Co-Mentoring as a Spiritual and Humanizing Practice

• In Event: 47.086 - Fusing Mentoring Frameworks: A Critical Praxis to Affirm Women's Endeavours in a Post-Truth Era

Abstract

Objectives
Few research exists on the relationship between mentoring and spirituality (Bruzzanell, 2009). While we found spirituality as a critical aspect of our co-mentoring dialogues, little is known about how spirituality informs mentoring practices, especially among women in a post truth era. In this paper, we make visible the role spirituality plays in feminist co-mentoring dialogues. We ask the research question, how does spirituality inform our co-mentoring practices and the work we do as Black women academics in a post-truth era?

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
In this paper, the authors utilize a feminist co-mentoring framework while incorporating spirituality as a humanizing aspect of the mentoring practice. This paper builds from the earlier work that focused on the critical role dialogue plays in co-mentoring (Authors, 2017). Spiritual co-mentoring departs from traditional forms of hierarchical mentor/mentee approaches, or relationships crafted on just career advancement goals. Spiritual co-mentoring instead is built on connected dialogues, relationship building, soul searching, and meaning making (Starks, Vakalahi, & McPhatter, 2014).

Methods and Data Sources

Our data entailed reflective narratives on our work as three scholars and academics of color and our stance on issues of justice. We wrote our narratives and had conversations about the emerging themes and the varying contexts in which we worked. Additionally, we committed ourselves to web conferencing and corresponding through email until we agreed saturation had been met. We began by web conferencing bi-weekly and later monthly during a period of one year. During our conversations, we generated questions that we wanted to further explore, and subsequently wrote about our wanderings and musings regarding how spirituality informed our work. In this regard, we found that “the very process of undertaking auto-ethnographic research, has helped us develop a collaborative method that allows us to weave our narratives together in a way that opens new opportunities for understanding our practice” (Coia & Taylor, 2009, p. 7), and specifically as regards to the connections between higher education and spirituality. Data analysis included thematic analysis (Riessman, 2008) of the narratives and transcripts from the web conferences and journal entries.

Results
In our co-mentoring dialogues, we asked ourselves questions like, what does it mean to be an academic at this stage of our career after ten years of graduating from the academy? What sustains us and motivates us to continue even when facing adversity? How do we find meaning within hegemonic spaces of academia, particularly in an era of post-truth? And, how do we search for wholeness and healing in a space that continues to wound those who are racialized minorities? From these questions, four findings emerged from the data: (1) our definitions of spirituality (2) dislodging injustice; (3) finding hope, meaning, and purpose; and (4) healing self and others.

Significance
This paper extends feminist co-mentoring practices to include spirituality as a key core concept. From an empirical stance, we explain how spirituality informs black women’s co-mentoring dialogues. We make the explicit link between dialogue, freedom from oppressive institutional practices and spirituality.

Authors

• Christine Wanjiku Nganga, The George Washington University

• Makini Z. Beck, Rochester Institute of Technology

• Joyanne Beverly De Four-Babb, University of Belize