NEGOTIATING THE ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENT
Kumari Beck - So lets just manage to sit through a little bit more of this and there will be more. I am not going to spend too much time talking about the topic but let it emerge from our panelists except to draw attention to the word environment. We live in it we breath it we also can influence it.
Our speakers are for this panel. We are going to start with my left, Dr. Stelómethet Ethel Gardner from Education. She has Ph.D from (SFU), Ed.M. from (Harvard), M.Ed. from (UBC), B.Ed from (UBC). She has been involved with First Nations education for more than fifteen years. She has been a long-time advocate and promoter for Aboriginal language revitalization, both in academia and at the community level. Her long involvement with the revitalization of Halq'eméylem in her native Stó:lö Nation led eventually to her PhD dissertation of the meaning of revitalization in the everyday lives of Stó:lö people. She is currently researching effective approaches for Aboriginal language revitalization, including the use of computer-assisted and web-based learning, and is part of the CURA team researching imaginative education in school communities with a high population of First Nations children. She has been an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education, here, since August 2002.
And then we have Dr. Dianne Cyr, Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, a Masters degree from the University of New Brunswick, and a Bachelors degree from the University of Victoria. She is an Associate Professor in the Business area at the Surrey campus. And primarily for our symposium today, the interest, she is the author of four books of which one , Scaling the Ivory Tower: Stories from Women in Business School Faculties co-authored with Blaize Reich (Praeger, 1996). She leads a SSHRC supported research project titled "Managing E-loyalty through Experience Design", which is focused on how to build trust in e-business across cultures. Dianne is also the Chair of an international conference to be held in Vancouver this coming July on the topic of " Culture, Trust and Design Innovation ".
And then we will have Dr. Ellen Balka. She says with degrees in Geography and Environmental Studies, Women's Studies, and an interdisciplinary doctorate (computer science, communication and women's studies), and teaching experience in 3 disciplines, my academic route has seldom been straight forward. Nonetheless, in many respects I have had a very traditional career, in which I have progressed through the ranks and achieved considerable success through a career that has focused on women and technological change.
And then we will have Dr. Marilyn MacDonald, a professor in Women's Studies, whose work focusses on ecofeminism, environmental health literacy, and narrative ethics. Before coming to SFU in 1992, she managed research and development projects for the federal government, engaged in environmental consulting, and facilitated grassroots-based workshops related to feminist science studies. She has a doctorate in evolutionary ecology, and an education degree in biology, chemistry and outdoor education.
And then we have Dr. Kathryn Alexander who entered SFU in 1985 as a 30 year old transfer student. She had previously worked in the pink collar ghetto in the corporate communications sector, where she became interested in writing and texts. Since coming to SFU she has also negotiated a variety of pink collar ghettos in academe, as an undergraduate in the English Department, as an MA student in a independent program in Education and a PHD student in curriculum theory and implementation. In 2002 she was hired as Faculty in the Centre for Writing-Intensive Learning (CWIL) in the Faculty of Arts.
And if there are a few minutes I will close the session I am a doctoral student in the Faculty of Education, and her research interests are diverse: difference and diversity, race, postcolonial theory, the ethics of care, internationalization and globalization, and pedagogy at post-secondary level. Community building and advocacy for equity and inclusion are high priorities. Thank you and welcome to our final panel.
Stelómethet Ethel Gardner - Ey Swayel. Ey tel sqwalawel kwels kwetslole, tel siya:ye. I say greetings in Halq'eméylem. I am glad to see you all my friends. And my traditional name is Stelómethet and I am Stó:lö . First of all I want to say thank you to Suzanne de Castell for acknowledging that we are on traditional Coast Salish territory and on behalf of the Stó:lö people I would like to say welcome to you to the traditional territories that our Coast Salish Nations share. And I would like to say that I want to learn from some of you how you do that interruption thing, and slamming the table to emphasize a point, because that is very much not my way. I do feel that often in the work that I do that things could maybe happen more (if I could do that interruption thing). But nonetheless I do manage to accomplish a great deal without taking on that kind of persona. I would like to go over, I know that in the description of my presentation I talked about hopeful things and things that can be made possible by working in academia. I did not focus specifically on issues of women as issues of Aboriginal people are across the board for Aboriginal people. There are hardly any distinctions there. Nonetheless there are issues of First Nations women for sure. In this academy and most of what I know is in the Faculty of Education, women are much higher represented in the faculty. And as of before January of this year, you are looking at 50% of the entire First Nations faculty on this campus. There are 2 of us. Now we are double women than men. We have 2 women faculty and one male faculty. The other female faculty is in education. Her name is Lisa Sterling and she just joined us this January and it is just great to have one other person on the Faculty to share all the work that needs to be done here. So first of all I would like to share a little bit about the history of First Nations education here in Canada and then I will talk a little about the challenges that we have. And then I will talk about what we are doing in the Faculty of education to respond to some of these challenges.
We are in a time today of redefining and re-imaging our traditional ways of knowing thinking, and doing in this contemporary time. We come from oral cultures. Only 30 years ago, a writing system was created for Halq'eméylem. We live in a society where a writing system has been in place for 1000s of years. Our traditional practices were outlawed, our languages were nearly wiped out by Canada's assimilation policies through the residential schools. Many of our stories and indigenous knowledges ceased to be transmitted from one generation to another as had been done for 1000s of years prior to colonization. Western anthropologists and linguists became the experts on indigenous people's cultures and ways. When they began to collect artifacts, songs, stories for what they thought to be dying races of people. We didn't die out. And while our traditions were outlawed our people continued to practice underground in secret and some of our elders who went to residential school, stubbornly determined to keep their languages hidden for years in their hearts and minds. Now we are at a crossroads. Picking up the shattered pieces of our languages and cultures and the picture we form from this puzzle will not mirror the past of 100 - 150 years ago. That would be ridiculous. Just as it would be for the wider Canadian society to turn back the clock and live as people lived 100-150 years ago. It is not so long ago that it was ok to refer to us as savages, heathens and uncivilized. And it was not so long ago that an Indian under the Indian Act would cease to be an Indian if he or she acquired a western education. Being an Indian and educated was considered an oxymoron and thus an educated Indian was deemed to be civilized and stood to lose their Indian status. Very few people chose to go this route at that time. Education meant something different to First Nations peoples. It was more about learning to be a human being, how to survive, developing one's talents through community determined processes. These ways of educating were interrupted by the residential school system and the laws that prohibited these ways. In 1969 the White Paper Policy was introduced to Canadian society as a way to integrate Indian people as equal citizens through it meant wiping out special status for Indians once and for all. Indian forces garnered together in opposition to the white paper though some people today believe that its implementation is alive and well. Two important things resulted from First Nations opposition to the White Paper: cultural centres were established across Canada to support revitalization of aboriginal languages and cultural practices (and) the Indian Control of Indian Education policy paper, which included the fundamental principles of parental control and local responsibility. So the first time since colonization, First Nations people could have a say in what kind of education they wanted for their children.
