Heritage, Lineage, and Critically Conscious Reciprocal Mentoring in Teacher Education Programs

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

Abstract

In an ideal context, we would map our academic family trees and see a beautiful representation of meaningful relationships. Lines could link people together to represent a web of community, solidarity, and collaboration. However, this idyllic vision of intellectual exchange can be rare in academia. Therefore, in this conceptual paper, we explore the impact of heritage and lineage on transformative mentorship within teacher education. Specifically, we consider the lasting and far-reaching impacts of critically conscious mentorship on the authors and their mentor’s intellectual and personal trajectory. We suggest that a critically conscious approach to mentorship rejects functionalist conceptions adopting more transformational and radically humanist conceptualizations (Darwin, 2000). In this paper we argue that heritage and lineage are vital in creating more equitable, reciprocal, and ultimately more humanizing mentoring experiences for all involved.

Context plays a key role in the mentoring experience. The authors of this piece were colleagues in a doctoral program and co-teachers of an undergraduate course. Adopting a more critically conscious reciprocal mentor approach during the course, the authors discussed and considered what it might mean to facilitate pre-service teaching experiences in more critically conscious ways. The authors reflected on their academic experiences and importantly discovered that the types of intellectual relationships demonstrated and imparted by their advisors influenced the ways the authors had come to understand their mentoring dispositions. The authors’ advisors have modeled key characteristics of critically conscious mentorship they inherited from their respective advisors. Not only were they influenced by their mentors, but by their mentors’ mentors. Both advisors completed their doctoral work under the same advisor at a different institution. The authors examined the mentorship approaches connecting these individuals and realized the potential import in one’s mentoring and intellectual lineage.

Given these relations, we argue in this paper that a critically conscious reciprocal mentoring (CCRM) framework including ideas of lineage, community, solidarity, and collaboration, might be used to explore the role of dialogical and reflexive relationships across time and space. Importantly, CCRM is more than just a theoretical lens, also suggesting that the materialization of dialogical and reflexive experiences can disrupt power imbalances in social relations and institutional structures. The authors employ an auto-ethnographic approach (Ellis & Bochner, 2016) to consider the complexities of their academic identities as they constantly shift between embodying the norms of doctoral students (mentees) and teachers of record (mentors) further considering the impact of heritage and lineage on their own experiences as doctoral students and teachers of record.

Lastly, this paper is a call for a more humanizing and transformative approach to mentorship in teacher education and challenges advisors and advisees, teachers and students to see their journey as a long-term, geographically expansive project. CCRM calls those working in teacher education to take seriously the responsibility of forming relationships and communities that in-turn produce more transformative material outcomes. Ultimately, we ask readers to reimagine schools as spaces of critically conscious communities of praxis.

Author

• Tori Smith, University of Alabama