The Complete Guide to Becoming An Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teacher, Postsecondary

Chapter 1: What Does a Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies Teacher, Postsecondary Actually Do?

Let's clear up the biggest misconception right away: being a postsecondary Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies teacher is not primarily a job about standing in front of a classroom and delivering brilliant lectures. That is part of it, and it's often the most visible part, but it's maybe 20 to 25 percent of the actual work. The rest is research, grading, advising, committee service, and a surprising amount of administrative paperwork. If you come into this career expecting to be a public intellectual who spends most of the day in seminars, you will be disoriented. This job is a craft with multiple, very different skill sets, and you need to be honest with yourself about which of those skills you actually like doing.

Let's break down the core responsibilities in the order they actually consume your time, starting with the one that takes the most hours: research and writing.

Research is the engine of the job. At a research university (think big state schools or private universities with PhD programs), your tenure and promotion will be decided primarily by your published work. This means you are a writer and an archival or field researcher first. If you study, say, the history of Japanese American internment, you'll spend weeks in archives sifting through documents. If you're an anthropologist studying diaspora communities, you'll be out in the field doing interviews or participant observation. If you're a cultural studies