What are the challenges that we face in light of this kind of history? Counteracting the fallacies that have been written about us by others, rebuilding Indigenous knowledges, validating our own ways of knowing, thinking and doing in today's world and pushing the boundaries of indigenous thought and making room for Indigenous voices. What are we doing in the Faculty of Education to promote Indigenous ways of knowing thinking and doing? Well two faculty members is one thing. Without the physical bodies here we can't really do much. There are three new courses in the Faculty of Education that weren't there before, focusing on Indigenous knowledge, language, culture, contemporary issues. We have a program called the Developmental Standard Term Certificate in First Nations language and culture that is a collaboration between this university and the Stó:lö Nation to train Halq'eméylem language teachers so that they can become certified and can teach in the schools as full professional teachers. We have IPTEM, which is Indigenousness Peoples Teacher Education Module, which focuses on the urban experience. So it allows for people in the urban communities to learn how to work with Indigenous Peoples in those communities. They are vastly diverse from all across Canada, from here especially. A number of other things. We have Masters of Education program that has been offered in several communities in this province. People know little about this and it is a collaboration with communities of people. And pretty soon we will have, we are working on the development of a First Nations PhD in education. Now this will be to counteract some of all of those things that have been broken and fallen apart so that we can reconstruct it from an Indigenous perspective. We have a few PhD graduates from our Faculty. That would be Joanne Archibald, you might have seen her with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, the little girl from Soowahlie. Peter Cole, Richard Vedan who is the director of First Nations House of Learning. So we need more Indigenous voices here in education and throughout the entire campus. We need more partnerships with First Nations communities to negotiate how Indigenous knowledge can be validated in a respectful way in the academy. The academy needs to show receptiveness and flexibility to hearing Indigenous ways of knowing. And that is where I would like to end. Thank you.
Dianne Cyr - It is a pleasure to be here with everyone. I had a chance to talk with a number of you already today. It has been interesting to hear the different stories that have evolved. When Cher asked me to speak on the panel she suggested that I should address issues that come out of the book that I coauthored with Blaize Reich eight years ago titled Scaling the Ivory Tower. So I am going to focus particularly on some of the themes in the book. There were 6 of them that we determined had evolved from stories of our women contributors. Also I would like to share some of my own experiences, which have been rather non traditional. A number have asked where this book is available and if anyone is interested, it is still in the SFU bookstore or on Amazon. When we decided to write this book, we chose to base it on career stages that women go through in academe. But I think that the lessons are much broader than that. We invited three women who we considered early career women to participate, three who were middle career and basically going through the turmoil of trying to get tenure, and three women who we felt led the field. In fact two of the women in the book are past presidents of the Academy of Management, and I think that they are probably the only two women who held that position. The Academy of Management is a leading group for business internationally. So what we did was to accumulate these stories, which I might add are very personal as well as focused on career issues, and we enabled the women to tell their stories. In addition, we provided some summary chapters along the way to help focus the contents. Cher mentioned that the topic of this panel was about keys to negotiating the academic environment, and posited that these issues might revolve around different role structures, or responsibilities that would be different between men and women. So I wanted to preface some of my comments by saying that, at least in my experience and also based on the experiences of the women in Scaling the Ivory Tower, that is not really the case. Most women achieved because they just worked longer and harder. Overall there wasn't a huge distinct between whether they were women or men in the academic environment, which is kind of interesting in itself perhaps. So what were the six themes?
The first one we called serendipity. And this was a bit of a surprise to me. When we looked at the stories of these nine academic women it wasn't a planned and clear and rational path, but one that was fortuitous to some extent. The path was unplanned to the extent that chance played some role, but I want to distinguish that from luck, because nothing was luck. It was unplanned in the sense that women had positioned themselves to take up challenges that were presented, and were ready to take on those challenges. These were things that you might not expect were going to happen in your career, but suddenly they are there in front of you. Throughout the book and through the stories, and I suppose I would say based on my own experience, this happenstance thing has occurred. For example, I am chairing a conference this coming summer, which has been a huge task. That responsibility evolved from a conference I attended two years ago. I went to a conference in Austin, and as a result of that was asking questions related to a new area of research in which I was starting to become engaged. As is typical at this conference, they often ask someone from the audience to sit on a panel, and I was asked to participate on the panel. One thing led to another, and I was later asked to chair the conference to be held in 2004. All of this happened in the span of two days. When I went to Austin this was probably about the last things that I would have imagined. But this is not totally uncommon, and I don't know if you have experienced similar things, but sometimes things just come out of the blue. But the key was that there was background preparation for the women in the book, so that they could Carpe Diem - Cease the Day. So serendipity was one of the themes.
