Black, Proud, Silent, and Loud: Experiences of a Junior Faculty Member in 2020

Several social injustice issues, well known within the Black community, were brought to light to other ethnic/racial groups in 2020 and could no longer be ignored within the academic community. This led to personal, departmental, and institutional initiatives meant to increase racism awareness and apply change in thought and action. These initiatives often came at a cost of personal time and resources to Black and Indigenous People of Color academics, expected to contribute to these initiatives, redefine classroom syllabi, uphold research agendas, and continue with mentoring activities amidst their home environment (due to COVID-19) while monitoring their own feelings of pride, hurt, anger, anxiousness, and often- fatigue. This presentation will present the perceived triumphs and failed experiences of a junior faculty member, how they navigated this process, and explain the continued importance of institutions’ forward movement of initiatives meant to change the social and racial academic atmosphere.

A Mother-Scholar During COVID-19

This poem highlights the current challenges and the lived realities of a mother-scholar during COVID-19. As a mother of two young children, the author details how the global pandemic has thrown her life into chaos as she attempts to provide support to her children with distance learning while also fulfilling her duties with teaching, research, and service as a junior faculty member on the tenure-track. Reinforcing the emergent literature on the lack of research productivity during this pandemic for mother-scholars, the author as a qualitative researcher illuminates this exact challenge in her poem.

Enhancing your scholarship as a family medicine junior faculty member

Family medicine faculty are often expected to produce some form of scholarship as members of academic departments. However, this can be challenging given a range of contextual factors, including limited research capacity in many departments, increased competition for funding and individual challenges around balancing multiple roles, unclear expectations and lack of mentorship, to name a few. The purpose of this reflection is to discuss seven content areas that might be addressed by faculty in order to promote scholarship, particularly among junior faculty. These include: 1) knowing your academic track and its associated expectations by rank, as well as the scholarship expectations within your department; 2) considering your personal goals, interests, professional development needs and the relationship between meaningful work and burnout; 3) starting small and building towards a niche content area; 4) finding collaborators and the benefits of collaboration; 5) seeking alignment between your scholarship and work that you already are performing; 6) educating yourself about available outlets for scholarship and 7) seeking mentorship.

Critical Self-Reflection as Disruption: A Black Feminist Self-Study

As the PK-12 student population grows more diverse, the teaching population steadfastly continues to be white middle-class women (NCES, 2016). Critical teacher educators understand the importance of preparing pre-service teachers to become culturally responsive and sustaining (CR/S) practitioners by engaging in culturally relevant education (CRE). Critical teacher educators, particularly those of color from historically marginalized groups, can be important advocates in the struggle to strengthen the teaching candidate pool of CR/S practitioners. Building a cadre of teachers, who are poised to decolonize minds and spaces, sustains the work of many teacher educators of color. However, the acts of teaching and learning in most institutions of education are inundated with oppressive norms such as white privilege, xenophobia and anti-blackness. It is this reality in which I, a Black female junior teacher educator, attempt to disrupt normative teaching practices within a special education course. This self-study examined insight derived from a focus group as well as from my self-reflections conducted over the course of two semesters (Spring 2018 to Fall 2018). Using a qualitative methodological approach, the findings indicated tensions between my vulnerable position of being a junior faculty member and my desire to dismantle normative deficit practices through critical self-reflection.

Disrupting to Sustain: Teacher Preparation Through Innovative Teaching and Learning Practices

The main purpose of this paper is to respond to the call to re-envision higher education and to share experiences of hope that provide concrete examples about possibilities of enacting liberatory education in higher education. This article focuses on the work of one junior faculty member and four doctoral students who participate in a critical inquiry group and research collective called the “Critical Education Research Collective,” (CERC). As social justice educators, in this shared space we engage in meaningful teaching and inquiry practices that involve teaching and research methodologies, education theory, dialogue, reflection and praxis. While research has highlighted the ways in which inquiry groups can be used as an intentional and systematic examination into teaching practice, this essay describes the structure, functioning, theoretical standpoints and the process of becoming a doctoral student and professor-led critical inquiry group. The group came together as a way to sustain the work and research development of both the doctoral students and the junior faculty in the collective.

“Let Me Give You Some Advice”

This essay is a personal reflection about an email I received from a Professor Emeritus at my university after my research received nationwide news media coverage. During my doctoral research, I located racist public statements made by William Ferguson Massey (1856–1925), former prime minister of New Zealand, whom my university (Massey University) is named after. The white Professor Emeritus, who I have never met, took it upon himself to email me, a Māori [Indigenous] junior faculty member, and chastise me for presenting my archival research to other faculty members. The Professor Emeritus's email epitomizes white power and white fragility in the academy that work to silence “Other” voices.