A Black Feminist Approach to Mentoring in Preparation for the Professoriate

• In Event: 25.063 - Diversity Issues in Higher Education

Abstract

Mentoring has been identified as a strategy that socializes doctoral students for careers in the professoriate. This conceptual essay discusses the vital role of the student-faculty mentoring relationship in preparing educational leadership doctoral students for research, teaching, and service that disrupt uneven power relations of privilege and oppression in education. In particular, I offer a critical mentoring framework grounded in Black feminist pedagogy that outlines four concepts including: exploration of one's positionality, use of intersectional analyses of power and oppression in education and society, and collective commitment to social transformation.
The intertwining of mentoring and Black feminist pedagogy as a framework emphasize opportunities for preparing the next generation of educational leadership faculty who seek social and political liberation.

Author

• Ericka Roland, University of Texas at Arlington