The second theme was personal mastery. And I think that of all the areas, this one is probably the key that enabled all of these extremely intelligent, extreme overachievers to exceed to the extent to which they did. There is no question that everyone in this book was an overachiever, and beyond that had a penetrating personal requirement to excel. It didn't matter whether they were first birth order children or not, and for some reason, and perhaps because they are academics and in their chosen field, all were very determined. Achievement was key. And in fact many excelled far beyond their expectations. So not only were goals set and the challenges presented, but women went far beyond what they felt they could have done in this context. It was the result of hard work. Again I can't emphasize that enough. But achievement was also related to good organizational skills. I think one of the keys to success for many of these women was the fact that they were excellent at time management, had extremely good skills in terms of organizing what they were doing, and how they were doing it. And above all they persisted. These women faced obstacles over and over again but never were deterred. So persistence was a key element. But in addition to that, being flexible, tolerance for ambiguity, excellent training and technical skills, and political abilities contributed to their success.
However one thing that didn't come out in the book, and I think really hits home for me, maybe because I am in business in addition to being an academic, is that marketing and self promotion are really important elements of being visible in an academic, or in any environment. Make sure people know what you do and how you do it and how good you are at it - whether it is in a traditional or non-traditional setting. Some of the activities that I have undertaken are not necessarily valued in academe such as writing books, compared to publishing in refereed journal articles. But it is an excellent way to promote what you do. Having a personal website, research websites or getting press coverage, which I take every opportunity to, is important to raise the visibility of research projects. This also raises the profile of members on your research team. So creating that kind of visibility, and it is basically raw marketing, is really important and it will raise the profile of women in the academy. And it is not just academics, but any women can raise her profile in terms of what she can do.
One of the other themes in the book we called the "female dilemma", which has been discussed quite a bit in the earlier sections, and therefore I am going to jump over this issue. But basically certain events affect women more than men such as birth, rearing of children, deferring their careers to partners, and also struggling within a traditional system. So that was another topic.
A key element and theme was support systems and that the women in the book inevitably had support from a number of sources, key sources. This could be from mentors to colleagues, to networking, to associations and role models. The women in Scaling the Ivory Tower really relied on these sources of not only inspiration, but support. I unfortunately have never had a mentor, and I always wished I had. However I think that there are great opportunities for women to be mentors, and I take every opportunity to be one myself - to mentor other women if ever that is required.
But it wasn't easy. One of the themes is that stress was rampant. Depending on the career stage, stress may revolve around completing a dissertation, obtaining a first position, or gaining tenure - it was hard. And I think that it was important that if you are not satisfied with what is being offered and presented to you, and this came out in the stories, then don't be afraid to change the career track. Don't be afraid to take a risk and see where things take you. That comes back to serendipity again. Stress is normal so don't let it derail you.
The other piece that was key for these women, a theme in the book, was achieving balance and of course this meant achieving an equilibrium between work and family, between teaching and research or administration, or the issue of role conflict. And quite frankly, that seems to be an ongoing challenge that will not go away. I know in my own life I constantly struggle with a balance of not letting work suck out all the time in my life. I must ensure I systematically time manage so that I get some time for myself.
So in conclusion, here are some things I would mention about these stories. One thing is that careers seem to take a non-linear path. Very few of these women decided that they would be academics. They started work and went from one career or career stage to another. Many worked outside academia, and have come back. In fact this was the case of eight out of nine women who were profiled. There wasn't a clear track going forward. For me, I went from psychology to business, not having a traditional tenure track job and which I still don't have. I worked as an adjunct in the business faculty while I was a consultant and had my own career on the side. Then I was a founding faculty member of Tech BC in Surrey, which was a contract position. And now we are merged back into SFU and are approaching getting on tenure track alignment. But all in all, certainty does not seem to be part of the normal academic career progression. So I think the nonlinear path is all right, as long as it is managed well. The bottom line of all this is that whatever you do, or these women do, or I do, it seems that passion and persistence are key. You just need to keep doing it. Thank you.
Ellen Balka - so I have one lonely little slide that I am going to show you. And when I was asked to do this I thought, what would be useful? I should tell you all that I just kind of in a sense woke up one day and had become what by traditional measures is a very successful academic. So I thought about what would be useful to other women in the audience about that process and I thought that I would try to make that process a little transparent for all of you. What I will do with my one little slide, I will show you what on the face of it, my academic career looked like and then as you will see I will highlight what was really going on.
So and I am just going to point out following from Dianne's comments about the serendipitous and non-linear routes. I also work right now as a research scientist in the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation at Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and I do want to point out that this is the last of several appointments I have held for which I hold no formal qualifications.
So on the face of it, this is what my academic career looks like. It is very straight forward linear path that I have had. I did my Bachelors degree in 1981. I went to work for a couple of years. I then decided to do a Masters degree, which I did here. I then went on and did my doctorate. I immediately got a tenure track position. I then became an associate professor and then a full professor and now I am kind of in a sense at the top of my game, in the sense that I am running this very large research project. So it doesn't get any better than this. So what did it actually look like?
Well the first thing was that after doing my masters degree, and I should tell you that I actually came to Simon Fraser University as a masters student having quit my first masters program because I hated it. So I was officially a drop out. And so then I came to SFU and started again and got my masters degree. That was actually a fairly pleasant experience. And then after I got my masters degree and got my doctorate I was in a car accident. I was rear ended and I was unable to function for an extended period of time. I wrote my PhD thesis standing up because I couldn't sit and I was also completely broke. I lived in a van in various locations in Vancouver including Strand Hall parking lot. One of my funnier moments was having the Dean of Grad Studies Office call me up and ask is it was ok to pass information about my situation on to other graduate students because they were so impressed with the ingenuity with which I had solved some of my financial problems.
Anyways then I eventually did get my PhD and in order to get a job of course I had to locate. And I left everybody I knew in Vancouver and I went to St. John's Newfoundland where I knew exactly one person and so that was very challenging. It is a very small place. And I went there and I actually became an assistant professor and I was actually running a Women Studies program. I was 31 years old I had just gotten my PhD and I was running a Women Studies program that in fact the university didn't want. And I taught five courses a year on top of running a Women Studies program and I had been promised administrative support and the reality was when I showed up to run this program they didn't even have an office for me. I had to actually, my first act on campus was actually turfing somebody out of an office.
