ASA002 A03
Week6 Blog
In this week's reading, I read the article "Opening the Box: An International Asian Woman Scholar's Fight" by Akiko Takeyama, a Japenese scholar working at U.S. academic institutions. She described her experiences as an international scholar and the hardship she went through in academia. Fortunately, she won her tenure after experiencing tough, inequitable comparison with white and male counterparts.
Before the tenure, despite Takeyama placed a lot of effort into preparing for the class, trying to perform as an attentive professor, there still exists some academic misconduct of the students which has never been happened before in her male senior colleagues' classes. This triggered her to have an introspect of her ethnicity and gender: females of minority ethnicity tend to be treated unequally. The fact was, the racial minority and international students were usually being attracted to international scholars' classes but unwilling to act like native Americans to openly express their thoughts.
Moreover, her struggle in learning English by transforming her Japenese thinking in order to publish the book has made me feel pretty respectable for her. Learning a foreign language is already hard enough for international students, not even to mention the scholars devoting to cultural anthropology like Takeyama while receiving little support from her institution.
Overall, I have been saying this for my past blogs, that I wish all the minority and international scholars, can be treated fairly as they have already paid more effort to tenure or contribute to academia. Takeyama claimed that "building cultural and linguistic sensitivity and raising awareness is an important component for mutual understanding" is a guide for international scholars just like her.
Question: what is the method of Takeyama to protect her right? It seems that she is the most successful one who won the tenure in our reading so far.
Reference
Valverde, L-K.C., Fight the Tower: Asian American Women Scholars' Resistance and Renewal in the Academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press
Image retrieved from https://www.commisceo-global.com/blog/why-is-cultural-awareness-important
No comments:
Post a Comment