Mentoring Across Universities: A Caribbean Educators Research Initiative

• In Event: Women’s Ways of Mentoring in the Academy: Reflections Across Transnational Borders

Abstract

Objectives
The aim of this paper is to explore how our commonalities and points of divergence have shaped emerging mentoring practices through collaboration. First, we elaborate our experience of being Caribbean teacher educators working in universities inside and outside of the Caribbean. Second, we will raise the tensions and opportunities that have surfaced as we seek to make sense of our pedagogical and methodological practices in light of the interconnected social, educational and professional experiences of the Caribbean. Third, as early to mid-career academics we will consider and (re)visit the tensions between ontology, pedagogy, assessment and research productivity, the inter-subjectivity of these spaces and the ways that they both enable and hinder our being and becoming as Caribbean intellectuals.
Perspective
In this presentation we adopt the theoretical perspective of Caribbean educator as intellectual and cultural activist (Lamming 1995 & Best 2003). In line with this, members of our research and mentoring group interrogate our cultural and intellectual activity as academics through an emphasis on the epistemic understandings of historicity, reflexivity, positionality, and criticality (Rizvi 2006).
Mode of inquiry
We draw upon narrative inquiry in the form of storytelling (Clandinin & Connelly 2000) as we create the space to write as women outside of domestic responsibilities and outside the isolation of the university (Grant 2006). Through professional talk (Hardy, 2010b) we engage in mentored transgressive and praxis oriented responses to university managerialism (academic programming/ policing the academic mind) practices which present a challenge for early career researchers, especially female academics (Ewing et al. 2008; Hardy 2010a; Waitere, Wright, Tremaine, Brown, & Pause 2011). Our narratives are situated “within particular personal, social, professional, institutional and cultural stories” and help us to better understand each other “learning about ourselves and each other” (Chiu-Ching & Yim-mei Chan 2009, p. 21).
Data sources
We compare our stories across time and the context of the personal and professional spaces we each occupy. Our storied comparisons reveal what may have been hidden; we re-reflect on what we knew; we re-imagine new possibilities and pathways for ourselves and we reconstruct our practices as Caribbean individuals and professionals within the university.
Conclusions
Our emerging mentoring practices within sites for collaborative praxis have significantly removed us as women and early to mid-career academics from the traditional ethos of research confinement and regulated outcomes. It provides us with the platform for and the opportunity to emancipate a practice of collective knowledge action through mentorship.
Scholarly significance of the study or work
Ours is a transgressive response to regimes of performance and as Smith et. al. (2010, p. 257) suggest “collective praxis” encourages “groups of academics within and/ or outside of their own institutions [to create] sites for the practice of communicative action by extending individual praxis into the realm of collective activity”. Collaborative research practices and mentoring relationships enable transformative academic practices and are for us, foundational philosophical and methodological projects.

Authors

• Laurette Maria Stacy Bristol, Charles Sturt University

• Joyanne Beverly De Four-Babb, Caribbean Educators' Research Initiative

• Talia Randa Esnard, The University of Trinidad and Tobago

• Jennifer Lavia, The University of Sheffield

• Lisa Joanna Perez, The University of Trinidad and Tobago