Then it turned out that they messed up my appointment so I was actually appointed to no unit. I was appointed in complete contravention to the collective agreement and I spent my entire first six years on the job basically getting variances to the collective agreement so that they could do things like strike a review committee for me so that I could be reviewed initially after 3 years and then reviewed for a tenure decision. So that was really kind of a disaster to say the least. Talk about stressful. And I eventually resigned from that position because it was quite clear to me that that would be the end of my academic career if I kept doing that. So I gave up running the Women Studies program and in the middle of all this I ended up with a partner who came with kids. So I became a step mom, which has been a great experience ultimately. So that was one of the high points - one of the good things. And then also when I was at the point where I was trying to get tenure I had 2 hip surgeries in the space of six months. And that was kind of a good and bad thing in the sense that that puts your life in perspective. I was completely completely dependent on the will of people around me. I was non-weight bearing for many many months and I had a dog. People had to walk my dog. I couldn't go to the grocery store on my own and so on. And that was one of the most helpful things in my career, was going through these 2 hip surgeries in 6 months because it really allowed me to think about the importance and value of my life outside of work, and in that sense was phenomenally phenomenally important.
I got my first SSHRC grant, which was not my first grant in 1995. That led to a lot of international travel. I got tenure in 1996. I should have gone on sabbatical in January of 1997 but because of my messed up appointment and realizing that the university would never hire a colleague for me in Women Studies in my first job, I decided instead to relocate again and return to Vancouver. And I actually gave up my sabbatical and I gave up tenure. So I came back to BC on a 4 year contract with no tenure. My partner and one of my kids stayed behind for a year and a half. I had one kid who was just finishing high school at that time. I had to go through the whole process of getting tenure again, which I did. I stared in 1999. My tenure came through in 2000 and around the same time that that happened, actually before that happened, I had to have hip surgery again and again was reminded that there is more to life than work. Then I got another SSHRC grant, which led me all sorts of interesting directions in 2000. The other thing that happened in 2000 that was really critical, which was one of those good and bad things was that I decided to mount a wage fight with this very institution where we now sit. I am sure that Marjorie spoke to you this morning about inequities in academia and let me tell you, I am a feminist. I have always been a feminist and I understand that this is a structural issue and I could in no way have predicted how difficult it would be to be faced with the knowledge of the extent to which I was being discriminated against from a wage standpoint. To make a very long storey short, I learned that one of my junior male colleagues, a rank below me was making a significant amount more money than I was and I decided to do something about it. And I went to the administration and they tried to bully me into doing nothing about it and eventually I was successful in getting a 40% wage increase. Forty. Four - Zero. Okay. A huge huge wage increase. And I think that that only speaks to how poorly I have been paid and it was an amazing situation because I had a CV that was way stronger than my colleague's and I am sure that the university knew that had it gone to court, that they would have been absolutely hung out to dry. And so they were quite, in the end, quite kind about it. What I will tell you is that it was one of the hardest things that I did. I became very depressed. I stopped coming to work. I hated coming up to campus. I felt absolutely unvalued to the core and I will never have the same kind of relationship with this institution I would have had I not done that. So that is just by way of saying that one needs to think very carefully about taking those kinds of issues.
Anyways, then I decided to go to become a full professor and a couple of people who I want to acknowledge that you have heard from today, actually Hiromi Matsui has been a very influential person in my life at SFU. Partly because she is one of the people I talked though my wage issue when I had to make a decision about that. But also Hiromi helped me to get my very first scholarship when I was a masters student. But the other person who was quite important in more recent history was Mary Lynn Stewart who you also heard from this morning. And when I decided that I wanted to go up for promotion to full professor the first thing that I did was I thought about who are the women I knew on campus who I knew well enough that they would be incredibly candied with me about my chances to make it to full professor and who had also served on the university tenure and promotion committee and one of those women was Mary Lynn Stewart. And I sent her my CV and I asked her for her candid opinion and she came back with some advise and told me it was a maybe thing but she thought that there was a good chance that I would get it if I went forward and I did go forward and I did get promoted to full professor. Again there were some ridiculous things that happened around that that I won't bore you with. And then following from that, life has actually been extremely good. I got seconded to Vancouver Coast Health in 2003 which has allowed me to, today I dedicate much of my time to research and also in 2003 became a principle investigator on this 3 million dollar Social Sciences and Humanities research council grant.
So there have been a lot of really high points. But there have been a lot of real challenges along the way and when I think about what is the take away message, I guess I would say if you don't love it, don't be here because it really is hard work. I wish that I could say that it wasn't as hard as it really has been. It has been tremendously hard. And I also feel that it is important for me to let people know that I never wanted to get married and have children, and if you talked to my partner what she would tell you is that I always put my career first and in that sense I have had a very very traditional male career. I have relocated twice for my career. In that sense I really have done the things that guys do. I have had blinders on I haven't had a whole lot get in my way. People know I have kids. They often don't realize that I didn't give birth to those kids and I have the utmost respect for any woman who makes it in academia with children who has given birth to them because frankly I can't imagine what it takes out of women to do that. So I'll stop there I am certainly happy to entertain any questions that people might have later on. Thanks very much.
Marilyn Mac Donald - this is going to be a bit different from some of the preceding talks in that what I want to start with is thinking not so much about the concept of the academic environment, as the concept of negotiate. And in true academic style, starting with the origin of the term. It is from a Latin word for business and it is make up of two roots. One "neg" or not and the other "otium" or leisure. So the implication about academia is that it is definitely not leisure, which makes sense. Negotiate as such has several meaning, one of which is "confer with others in order to reach a compromise or agreement". There are other aspects about overcoming difficulty and that sort of thing but I think that idea of compromise to reach agreement is central to what we are talking about here about women in the Academy. That for all the schisms that divide us, the Arts versus the Sciences, the applied or business focus versus the theoretical approach, all those sorts of things, it is the kind of issue in these times, that if we don't stick together, we'll, as the expression goes, hang together.
So bearing that in mind, Women Studies which is my current home, might be summarized by this cartoon in which you see a fox at the door begging to be let in to the sort of salon atmosphere of the French poodles and in true liberal theory, "Ah look. It is Lennard coming to tell us about freedom". There was a publication in Women Studies entitled "if this is so liberating why does it make me feel so depressed?" And I think that that does summarize some of the issues raised in Women Studies.
