Shadows and Light: Professional Women Educators Transitioning to Academe

Abstract

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.

Keywords: professional women educators, ecofeminist, institutionally invisible work, teacher educator identity, transition to academe, program renewal, collaborative autoethnography, borderland discourse, mutual recognition, shadow places, ethic of care