A Balancing Act: Faculty and First-gen

Navigating higher education as a first-generation college students can be challenging. Becoming faculty and identifying as first-gen adds a contextual layer to the higher education journey that must be discussed and explored!

Presenters will share testimonials and personal narratives about how their intersecting identities, personal backgrounds, and life experiences inform their pedagogy and research practices. They will also share how identifying as first-gen continues to influence their academic identities. As such, the live briefing will focus on the lived experiences of navigating the professoriate to underscore the ways in which academic borderlands have impacted their lives, and especially how they have confronted, challenged, and even crossed these borders. The aim here is to highlight their agency, strengths, ingenuity, rather than to focus on any types of assumed deficiencies.

Learning Outcomes

By attending this session, participants will:

• benefit from “lessons learned” shared by presenters;

• find affirmation and strength in their identities as first-gen (or those who support them); and

• examine first-generation advocacy amid hierarchies of power in academia.