For me, I began my academic career in 1965 at Mount Allison which has the distinction of being the university which granted the first degree to a woman in the British Empire, which it did in 1875. So I was a mere 4 generations after the first woman to actually get a degree. Our entry into the academy is not that long ago. She got her degree in Home Economics which was a science degree. So she did 2 innovative things - the science degree itself, a bachelors of science had just emerged in 1870s from the Bachelor of Arts. And Home Economics had been created as a place in which women could go to learn the scientific management of their instinct to mother. So scientific motherhood creating Home Economics which eventually was a place in which women could do chemistry or history or anything as long as it was related to motherhood.
From Mount Allison, which was a small liberal arts college where I was do a biophysics degree, and our fourth year thermodynamics course for instance had Oedipus Rex as one of the texts. I went to the University of Western Ontario, which was a professional school in all the sense of that term. We used to, for instance in the, working in plant sciences I was tutoring a course in which the pre-med students would put cyanide in each others cell cultures and move some slides over microscopes so that other students would get low marks. So a very competitive kind of institution in which I think it was the first time I really began to realize things which I had been able to ignore at Allison around the role that professionalization plays in the masculinization of the academic environment. So that when I got my doctorate from Western and started working in first as an environmental consultant, and then as a research contract administrator for the federal government, I saw more and more instances of that - that because of industry demands, a certain standard of expertise but also a certain devotion to client's best interest, one is not always permitted in a professionalization atmosphere to consider social justice issues or the wider benefit of the general public when you are actually consulting for someone. So when I think, we are talking about women in the academy and we are finding pressures within our own disciplines to perform in certain kinds of ways within a context of peer review and competition for women in funding, that tends to divide us up and trying to pursue inter-trans-disciplinarity is a sort of a cost within that context of a system of professionalism.
The other thing that I think comes out of that and it became part of the grounds for the research that I do here is when I was working as an environmental consultant and for the federal government I got into the issues around Women Studies doing science education for community groups. So things like working with workers about workplace health issues, trying to find out why Workers' Compensation Boards take longshoremen seriously but don't take bank tellers seriously in terms of health issues. So again coming into women studies realizing that it is to some extent, or that it understands itself as the academic arm of the women's moment. It was interesting to try to see how that area incorporated or did not incorporate Feminist Science Studies and one of the things which I have been doing research is comparing it to Environmental Studies or Environmental Sciences.
They are the two places that you might except to see Feminist Science Studies incorporated but for different structural reasons neither incorporates Feminist Science Studies in a substantive way. So part of the question would be why. And a person called Ann Phostosterling suggested in 1992 that one of the reasons is that that sort of drive to professionalize that the constrains within Environmental Studies has created a sort of schizophrenia where Environmental Studies is becoming a Bachelor of Arts degree in which you study the philosophical and historic implications of environmental issues. But Environmental Sciences are where you learn to be the person who can consult for industry and by and large, there is more conflict between those two than there needs to be. Some people who are really concerned about the professional image of the Environmental Sciences have a strong drive to say lets only do the natural and applied sciences and not so much the context of what we do. And the greater the control or concern about professional status, the greater there seems to be a control about who represents, in terms of gender or race or ethnicity, and a much stronger disciplining not only of who graduates but of professional standards and life long learning. So if we are thinking about women the academy, part of the things we need to take seriously are where are we going when we leave here, who determines what standards those sorts of post education opportunities are then set up to realize and in what way can we see more bridge building or coalition amongst areas that have been set up as confliction for reasons other than what we might see as the purpose of those areas. The sort of conclusion that I think people have come to is that, going back to Ann Phostosterling , what she was arguing was that when she is at science conferences she often feels like an alien in terms of having to admit that she is a feminist in Women Studies and when she is at Women Studies conferences she feels like she is an alien because she has to admit, or come out of the closet about being a natural scientist. And so what she's hoping for in that 1992 paper are the types of bridges for instance the National Science Foundation in the USA supported with a million dollar, 10 university project where the way in which they started instigating or building those bridges was allowing faculty from Natural Science departments and Women Studies to take three years looking at the sort of things that they had in common rather than the things that divided them. Unfortunately with SSHRC or NSERC a similar size grant would be $50 000 but I am sure that we could do it with a similar number of universities. Thanks
Kathryn Alexander - Hi everyone. I am Kathryn Alexander from the Centre for Writing Intensive Learning. And as usual I over wrote my paper. I am grateful for this opportunity of the conference about Women in the Academy to think through how negotiating this academy has been about writing for me and it has been since I arrived here in 1985 as a 35 year old mature transfer student from a local college. A lot of my research and my studies have been about negotiating how the academic environment or schooling is this nexus of politics of writing, of literacy, of textuality and gender in situated locations. And I notice that at certain junctions of my history here that my relationship to being a knower or one who professes has a great deal to do with how I am positioned with regard to my textuality, to my writing practices, to being a knower. So it is with this that I find that my positioning in the Centre for Writing Intensive Learning is of real interest to me. In particular, since I acquired my PhD and was briefly Dr. Alexander for about a year or so I am now called a Writing Lady. I am now the Writing Lady at this university. So this talk is about unpacking what it means to have become a writing lady at this place.
