Resetting Dysfunctional Education Ecologies: Dealing with Marginalization in the Classroom

Securing a tenure-track position is a daunting prospect, with disappearing budget lines, exhausting application and interview procedures, and hidden pitfalls. For the lucky scholars who receive an offer, life can seem suddenly easier. However, there are still obstacles to face, particularly if you’re a feminist and/or womanist faculty who belongs to one or more historically marginalized groups. For those of us who are People of Color, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, and/or first-generation or low-income, doing the job of teaching presents unique challenges. Thus, we’re here to discuss the challenges facing untenured feminist and womanist faculty inside and outside of the classroom. While we recognize and embrace feminist allies who only belong to dominant social groups, in this chapter, we focus on those issues encountered by feminist and womanist faculty who have at least one marginalized identity. We discuss challenges we face both inside the classroom and outside it. We detail how oppressive structures are reproduced in the classroom to affect marginalized faculty and students, particularly what Annamma and Morrison (2018) termed “dysfunctional education ecologies” (p. 70). Throughout, we give examples of how we’ve encountered obstacles and ways that we’ve resisted them.