Striving for Harmony in Discord: Recounting My Shifting Selves in Academia

• In Event: 60.070 - Personal and Professional Changes: Recognition of Our Authentic, Multidimensional Selves in Academia

Abstract

Purposes: The purpose of this presentation is to highlight the ways in which I experience, and strive to overcome, the discord of conflicting paradigms in my evolving journey as an emerging scholar. My story revolves around three enduring struggles among my various selves as I continue to learn what it takes to “make it” in academia.

Perspectives or Theoretical Framework: I frame my entry into academia through a situated learning perspective. Learning, then, is both a social and cultural process, marked by participation in a group with the negotiation of in-group, or taken-for-granted, meanings (e.g., Wells & Claxton, 2002). Participation provides the context for learning and serves to induct participants into a group’s culture (Wells & Claxton, 2002). Learning through participation in practice “is to take up a new practice, to change one’s position . . . and thus it changes the self” (Wortham, 2006, p. 141).

Modes of Inquiry: Trajectories of learning and change are sometimes bumpier and fraught with more challenges and obstacles than we care to admit. Through autoethnographic inquiry, this presentation helps to make sense of my experiences within and against the culture and politics of academia at a Research I university (Ellis, 2004).

Evidence: Evidence for this autoethnography is based on my trajectory and experiences as a former high school science teacher and relatively new science teacher educator and scholar. All told, I have seventeen combined years of learning about science education and teaching science or science education courses. This background enabled me to earn a tenure-track position in science education.

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View: Within academia, I have faced dissonance around three specific inner struggles. First, I accepted my faculty position ABD. Typically, the demarcation between doctoral student and faculty is distinct; for me, it was blurry. Second, I experience dissonance as a wife and professional. Accepting my faculty position meant my husband and I were separated for nine months. He left an assistant dean position at a community college to join me, clearly privileging my career over his. Finally, I face an ongoing struggle against the notion to research and publish at all costs, resisting advice to abandon my teaching for the sake of research. Now, I view my undergraduate courses as opportunities to research teacher education, dispositions, and practices.

Scholarly Significance: Perspectives on the conflicting paradigms I negotiate as new faculty can be supportive to graduate students and early career faculty along their own trajectories in academia. Mentor faculty may draw on these perspectives when advising future scholars. Like others in this session, my presentation is significant to encourage dialogue on this taken-for-granted transition into academia.

References:
Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
Wells, G., & Claxton, G. (2002). Introduction: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education. In G. Wells & G. Claxton (Eds.) Learning for life in the 21st century: Sociocultural perspectives on the future of education (pp. 1-17). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Wortham, S. (2006). Learning identity. New York, NY: Cambridge.

Author

• Angela W. Webb, James Madison University