When I first came here, my first year at SFU I had just left a decade of working in the downtown core as a clerical worker and an assistant in the communications industry. And I arrived here with the ubiquitous imposter syndrome that we all hold. My first course here I encountered a senior faculty member who told me that I would never become a writer or a graduate student because I could not instinctively punctuate. And of course know that this was not on the genome, but I took it to heart and it was my dirty secret. What he has guessed was that I was untutored in academic discourse and essay writing and I didn't know formal grammar and I had a very strange background. My high school education was quite checkered. Nonetheless I preserved and completed my graduate studies. And you know eventually left here with a PhD and was rehired in 2002 as faculty in the Centre for Writing Intensive Learning. So this is a really interesting moment for me because I am one of those accidental academics. My whole career has been serendipitous. It has just been falling into one episode after another. Here I was, Dr. Alexander, or Dr. Kickers as members of my family call me. That was my nickname. And then I began to notice something very interesting about my role here because my work is intimately tied to writing and teaching and working with other faculty members on their courses. And I began to notice that I was being addressed in more and more informal ways. This became a site of really interest to me. So for example, the doctor salutation began to drop off almost immediately which is fine because I don't really hold that as being important. But then this past fall in a very public forum I was introducing the W implementation process at our university, all the faculty on the writing support group and the university task force were introduced as professors and doctor so and so. But my colleague and myself, even though we had the same alphabets after our names were introduced by our first names, Wendy and Kathryn from the Centre for Writing Intensive Learning. So I found that very curious. So we had to interrupt and say we would like to be introduced as doctors too please. So then over the past two years since I have began to work in courses across the disciplines I began to notice a very curious phenomena. At first it was in post course surveys and evaluations and emails. We began to be called "the Writing Ladies" by thousands of students or "the Ladies from CWIL", which is the acronym for our centre. Finally this spring we were jokingly introduced by a faculty member in one of the science faculties and it stuck. And I knew at that point that becoming a writing lady was a very important social phenomena and I needed to, so I am going to start unpacking this a little bit. So I wager that one of this is that all the faculty who work in the Centre for Writing are mid-aged women. We are all small stature, all nurturing types of people. And I wager that if one of our colleagues was male, we might not be called the Writing Ladies.
So I going to take up the advice of Dorothy Smith in the Sociology of Knowledge and look at the notion of what is the work that word, or language use, or discourse, that being called a Writing Lady implies. I am going to put foreword the notion that for many faculty and students, because of the ambiguity of our work that the notion of us as knowers, as scholars or experts, we are no longer visible as scholars whose expertise about the research and theory of literacy or curriculum implementation or philosophy of language whatever disappointed. So our collective PhDs of which there was quite a lot in the range of areas of or curriculum and implementation, composition studies, human social spaces, geography, literacy are sublimated when we are in the context of the classroom and I think that this is a really important thing for many of us who are not on the tenure track, professional track. We are professors or lecturers. We are in different places. So one of the issues is that when we are in these areas of this human social space, it is not our role to be the content experts, however we are doing research and we are doing theoretical work when we are working with the faculty and when we are doing this teaching with them. It is actually very applied very emergent.
But you are not the expert however because we are women and working in a collaborative teaching setting, we are perceived as naturalized and non-authoritative maternal figures. So we have become helping figures in our profession. So the other part of it is that we are now doing the domestic labour of teaching writing, which is the primary work of sessionals and lecturers at this university regardless of where we are located. So Writing Ladies are definitely not knowledge makers even though we are figuring out the teaching actually at the heart of the discipline with the faculty members. This is really interesting to me because it is the site of my own research. Feminist institutional ethnography as described by Dorothy Smith asks us to start from the standpoint of our experience. When I began with my job at CWIL I thought it would be difficult to not explicitly profess but I didn't think that my identity as a scholar would be utterly erased and I didn't anticipate that the social hierarchy of the university constructs the teaching of writing as skills based, atheorectical and transparent.
I am going to kind of make a switch now and say that this is a lot like, we have been doing a lot of talking about the maternal work and the maternal labor that we provided and I am going to do a little bit of metaphorical work and say that writing is the means, it is the medium by which we do all our work here. So I am going to put forth a different label. I am going to say that we are all text trade workers at this university. One of my favourite metaphors and jokes since I started my life here, but writing is intimately tied to the entire dissemination of knowledge here. The educating and apprenticeship of novice scholars in cultural ways of knowing is the primary vehicle for obtaining funding, accreditating students, graduate students and faculty alike, and it is enormously significant. It is like the material body of the entire institution.
So I have got a whole bunch of stuff about Adrienne Rich's essay towards a Women Centred University and the armies of non tenured staff, female labour that is required to run a university but I have to skip along here. I think that writing is a technology that mediates the social meaning and the cultural, political, and economic discourse of this university, and writing is our core social and cultural practice of the academy and the texts are in some sense the currency of our identity at this university. And it is our understanding of the textuality as a site for power and social mediation remains at best extremely naive and very transparent even by those of us who are extremely sophisticated in the production of these texts. So I see it that these power relations are encoded in the ways that we are positioned as teachers, writer, and researchers and they are all expressions of that continuum of power relations.
And I call this gender textuality in the academy. And I think that we have an opportunity right now in terms of some of some of the implementation processes to interrogate what writing means for both students and for faculty at this institution. I know that there are a lot of politics in the implementation process that is about to take place. But what I would like to say is that there is a moment here where we could begin to develop and there is some research that is coming out of Sydney and UTS of how by actually furthering the teaching of courses about writing by creating writing groups at the heart of the institution you can actually do quite a lot not only for students but also in terms of faculty development and I think it is part of our dirty little secret that we actually do a lot of our writing work in spaces where this institution does not support the writing.
There is a bunch of stuff here that I want to talk about - writing as a means of becoming an academic, it is also the way that we are made intuitionally invisible. So for instance, my daily work doesn't actually support doing research. That is what I get to do in my spare time. And so the notion of being a lecturer or a teacher or perhaps program director like you Yvonne. I think that you were talking about having to do it outside,
Yvonne Tabin - In my spare time.
Kathryn Alexander - In your spare time. So it very interesting how our institutional positions like job descriptions actually mediate against the very currency, the very means of us working and moving beyond. And also as we are through that continuum as students, as undergraduates, etc, etc this is problematic. So I would like to embrace my identity as being a writing lady. My hope is that what I can do in developing a feminist epistemic textuality pedagogy would be one that rigorously takes up writing as a focal point for critical and social disciplinary mediation; that we assist students and ourselves by making these disciplinary tools explicit and less transparent; that we build in some fairly simple and structural processes for assisting one another in acquiring this and this is certainly an issue for International students and more and more transfer students. And there you go. That's about it. Thanks.
