The Diploma Belongs to All of Us: Mentoring African Immigrant Girls Through/for the Community

• In Event: When Mentoring Is Method: Exploring Spirituality, Black/Endarkened Feminisms, and Relationship in Black Girls Lives

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to employ data from a three-month study of the ethnic identity negotiations of African immigrant high school girls in a Midwestern school to illustrate how the researcher-participant relationship extended beyond the study, moving the researcher into the role of mentor. This paper pushes the field to consider the notion of community embedded within the South African concept of Ubuntu (belonging to a greater whole) and its implications for the researcher-as-mentor. I relied on Black feminist theoretical perspective (Collins, 2000) as the lens through which I explored the girls’ experiences with ethnic identity negotiations. Since then, I have reconsidered how an endarkened feminist perspective (Dillard, 2006) might extend the framework for the study. The spiritual and epistemological stance of endarkened feminist epistemology is one in which the concept of individual well-being is predicated on the wholeness of the community (Dillard, 2006; Dillard & Okpalaoka, 2011). Narrative research aided my investigation of how the girls made meaning of their experiences of navigating the terrains of ethnic identity construction. Participant narratives were gathered through three data collection methods: Personal interviews, group interviews and participant journals. The interviews were analyzed to make sense of the data by coding and recoding, using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The constant comparative method allowed me to look for recurring themes, patterns and differences. The findings of the study reveal the influence that the socio-cultural and national identities of the girls had on my role as mentor. Given that my socio-cultural and national identity was in line with that of the participants and allowed me to function in community with them, the notion of mentor as method became apparent in the ways our cultural knowledge and experiences set the tone for the interviews. The participants and I shared an understanding of family cultural expectations with regards to ethnic identity. Further, my position as a researcher who has also had to navigate cultural and identity boundaries gave me deeper insight into the girls’ experiences, especially on occasions when they struggled to articulate their thoughts. The notion of mentor as method has extended beyond the study to include my continued engagement in the lives of the girls. Scholars who engage in research with Black girls, and their navigation of contextual identities might consider our commitments to a relationship with the participants that extends beyond the study. Whereas traditional research practices have encouraged the concept of “research and run” in which the relationship with the participant concludes with researcher acquisition of the data, an endarkened feminist framework encourages us to move away from the traditional metaphor of research as recipe to a more useful research metaphor- research as a responsibility, answerable and obligated to the very communities being engaged in the inquiry (Dillard, 2000; 2006). The findings of this study confirm what is possible in a researcher-participant mentoring relationship in which the researcher commits to enacting community in an on-going relationship with the participants that also serves the community as well.

Author

• Chinwe Linda Okpalaoka, The Ohio State University