Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers Mentoring

• In Event: Building a SIG for Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: Literature on teacher diversification indicates that Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (TOCITs) have the potential to serve as powerful educators, role models, advocates, and mentors to the increasingly diverse student populations in today’s schools (Easton-Brooks, 2019; Hunter, & Stinson, 2018). However, the underrepresentation of TOCITs is a complex social and political issue with deep historical roots (Gist & Bristol, 2018). Though they are being recruited, graduated, and inducted into the profession in increased numbers, TOCIT attrition serves as a key barrier to sustained growth (Shanker Institute, 2015; Ginsberg & Budd, 2017). Factors such as climate toxicity, lack of support, and increasingly-limited professional autonomy are problems that lead to TOCIT’s frustration, disillusionment, and ultimate resignation from teaching.
Though there are numerous factors that contribute to the complex dilemma of TOCIT attrition, the intent of this focus area is to consider the role of mentoring among TOCITs within the white-normative spaces of teacher prep programs and K-12 schools. Informed by ethno-racial-based epistemologies, critical literatures, and extant scholarship on teacher induction, mentorship, and professional development, scholars and practitioners working in this area share insights regarding the critical need for mentoring as well as more affirming contextualized approaches to TOCIT mentorship.
Theoretical Framing: Literature reveals that districts struggle to support TOCITs’ ongoing development and mentorship once in the classroom (Flores, et al., 2011). Through induction programs, administrators have bolstered mentoring of TOCITs to increase retention. However, programs have limited effectiveness as leaders fail to maximize TOCITs cultural and linguistic assets (Author, 2018; Kohli et al., 2015). Many TOCITs reveal that the overwhelming presence of whiteness (Sleeter, 2001) continues to influence the ways mentoring and support efforts are designed and implemented. While mentoring, when done effectively, can play a critical role in disrupting historic barriers to TOCIT sustainment (Brooms, 2018; Dingus, 2008); many of the formal mentoring/induction models utilize positivist, skills-oriented approaches that are often rigidly vertical in orientation, which leaves little room for relational pedagogies that bolster the fullness of TOCITs identities within the development process.
Findings: Recently, there has been an emergence of critical mentoring frameworks that center root issues (race, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, etc.) and the ways they impact the lives of POC. Such critical mentoring approaches not only support TOCITs as they develop their skills as teachers, but also support them as they learn to navigate socio-political landscapes. A major component of this approach involves supporting mentors in understanding their own identities to develop keen understandings of the variances of lived experiences for TOCITs, towards a more critically-conscious approach to the mentoring process.
Scholarly Significance: Given the dearth of scholarship on TOCIT mentoring, this growing body of work on mentoring challenges us to rethink our traditional understandings of mentorship and reimagine what race-conscious, critical mentoring can be for TOCITs. In this vein, clear articulations of the dispositions expected and required in a mentor, such as authenticity and cultural humility are necessary. This featured work shares the quintessential mechanisms of critical mentoring that allow for horizontal, relational, emancipatory, co-mentoring to develop, for the sustainment of TOCITs.

Authors

• Amanda Morales, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
  Presenting Author

• Bianca Nightengale Lee, Florida Atlantic University
  Presenting Author