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Kumari Beck - It was been a long day I am going to try and keep it brief. I learned a very long time ago that knowledge was something that came in books. People by, white and pink people who live in little cottages, with white picket fences with masses of hollyhocks and daffodils whatever growing against the picket fence. Years later when I went to university, my understanding deepened. Except now knowledge was something created by wise old men sitting in secluded rooms very far away within thickly ivy run walled buildings like Oxford and Cambridge. So I have been trained very well to recognize that certain things, like knowledge production, there are certain things that are normal. And so when I came here to SFU as a mature graduate student I guess I was broadened very gently because I had two wonderful women professors in my first two courses. And I recognized that there was something different about the way that knowledge was created in these two rooms but wasn't wise enough to recognize what the differences were. And then of course I went out from these courses into volunteering around campus, out to the wide world of SFU and discovered how much things were different than those few two classes.
I would like to share with you two quotes. The first from Himani Bannerji a book called "Unsettling Relations: University as a Site of Feminist Struggle"
"The way relations of power are organized in and through the university make it possible to live these relations without reflecting on them. This not seeing participates in the ruling practices which regulate the social relations in which we live. Historically universities have been and continue to be central to the production and reproduction of such practices."
So the key thing for me was in how I had been trained, and those others students with me, in this inability to see.
And the second one is from Susan Helt
"Those of us who bring to academia anything different from the normal are faced with the work of combining those discourses and managing the contradiction among them. The struggle to fit into the definitions of normal are different for differently located people although they share some commonalities. It is possible to resist fitting in but this brings its own set of problems. That these struggles are difficult and maybe impossible and usually crazy making is not the concern of those who author and authorize the discourses.
I guess I would just like to pick a few instances of those key words for me - coming up against normality, what I call the weight of normality and crazy making in a few instances of my journey here.
One thing I both Cher and I have related to is what was related to this morning as doing the housekeeping work on committees and generally the housekeeping work of the university. One wonderful thing that has happened is that I have come into contact with like minded individuals who are willing to do that housekeeping. But of course, as volunteers, it is another form of invisibility. It is normal for women to do the housekeeping and the volunteering but on the other hand it is also normal to be considered invisible. That also leads to a lack of recognition. Of course we discovered when it was time to apply for the scholarships and the awards surprise surprise papers get recognized, presentations at conferences but the hours and hours of housekeeping time that is spent at this university that women in particular spend improving the health of the environment here go for the most part unrecognized. That is something that I think that we need to address in a major way in the faculties that we belong to.
There is also the issue of course of the crazy making stuff and that relates to what Joann talked about from a CUPE perspective that those who keep this university physically functioning in low paid unrecognized work. Also there is a divide been us women in the academy and those women who work to basically keep the academy functioning.
Of course there is the task of resistance. There is also the risk of resisting because there is an issue of being, when you are out there; it is a matter of survival. What are the risks that you run in wanting a career? Second of all the various lines on the resume that you fail to collect, or that the feathers that are ruffled that will perhaps be in the way of getting through the program as a student.
One of the other issues that I want to bring I guess to your attention, we are talking about an academic environment we are really addressing what I call, it is a lack of negotiation in my mind. When I was thinking about this about this term, and I thought of all the different ways in which it operates to me it is not so much of negotiation, we navigate around things. We come up against invisible structures, we come up against invisible rules. So it is a constant task of how we navigate around these things. To me, the wish to negotiate is about making this structures, and discourses and norms visible by making naming them, that is a first step. Going into environmental clean up the first step is to recognize that there are pollutants in the system. We start off by recognizing that there are toxic waste dumps and they are seeping into the waters and if we don't take time to address those we are getting poisoned. So in the first step of the clean up again is the call, and I have heard all day, the call for allies, the call for solidarity to avoid the risk of resistance.
One other thing that I want to comment on in environmental clean up is a recognition of privilege, which I addressed briefly this morning. The recognition of privilege is the ability to see as in opposition to not seeing. We are trained so well to fit into and have been raised to reproduce the very structures that we are a part of that often we don't take the time to reflect and see. And that is again the first step to environmental cleanup.
The other one which is risk taking is breaking the silence. Often, as I said, that training goes so deep that we hesitate, that even if we do see we lack the confidence in realizing oh this intervention is not going to mean anything the speaking up or the standing up is not going to change anything. So going back to the various calls for, as Ethel called it, respectful partnership. I would like to end this panel on that note of resistant in terms of environmental change through respectful partnership.
Atousa HajShirMohammadi (?) - What is the level of interest and involvement of men in women's related issues and feminism and all the issues that have been talked about.
Ellen Balka - In general I have found that there is actually been more support outside of academia for the kind of work that I do around technological change then there has been within academia. The other thing that I think is very worth mentioning is that I have been very successful in getting people interested in what I do by pointing out that focusing on women allows us to see short comings that have relevance beyond just focusing on women. So there is quite an irony in that. So you say, I am focusing on women that is the population that I am particularly interested in but it also helps us understand why things aren't designed well for people with disabilities or how technologies favour people of certain ethnic backgrounds, or some cultural groups over others and so on. So for me there has been a whole politics to how I position what I do.
Marilyn MacDonald - I think that only thing that I would add to that is Margaret Eichler who is a sociologist at University of Toronto did a study of the 88 or so universities that link up our Canadian system and actually about 12% of the people who are teaching women studies courses are men. There are more men teaching women studies than there are natural scientists, health scientists or applied scientists all of which end up to a grand total about 3%. So part of the schism in Women Studies, or as it is now sometimes positioned itself Gender Studies, seems to have a greater disciplinary divide in some ways with Women Studies located primarily in the arts than it is gender per say.
Ellen Balka - Actually can I just say one other thing about that. Which is when I was a doctoral student, I was going out with somebody who was an assistant professor at another university who told me about the competency deviancy theory. And that was incredibly helpful to me and that is the more deviant you are going to be in your ideas the more competent you need to be. So if you are really really competent, and you are a scientist and your science is really good, then you can get away with advancing more deviant ideas and that is kind of the approach that I have taken to in bringing my agenda forward.
