On Becoming Critical Educators: Reflections on Co-Mentoring, Situated Learning, and Communities of Practice

• In Event: Student and Scholar Activism: Reciprocal Mentoring for Social Justice

Abstract

This paper is a critical, dialogic narrative between two scholars of color, an early career faculty member and a doctoral student whose role was to act as a critical interlocutor for a new course focused on affecting organizational and community change to support children’s and families’ well-being. Our intent is to use our experiences of introducing critical pedagogy within a predominantly modernist, scientistic curriculum, to pose the following questions to workshop participants: How did you become an activist scholar? What lessons do you have to share from being mentored? How do you mentor? And what is the role “diasporic,” critical communities of practice can play in sustaining localized scholar-activism within the constraints presented by the contemporary, neoliberal academy?
We examine our work together primarily through two overlapping lenses: Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin’s (1984) theory of dialogism and ideological becoming. While mentoring and apprenticeship are key traditions in graduate education, the practices through which novice scholars move from peripheral roles into increasing degrees of “community” membership, much of these processes are implicit which can be detrimental to those whose cultural capital differs from that valued in higher education’s hidden curriculum (Margolis, Soldatenko, Acker & Gair, 2001; Dodson, Montgomery & Brown, 2009). Therefore, in order to make our co-learning more explicit for both of us, we engaged in regular dialogues about the course, as well as our developing understandings of our identities as critical educators.
Both of us shared (share) the goal of learning about the practice of critical pedagogy and decided that a teaching assistantship, and the tasks that often come with this role, would not serve our goal. Rather, what was needed was a defined role as participant observer and critical interlocutor “free” to offer radical critique. This resulted in fifty pages of field notes and four critical dialogues during the semester. Subsequently we have drawn upon critical personal narrative to both re-construct the class’s arc and interweave our separate narratives (Chapman, 2004; Mutua & Swadener, 2004). We draw from field notes, reflection logs, and artifacts from class activities.
This process has had multiple results, most concretely the course being completely revised to focus more explicitly on inquiry based learning focused on mobilizing collective action around social justice issues identified by students through a consensus-building process. More formatively, we discuss our identities as activist scholars and our respective experiences of working critically with/in an institutional context that is both overtly and covertly resistant to critical pedagogy and scholarly activism.
While the subjects of mentoring and critical pedagogy in graduate education are not new, we argue that the prevailing climate in higher education (and society more generally), necessitates not only re/invigorated mentoring into scholarly activism in small spaces, such as the ones that we describe, but also through sharing stories and lessons learned across the diaspora of critical educators.

Authors

• Mark Nagasawa, Erikson Institute

• Kandace Thomas, Erikson Institute