Equity-Oriented Mentoring: Tools, Tensions, and Toward What Ends?

• In Event: The "Wicked Flexibility" of Whiteness in Progressive Educational Reform Initiatives

Abstract

Purpose
This paper looks at structural tensions and constraints that arose when one district’s teacher mentoring program shifted to center equity. It explores how the specific tools, frames, and aspirations of equity work held potential to disrupt white supremacist structures as well as what constrained these aspirations. In doing so, this paper grapples with the complexities of teacher learning and organizational work for anti-racism.

Framework
Building on theories of teacher learning as social and situated (Horn & Little, 2010; Rogoff, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978), scholars are developing frameworks to attend to contexts of learning as sociopolitical, power-laden, and racialized (see McKinney de Royston & Nasir, 2017; Philip & Sengupta, 2020). This paper builds on such approaches, as well as critical race organizational work (Ahmed, 2012; Ray, 2019), to consider the institutional structure, discursive and material tools, and constraints of equity-oriented professional development.

Methods and Data Sources
This paper analyzed professional development trainings of an Equity-Mentoring Program (EMP), interviews with EMP leaders, and document analysis. Data analysis was iterative. The author wrote field notes for each session and analyzed related documents. Coding was a flexible inductive and deductive approach (Erickson, 2004), including top-down codes such as Participation Framework, Tools, Goals, Relations of power, and Discourses of equity. Through reviewing the data and writing cross-case memos, other analytic codes arose, including Formal Definitions of equity, Tensions, and Context. Throughout analysis, the author created and updated a codebook.

Findings and Significance

Tensions with too many tools
EMP’s heavy emphasis on tools overshadowed sustained attention to equity or disruption of whiteness. Participants navigated numerous formal documents, at times 10-plus in a single training. Originally designed to comply with state credentialing requirements, most documents were adapted towards equity-orientations. However, this adaptation failed to attend to the ideologies embedded within presumably neutral tools. Despite intentions, the tools were both overwhelming to navigate and easily disconnected from equity work.

The multiple and vague definitions of equity
Trainings incorporated multiple definitions of equity which fostered inclusion of diverse perspectives but enabled slipping into power-evasive discourse. EMP drew on the district’s equity definition as well as the definition from their consultant organization. In a typical training, participants chose one sub-component that resonated with them to ground their work. Facilitators affirmed participants who highlighted “teaching ‘all students’” as well as those who centered examinations of race and power. The result was that while EMP trainings assisted deepening some participants’ skillset around leading conversations about hierarchy and power, it failed to interrupt others’ shallow engagement with equity that avoided addressing entrenched inequities in schooling.

Structural entrenchments of inequality – unnamed norms
EMP trainings left many pervasive taken-for-granted structures of schooling uninterrogated. Exemplars of equity-mentoring included attending to teacher positionality, challenging low expectations, and centering race. However, discourse around “best practices” (cf. Philip et al 2017), improving standardized test performance, and individual bias absent structural analysis (cf. Vaught & Castagno, 2008) remained dominant. Ultimately, while EMP strove to shift their program towards equity, entrenched forms of structural racism remained normalized.

Author

• Joy Esboldt, University of California - Berkeley