Silencing Critical Consciousness: Reflecting on the Unspoken Lessons Between a Mentor and Mentee

• In Event: Critically Conscious Reciprocal Mentoring: Reimagining and Renewing the Egalitarian Learning Community

Abstract

A disconnect exists between knowledge imparted to pre-service teachers and actual practice of classroom teachers. Pre-service teachers are encouraged to engage in multicultural education, to challenge curriculum norms, and to find relevance so that students may learn more deeply and think more critically about their world. Conversely, current classroom teachers are challenged to create curriculum that balances the demands of state mandated testing and those of concerned parents. In seeking balance, the student voice is omitted from the conversation; the teacher voice, drowned out by the inundations of the administrative pipeline. Fortunate teachers often find their footing in the relationship cultivated with a quality mentor - a mentor who can navigate politics and power structures, who recognizes and fulfills the needs of students, who is willing to impart their wisdom and listen to the wisdom of others. More often, however, the figures that many look to as mentors (principals, instructional coaches, and department heads) succumb to the pressures of institutional norms and perpetuate power structures that leave the mentee feeling unheard and unfulfilled, never mind the frustrations felt by classroom students.

As a result, true critical pedagogy resides primarily in heart and rarely in practice. Giroux (qtd. in hooks) says, “You can’t deny that students have experiences and you can’t deny that these experiences are relevant to the learning process even though you might say these experiences are limited, raw, unfruitful...” (hooks, 1994, p. 88) Nevertheless, teachers are encouraged to omit transformative pieces that might lend voice to a silenced group due to a lack of understanding that results in “stubbornly cling[ing] to old patterns” (hooks, 1994, p. 41). Such devotion to the “old patterns” denies the lived experiences of our increasingly diverse student populations and ignores that “students are eager to break through barriers to knowing. They are willing to surrender to the wonder of re-learning and learning ways of knowing that go against the grain” (hooks, 1994, pp. 41,44).

This auto-ethnographic piece uses teacher narrative to examine how critical consciousness is silenced in classrooms through the complicity of principals and instructional coaches to the demands of concerned parents (Creswell, 2016; Fetterman, 2019; Fusch, Fusch, & Ness, 2018). In considering the roles of both the principal and the instructional coach in relation to the teacher, the author uses the mentoring models and mentor/mentee competences to reflect on how mentorship can be used as a tool to encourage teachers to challenge social norms or contribute to the continued hegemony of classroom instruction (Merrick L., The SAGE handbook of Mentoring, (2017) 185; Sanyal C., The SAGE handbook of mentoring, (2017) 143). By analyzing the role of mentors in the perpetuation of flawed social structures, the author argues that more focus be given to the development of mentors and mentoring programs in order to support teachers who seek to implement best practices for multicultural and inclusive teaching, thus suggesting that mentors, whether in the classroom or not, play a role in the development of critical consciousness in students.

Author

• Ashleigh Maldonado, Baylor University