Anthropology and Sociology
Dawn Tawwater is a professor in the Anthropology and Sociology departments at Austin Community College (ACC), with more than 30 years of college teaching experience in sociology and cultural anthropology. Her teaching and research interests center on social justice, equity, rural communities, and emancipatory education, and she is the founder of Barefoot Rural Research, an independent research practice focused on rural communities in Central Texas.
How has your community college teaching experience shaped your character over your career?
My community college teaching experience has made me more patient, more grounded, and convinced that education is a form of social justice. I came to this conviction the hard way: I dropped out of high school at sixteen and earned my GED at eighteen as a single, homeless mother, learning to overcome those hardships by understanding why and how they happened. That understanding became a tool I carried into my work as director of the Dallas Peace Center, where working alongside human rights organizations deepened my commitment to human dignity and helped me make sense of my own path from the margins. Those experiences taught me that education, rightly used, is emancipatory: it enables people to move from being acted upon to acting for themselves, as it did for me. As a sociologist, I sought out community college teaching positions because I wanted to work with students who, like me, might not have had a clear road to education and who deserve the opportunity to understand and shape the world around them. Teaching students who juggle jobs, families, and financial strain has deepened my patience and humility, reminding me that every classroom either extends dignity and opportunity or denies it. My years as a community college instructor, alongside my work as Director of the Peace Center and President of the Association for Humanist Sociology, have taught me to see my students not as people who need to fix themselves, but as people capable of understanding and changing the social conditions that shape their lives. Teaching has therefore shaped my character by keeping me faithful to the conviction that education is both a right and a tool for liberation, and that helping students develop the knowledge and power to change their world is among the most meaningful work I can do.