ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three Chinese-speaking women’s (Nina, Terry, and Sue are pseudonyms) personal narratives of their lived experiences of struggle and empowerment as nonnative English-speaking female academics in a US university. It describes teaching as a minefield of student resistance and negative attitudes for Nina, Terry, and Sue in their first few years in the academy. The chapter captures these women faculty’s internalized peripheralization of linguistic self and their socioculturally marginalized professional identity. It excerpts these women academics’ reflexive accounts to tease out the reality of their classroom lives and their ongoing battles with linguistic, gender, racial, and cultural issues. The chapter uses the Russian cultural-historical psychologist Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory lens to reflect on their strategic approaches to taking action and progressing in the academy. In light of Vygotsky’s concept of mediation, it theorizes the three immigrant female faculty’s journey of loss and recovery to suggest a pedagogy of mediated co-construction of opportunities.
