Instructor hopes to foster equality, understanding

Dawn Tawwater stands in the front of the classroom hoping to give her students a greater perspective on human rights and equality.

She paces back and forth hurriedly in front of the dry-erase board, quoting statistics and writing down information in a scribble-scrabble manner, stopping every so often to see if any of her pupils have a question or comment about the material being covered.

Tawwater is a Sociology professor at ACC who focuses her curriculum on inequalities in society, mainly gender and race issues. On Dec. 4, she helped co-host a domestic violence awareness seminar during "The Justice Project" with a local organization, Safe Place, at the Rio Grande Campus.

Tawwater was born into a single parent home, she lived with her mother, and two sisters. Her mom worked as a beautician during the day, and went to school at night in hopes of pursuing a graduate degree.

She witnessed domestic violence at an early age in a relationship gone south between her mother and boyfriend of four years.

"He pulled the spark plugs out of her car, stalked her, and verbally abused her," said Tawwater.

Although Tawwater realized the injustice, she said that "at the time, I had no idea how to process because I had no intellectual backdrop to rely on."

This experience led to her interest in gender inequality, and it caused her to further question the other forms of equality that she began to notice in the world around her.

Tawwater got her first opportunity to work toward the change she wanted to see at the age of 18 when she organized a protest against a Ku Klux Klan rally. After that rally, she understood that her calling was to be a human rights activist. She recalls the first realization about what she wanted to do with her life in her work with the Dallas Peacekeepers.

"I lived and worked among a lot of Quakers and Mennonites with the Dallas Peacekeepers. Both groups placed strong emphasis on pacifism and helping others. From then on I was sure that I knew that I wanted to help people."

Work at the Dallas Peace Center included promoting awareness about apartheid in South Africa, localized issues such as domestic violence, as well as heading anti-war protests in the Dallas area.

As she worked her way up the ranks, her passion for equality work grew, and her focus toward the human rights movement inspired her to devote her life to the cause.

Tawwater then attended Texas Women's University and received her bachelor's degree in sociology with a master's degree in inequalities, race, and gender.

She began teaching during her early graduate studies to provide for her family.

"I was a single mom trying to provide for my three children."

Her later graduate studies lead her to a small town in the Ivory Coast of West Africa named Adzop, where she spent six months studying the unique gender relationships within the various tribes in the area.

Tawwater draws on her various experiences to educate her students about the oppression that many Americans and people of the world alike face on a day to day basis and encourages the notion that different ways of life can and should be embraced and celebrated.

"I wanted to help people with my sociological imagination," said Tawwater. "People need to wake up and realize that equality can be achieved if children are educated on the past inequalities in history. Promoting sensitivity to issues of oppression in our culture is of the utmost importance to me. How can there not be a revolution going on when the statistics show that more and more women are being beaten daily than ever before. How can we justify something like that happening?"

She explained that ACC students can have a large impact on issues of inequality. She encouraged them to "educate yourselves, organize and start student groups. I'm dying to be a sponsor. If you can't find the information on equality that you need in the classroom, then search outside. Be curious and wanting to be the change."

Tawwater sums up her current goal with a smile, saying "I teach 3 classes daily, and I've taught for 15 years. That is a lot of students. If I can influence just one of my students to understand inequality through my teaching, then I have done my job."