Journeys of Becoming: Mapping Our Lives Through Mentoring Relationships

• In Event: Mapping the Long Haul: Cartographies of Mentoring Journeys

Abstract

Objectives / Purposes
This paper traces our interconnected journeys of becoming - as students, educators, and thinkers shaped through dialogic mentoring relationships within and beyond liberal arts spaces. Through personal narrative, photovoice, journey mapping, and intergroup dialogue, we explore mentoring as counter-mapping—refusing linear, elite, and individualized notions of academic success in favor of relational, recursive, and culturally grounded growth.
We argue mentoring is not just support but method, archive, and refusal. We ask: How do dialogic, non-linear mentoring relationships shape us as academics? How do they help us remember what institutions forget and imagine what they cannot?
By centering lived experience as theory (Hill Collins, 2005) we offer a collective cartographic praxis that reclaims mentoring as life-making—contributing to educational research that unremembers harm and builds futures grounded in justice, care, and shared becoming.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This paper traces the mentoring relationships between a faculty member and three former undergraduate students to explore how network mentoring fosters long-term growth and relational transformation. We draw on mentoring literature that frames mentorship as both structured and deeply personal—where mentors support mentees' goals through attunement and care (Higgins & Thomas, 2001; Montgomery, 2017). To document these evolving relationships, we use Montgomery’s (2017) mentoring roadmap and Annamma’s (2017) educational journey map, which traces how race, power, and identity shape movement through academic space.
These maps serve as acts of counter-mapping, refusing dominant narratives that suggest the university “saves us” or leaves us unaffected by its oppressive logics. Our work draws on Harney and Moten’s (2013) undercommons, Hill Collins’ (2000) standpoint epistemology, and Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth to position our identities and histories as central to survival.
Through feminist grassroots mapping (Prutzer, 2022), we use mentoring as both critique and method—reclaiming it as a generative space for refusal, relationality, and liberatory possibility.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
Our approach is multimodal and layered, reflecting the dialogic nature of our mentoring. Alongside educational journey mapping, photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) and intergroup dialogue (Zúñiga et al., 2007) surface nonlinear educational paths, ruptures, and reimaginings. Through collaborative reflection, visual documentation, and structured dialogue, we reveal how mentoring acts as a practice of resistance, care, and shared becoming. Together, these methods represent a form of critical cartography, allowing us to trace how mentorship enables the refusal of academic norms rooted in antiblackness, elitism, and linear success (Varga & Agosto, 2020). This methodological pluralism affirms mentoring as a generative, embodied practice.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Our data emerges from our own mentoring journeys. We draw on personal reflections through intergroup dialogue, images, maps, and everyday exchanges to co-construct a relational counter-archive. We center lived experience as both method and evidence, using these artifacts to show how mentorship reshapes power, affirms cultural knowledge, and creates space for refusal.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions
Our findings show that dialogic mentoring, when practiced relationally, disrupts institutional hierarchies and affirms nontraditional knowledge. These journeys of becoming are insurgent constellations, aligning with AERA’s call to envision education grounded in justice, co-authorship, and collective possibility.

Authors

• Kimberly N. Williams Brown, Vassar College

• Faith Northern, New York University

• Cayla Kallman, Vassar College

• Malachi Derian Maguregui, The School District of Philadelphia