Matters of Identity: Intersectional and Gendered Perspectives on Mentoring in Higher Education

• In Event: Mentoring Amid Intersectional Identities, Racialized Allies, and Gendered Accomplices

Abstract

Objective: Identity research in education has garnered consistent interest for decades. Subsequently, teacher education identity is becoming prominent with an emphasis on how teacher educator identities are formed and maintained (Izadinia, 2014). Teacher educators hold institutional positions in higher education such as administrators, faculty, and field supervisors (Erickson, Young & Pinnegar, 2011). There is limited research around how marginalized identities shape teacher educator identities and the multiple roles higher education faculty assume including as mentors. Therefore, in our larger qualitative study, we explored how our experiences with marginalization shape our professional identities.
Perspective: We focus now specifically on a significant finding from the larger study which includes our roles as university faculty in creating safe spaces through mentoring relationships. We discuss how our marginalized identities shape our experiences and relationships within higher education and the importance of mentorship and mentoring relationships. Utilizing the theoretical framework of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989; Scanlan & Theoharis, 2016), we focused on the representational and structural oppressive institutional barriers that contribute to our intersectional identity construction. This focus is useful in helping to understand and navigate the barriers imposed by institutional privilege especially with regard to race and gender (Robinson, 2018).
Method and Data: We used collaborative autoethnography, an emerging qualitative method of research involving 2 or more researchers participating in a study that is “self-focused, researcher-visible, context-conscious, and critically dialogic” (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013, p. 22), as our methodological approach. This approach validates other ways of knowing, sidesteps the delimitations of conventional research, and values those on the margins. Both of us have different intersectional marginalized identities and are located at different places within the hierarchical ranks of our university system, but we share in a “power with” and a “power for” instead of a “power over” (Moloney, 2011, p. 63) each other. Adhering to Clarke’s perspective (2009), we recognize that our work in academia “shapes and is shaped by the very mode of our being” which allows us to think about “the formation of our identities [as] crucial for all of us in education” (p. 186). Therefore, our life experiences with marginalization contribute toward the development of our professional identities impacting our roles in academia. Our research questions are: 1.) How are our identities shaped through personal experiences with marginalization? 2.) How do we navigate the mentorship relationship with others who experience marginalization? We utilized transcribed recordings of our meetings, personal journal entries, and informal conversations to inform our findings.
Results: Thematic analysis concluded with three integrative themes: internalizing factors of subjectivity and intersectional identities; societal perceptions and expectations; and safe spaces in higher education institutions (through mentorship, role modeling, etc.). We specifically examine these themes in relation to our roles as an assistant professor and an associate dean.
Significance: We discuss how our mentoring with students, with each other, both formally and informally is a dynamic process and how our own experiences with marginalization from an intersectional lens have shaped how and why we mentor in the way that we do.

Authors

• Ann Cranston-Gingras, University of South Florida

• Karen Ramlackhan, University of South Florida