Abstract
Leaps of Faith: Stories From Working-Class Scholars is an unconventional book that provides an intimate look into the personal and professional lives of academic scholars who come from working-class backgrounds. The book contains 20 chapters in which each of the working-class scholars chronicle their distinctive personal journeys. Each chapter contains an intimate reflection of the author’s background and family, passion for learning, and transition into academia as a student and the professoriate. Although unique in their narratives, collectively the voices coalesce into three major themes including (a) abandoning the conservative ideology of the working-class family, (b) battling imposter syndrome, and (c) overcoming the challenges of the professoriate.
Chapter 1 opens with the first working-class scholar’s story and overview of the book by one of the co-editors. Olson discusses her roots as farm girl who became a professor and gives an introduction to the concepts the reader will encounter throughout the book. She is careful to remind the reader that the narratives which follow are formed around rough edges, not limited by editorial constructs, or themes emerging from a qualitative data set to describe a certain phenomenon. Instead, what follows are the unaltered narratives of working-class scholars who answered a set of enduring questions on how they navigated the world of academia.
The working-class conservative ideology described by the authors is grounded in their families’ pride on being independent and, for some, of the physical labor performed on family farms or working in blue-collar industries. Their sense of family pride was not linked to any accolades or degrees one may earn from attending college. Thus, much like Douglas’ reveals in Chapter 3 her family did not encourage her to go to college. And by attending college, they challenged the family-based conformity, which made coming home an awkward and painful experience, as described in Chapter 5 by Holtz.
The battle with imposter syndrome raged as the authors aspired to earn their college education and enter the professoriate. In Chapter 20, Yarrow describes attending her first graduate class. Much like the others, she stated her first class began with feelings of excitement and nervousness but it would end leaving her feeling dismissed, intimidated, and silenced by other students. Orphan and Reynolds, in Chapter 10, divulged that once they infiltrated academia and landed their tenure track positions, they faced new challenges. These sometimes painful challenges helped them recognize the resilience they garnered from their working-class backgrounds and the salient role they would play in the lives of their working-class students.
Most often, we ascribe the working-class identity to low-income individuals living in urban and rural America; however, there is a particular group of working-class scholars that has been seemingly overlooked in the past collection of narratives. In Chapter 9, Murray-Johnson and Hunter-Johnson reflect on their country of origin and cultural backgrounds. The authors examine how, as immigrant scholars, they perceived the meaning of their newly acquired social class and how it compares with that of their home countries. The authors also reflected on the challenges they encountered inside and outside academia. The chapter ends with the authors exploring the factors that drove their persistence and the learning strategies they relied to help them learn against all odds.
Although the narratives about working-class individuals are not new to academia, this book’s contributors are very diverse in race, culture, gender, sexuality, and nationality. And in the final chapter of the book, Benoit describes for the reader how this collection of narratives differs from other books that tell the stories of working-class scholars. This book also provides an update on the existing literature on working-class scholars entering and teaching in, what some consider as, a tumultuous time within academia. The most salient contribution of this book is it provides new working-class scholars a rich wealth of experiences and perspectives in which to draw upon as they learn to navigate academia. More importantly, it offers those working in academia valuable insight into the personal lives of and struggles that working-class scholars experience as students and professors.
