Empowered Volume 7

Experience tells us, and studies confirm, that women faculty of color are among the most overworked, unfairly criticized, and least rewarded individuals serving higher education today. They are also the most thwarted when it comes to the basic goals of an academic career: tenure, security, and personal satisfaction. This, despite ranking as some of the most talented teachers we have: Women faculty of color disproportionately overdeliver on higher education's loftiest promise - preparing students to contribute to the world. In this book, these highly effective, overworked, underappreciated women will find expert guidance, encouragement, and practical steps to meet the outsized challenges women of color face in academia, and finally get what they've long since earned. In Empowered, Chavella T. Pittman distills decades of practice to show women faculty of color how to be unapologetically authentic in their teaching, speak up in reviews about their classroom excellence, and to offer themselves compassion. And, to recover a sense of joy in what they do. Drawing on extensive research, Pittman provides active measures for withstanding intersectional race and gender tensions, exercises to inoculate against toxic dynamics, and tools to resist being silenced and support being heard. Through these empowering strategies and exercises, women faculty of color can become the most powerful versions of themselves in their classrooms, and go on to make the most of their careers, contributions, and lives.