Participant - I just want to add something else to that as well. The ____which addresses diversity in the workplace just released a study they basically found out that the more women that were in senior positions, the more minority groups that were in senior positions in institutions, in academia and industry, basically the bottom line was that they were more successful overall in business terms if that is your currency so to speak, more successful in profitability and more successful in compensating their employees. So one particular message that the groups that I am involved in take out of that is when you improve environments for women, you improve environments for people overall.
Sari van Anders - My name is Sari van Anders and I am a phd student one of the things about this question I was thinking about is that this morning we heard about how Mary Lynn Stewart when she came out of grad school thought that everything was pretty much equal and it was only when she had a faculty position or a post doc that she realized that things weren't very equal and about how people these days are saying things are equal but when we get out into the workforce they are not. But I am thinking men are going to come out thinking that things are pretty equal but they are going into the work force as men so they are not going to have that same eye opening? So that is why I think that it would be really useful to have things like this open to men. I like to think that I do a lot of reading and educating and discussing on the issue and I have had men discuss with me they have never heard about these issues. They think that it is easier for women to get jobs than men. A lot of issues like that and they don't have a forum to find out about it. With academics we think that we know everything that we are experts on everything. So it would be great to show what they don't know. People are always aren't always able to seek out what they don't know. One of my questions is I thought that it was really fascinating about the writing lady. I think that that is just a totally interesting idea. And I was wondering if any of you or anyone else could comment on what is it like to be the feminist lad, or the feminist bitch or the feminist woman or whatever.
Ellen Balka - Just a couple of comments. It is always identified on my teaching evals. There is never a term that goes by when it is not pointed out. So that is one issue. One of the things that I an incredibly incredibly aware of is the different norms and standards of communication that are considered acceptable from men and from women and that continues to be a challenge for me. If I exert my authority at all I am a ball breaking bitch and I have a very difficult time often getting men and women to treat me it is very difficult to assert that authority. I have actually been thinking about that a lot this week about the strategies that I personally use to navigate those relationships. I think that that is the hardest part of my job on a day to day basis is figuring out how to do my job well. And just to put things in context I currently employ about 15 students. That is really challenging. I have to be a manger. I have no choice but to be a manager. It is very difficult to be a woman and manage because of all those contradictions. I guess the other comment that I could make is that it is never been a problem for me to be accused of being a feminist or a lesbian because I am actually both of those things and I am quite proud of them. It is not a big deal. I think it would be a lot more difficult if I were uncomfortable with either of those labels. And I also sometimes feel badly for students because I think that students lose out because they get steered away from me because I am a feminist.
Kumari Beck - I guess I haven't had the experience of being labeled a feminist but my experience is that like racism after the multicultural act, it has gone underground. I find that in my classes for example with my fellow students that I can see the label in their eyes when I take a particular position. I am also constantly battling against the myth which prevails, believe you me that women are a highly privileged bunch here on campus because we rule all the scholarships, because we rule all the treats etc, etc. So to me that is more difficult to combat over overt label calling or gesturing it is a very similar to a racists look or a kind of comment that I can't really confront in that way because it is underground it is insidious.
Marilyn MacDonald - Patricia Hill Collins came up with a phrase called _____ of privilege and she, I am going to interpret what she was saying in relation to what you were saying. She said that one of the hardest things to maybe bring into your consciousness is that you owe your success to privilege rather than hard work. Okay so I am paraphrasing what she said to some extent. That being said I think within the men's movement there is an acknowledgement that people in positions of privilege are responsible for their own education there is no law that we can use to drag people into, like I need to recognize my own racism rather than expect other people to educate me in it.
It has been my experience around other things that were said that when I was with the federal government I would say that it was about 10 - 15 years ahead of where the academics are in terms of paying attention to discrimination or trying to avoid it. And I think industry is 10 years ahead of government. When I started in the late '70s with the federal government there were 2 categories broadly speaking - there were purchasing agents who administered research contracts which were primarily men and there were clerical workers who were predominately women. And the clerical workers at that time sued the federal government for discriminatory payment because of their clerical positions. I was assigned to a purchasing officer to train me in the sort of ways that research contracts were administered and one of the things that he said when we had gotten into a comfortable conversation about the intricacies of that was if you want to get something typed you just take it to the person and flirt a little bit and she will speed it up and then he realized who he was talking to. And it is sort of like Ellen - okay I am a lesbian but I don't think that is what you mean. So he turned a little red and we went on to other topics but from the late 1970s to the end of the '80s when I left the government there were a lot of programs involved in, I was certainly supposed by the federal government in offering education program so that clerical workers could make a transition into purchasing so that women who were at the top of the clerical categories (CR5) could get into PG1 or PG2 category through sitting examinations. So there was a lot of mobility possibility in the government that doesn't exist in academia. There were training courses and things that women were sent on to acquire the background in technical things. So for instance, they were sent on NASA training programs so that they could become purchasing agents or alternate energy programs. I don't see that kind of on the job mobility possibility in academia part of it is resources, part of it is disciplinary, sort of peeing on your territorial boundaries that you don't want anyone coming in who is not sort of jumped through the right hoops.
And finally Pat Carney, I don't know if any of you remember, was a conservative member from BC who managed to make it into the treasury board which was the advisory group that has the ear of the prime minister and while she was there she browbeat them into doing a study of the civil service which was used a title beneath the veneer and she interviewed women and men manages. 75% being consist in believing what the rest of each group believed. 75% of the women believed implicitly that there was such a thing as a glass ceiling 75% of the men did not. I think that that was your point that men going into the work place there are barriers which they overcome but they think that it is though there own ingenuity, strength of will and general all around character. Women run into the same, the decisions were made in the washroom or a the golf club, I wasn't there when I was asked to do the really key things, I was too busy doing the housekeeping - all the sorts of barriers that men can't see because they don't experience them. So Ellen's point that that applied for race, that applies for physical and mental disability, all the sorts of barriers that persist.
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