Navigating inclusive teaching and professional life as minority faculty: Opinion

In an article for Inside Higher Ed, Dr Kerstin M Perez explains how professors from marginalized communities can encourage inclusivity in their classes without sacrificing their own professional lives and mental health. She describes her experience with being treated as having less authority, being expected to do emotional work she is untrained for, and facing issues from tenure boards for putting in work to make her classroom more inclusive. To navigate this problem, she suggests that professors become familiar with mental health resources on campus, establish their academic expertise before ceding personal authority, use the infrastructure and syllabi of their classes to help guide students to supportive resources, and establish clear boundaries between their research work and emotional work with students. Inside Higher Ed Note: Archived stories may contain dead links or be missing source links.