Time to Come From the Shadows: Reflections on Reciprocal Mentoring and a "New" Activist Scholarship

• In Event: 70.033 - Reciprocal Mentoring for Critical, Activist Scholarship

Abstract

This paper is a dialogic reflection on the central role of mentoring in pursuit of this year’s meeting theme: “Toward Justice.” We use our empirical work, contextualized within the neoliberal turn, to consider how the apprenticeship model in graduate education can be mobilized to teach not only the orientations of critical scholarship and the skills involved in making this work more public, but also by providing the spaces of support that are necessary to negotiate the competing demands of the contemporary, neoliberal academy. Our intent is not to present our work as exemplars of ideal critical activist practice, or to make claims of suggesting anything particularly new, but rather to use our experiences as vehicles for considering some of the imperatives, dilemmas, and opportunities involved in taking the path of scholarship in these times.

Objectives or Purposes
The primary objective of this essay is to highlight the common practice of scholarly mentoring as a promising tactic for teaching critical, activist scholarship that is responsive to shifting cultural and historical context.

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework
We draw primarily from post-structural feminism, following Patti Lather’s (2010) reading of Foucault (1972) and Ruth Gilmore’s (2011) call for a renewed scholarly activism.

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
This is a reflective essay in the form of a multi-vocal, critical autoethnographic narrative (Davis, 2011; O’Brien & author, 2006)

Data Sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
In order to illustrate issues of continuity and change in critical scholarship, we draw upon studies that we have conducted individually and collaboratively to illustrate the influence of historical and cultural context on critical praxis and roles of reciprocal mentoring.

Results and/or Substantiated Conclusions or Warrants for Arguments/Points of View
We argue that contemporary evidence of persistent inequalities and injustices in education demands the re/invigoration of community among critical scholars, particularly in our field of early childhood education, by reimagining both the traditions of socialization into scholarship and Civil-rights era activism as tactics for mobilizing a new generation of activist scholars of-and-for this current era.

Scientific or Scholarly Significance of the Study or Work
This paper addresses the longstanding issue of the gaps that exist among research, policy and practice(s), a pressing issue in-and-of-itself but one made more so by narrowed definitions of empiricism and scholarship that have had some success spanning these gaps but which have not shown evidence of addressing persistent educational unopportunities (P.L. 107-279; Lather, 2010). This is the issue upon which communities of critical scholars must focus.

Authors

• Mark Nagasawa, Erikson Institute

• Beth Blue Swadener, Arizona State University