Following Your Heart: A Teacher Educator’s Journey

• In Event: Roundtable Session 78
  In Roundtable Session: Photovoice and Going Above and Beyond Being Faculty: Caring, Advocacy, and Passion

Abstract

Purpose
Our contribution to the gallery presentation will be a discussion regarding the work of a junior faculty member during a transitional period of her career: leaving a tier one research institution, where she administered an undergraduate program, to take a visiting non-tenure position at another institution. This transition was motivated largely for reasons that the co-researcher described as “the right decision for me” as it relates to her productivity and scholarly passion. A goal of this presentation is to share the co-researcher’s experiences of this transition as it pertains to the session’s theme—going above and beyond being faculty, caring, advocacy and passion.
Theoretical Framework
This theoretical framework looks at the ways that being a faculty member feels in terms of the links between job passion and the mental and physical engagement that it entails (Boyatzis, McKee & Goleman, 2002; Ho, Wong &Lee, 2011). Thus, we link the concepts of emotional labor with embodiment. Hochschild (1983) described the way that emotions like empathy were required in particular professions. We rely on the embodied quality of experience that Merleau Ponty (1964, 2002, 2004) recognizes in terms of the ways that our bodies and senses inform our understandings, perceptions and interpretation of the world.
Modes of Inquiry
This study combines elements of visual and sensory ethnography (Pink, 2006, 2009; Goldman-Segall, 1998) and photovoice (Guillemin & Drew, 2010; Wang & Burris, 1997). We focus on the experiences of this junior faculty member in transition. She was provided with instructions for taking approximately 24 digital photographs: take pictures of what it is like to follow your heart in your career. In two subsequent interviews, we asked the co-researcher to choose several photographs and to describe them to us. Interview transcripts were transcribed and content analysis (Gribich, 2007) helped us “define … what the data is about” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 44). After clarifying an initial picture of the co-researcher’s experience of transition, five photographs were chosen to display at the gallery presentation to be held at AERA. Finally, after the community gallery gathering at AERA, we asked the co-researcher to describe her experiences and how that might have changed the way she understood her photographs or might take different photographs.
Results
Preliminary results demonstrate the tensions between legitimacy and passion. The co-researcher’s reflections on her career transition raised questions about what it means to have a successful academic career in terms of the personal responsibilities that one can shoulder.
Significance
This presentation will provide discursive space for conversations about the ways in which being a faculty member can require sacrifices that seem antithetical to the predominant neoliberal education environment (Suspitsyna, 2010). Further, this presentation differs from others in this session by focusing predominantly on the depth and complexity of the passion associated with being a faculty member.

Authors

• Theodore Chao, Harvard University

• Amanda Bell Werts, Appalachian State University

• Sarah A. Mathews, Florida International University