OWHE Blog
Propose an OWHE Conference Session: Topic Ideas Oct 4 2020
At the end of the 2020 OWHE Conference, attendees suggested topics they would like to learn more about. Some topics offer a deeper dive into OWHE’s values, and others are new topic areas. All the suggested topics were organized into themes. The list below describes OWHE’s values and the themes that emerged from member recommendations, along with potential action steps and presentation ideas for future OWHE conferences, webinars, and blogs.
OWHE Values and Presentation Ideas
1. Leadership
Facilitate meaningful connection, personal growth, professional advancement, and systemic change for all Oregon women, non-binary, and trans people in higher education.
OWHE's Statement on Racial Injustice: Black Lives Matter Jun 9 2020
Dear OWHE Peers and Colleagues,
We are reaching out today to express our sincere sadness and recognition of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbrey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and all Black people who have been murdered due to police brutality and unnecessary use of their power. The OWHE Board of Directors wants to bring light to the trauma, fear, and anger this has caused for many of our colleagues of color. We share in your feelings and offer our support as we work through processing the impact of these injustices while simultaneously conducting our day-to-day lives during a global pandemic.
10 Tips to Create a GREAT Webinar Apr 30 2020
We received a lot of interest in our recent OWHE webinar “Create a GREAT webinar.” If you missed it and still want to watch it, click here to watch the recording on YouTube. However, we understand that many of you are feeling oversaturated by the near constant screen time while working remotely and wanted to provide you with an abbreviated written version here on the blog. Below you will find OWHE’s top ten tips for creating a great webinar inspired by the expertise of Erica Curry and Alex Aljets in the recent webinar. We cover much more in the actual webinar but this can serve as a starting place.
Professionalism through the Lens of a Mexican-American Woman: Not Meeting the (White) Standards of Professionalism Mar 15 2020
In 2018, I received the following feedback: “How you interact with *Tony in the office could be seen as unprofessional to folks who don’t understand your relationship. Sometimes it just comes off as really intense and aggressive. What if the Provost walked in and observed that interaction?”
Receiving constructive feedback from a supervisor can feel like a jab at one’s ego. What if your supervisor is a White woman who doesn’t seem to understand that your “professionalism” is going to look differently based on the identities you hold? Microaggressions are common obstacles that women and/or people of color face while working at predominantly White institutions.
Learning to see my whiteness: reflections of my growth as Chair of the Board for OWHE Feb 18 2020
But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others' difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles.
--Audre Lorde, 1980, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”,
Maximize Your Conference Experiences Jan 5 2020
My first OWHE Conference was last year. I left the conference with an expanded network of other professionals in higher education and a set of new strategies to take back to work. The OWHE Conference offers a variety of sessions, activities, and personal growth experiences.
Learning a Different Kind of Self-Care Dec 8 2019
Looking for jobs is exhausting and hard on a person’s ego. Having been out of my desired career field for five years, in 2016, I jumped at the opportunity to get back into Higher Education.
From 2011 to 2015, I had been stuck without a clear path out of my situation. I was working as a Teacher’s Assistant at a private elementary school, serving in a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade combined classroom. I was selling myself short, keeping myself back from being my best, telling myself that “this is not what I am trained to do”, “I don’t know what I am doing”, and “I need to stay out of the way”. This attitude served no one including the class teacher, students, my family and my self-esteem.