic study we embarked upon involved examining our own experiences of making this transition. By revisiting an academic year's worth of recorded conversations and analyzing them through an ecofeminist lens, we considered the lessons we had learned through engaging in a program renewal process and designing and co-teaching new courses in our first few years as faculty, as well as how these lessons impacted our emerging identities as new teacher educators. Our findings included three broad lessons learned: Beware of Institutionally Invisible Work; This is not High School, Dorothy; and Two Heads and Hearts are One. These lessons taught us to navigate the shadow places (Plumwood, 2008) of academe, including the delegitimization of teaching, nurturing and service work and the dematerialisation (Plumwood, 2008) associated with such delegitimization, and to embrace the light we found rooted in interconnectedness, an ethic of care, and our mutual recognition of the other. Moreover, these lessons offer others in the field ways of understanding the difficult transition to academe undertaken by professional women educators and the complexity of academic/teacher educator identity formation.
Descriptors: Women Faculty, College Faculty, Work Environment, Adjustment (to Environment), Feminism, Beginning Teachers, Teaching Conditions, Teacher Educators, Teacher Collaboration, Elementary Secondary Education, Equal Opportunities (Jobs), Barriers, Teacher Responsibility
University of Regina, Faculty of Education. Education Building, 3737 Wascana Parkway, Regina, SK S4S 0A2. e-mail: editor@ineducation.ca; Web site: https://journals.uregina.ca/ineducation/index
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education; Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A