Negotiating Emergent Tensions and Culturally Responsive Caring in Support of a Bilingual Mentoring Program

• In Event: Caring and Being There: Toward a Framework for Care-Based Research With Youth in Schools

Abstract

Purposes
Scholars define culturally responsive caring (CRC) as an ethical and emotional partnership, necessary for fostering social justice and learning in urban schools. Qualitative researchers, like educators, can support CRC; yet, past work rarely highlights the researcher in this partnership. We examine complexities in conducting ethnographic research with bilingual students, mainly youth of color, who participated in Peers Making Change (PMC), a student-led peer mentoring program designed to help newcomer English Language Learners (ELLs) in a diverse and under-resourced high school.

Perspectives
We draw on the literature on Youth-Adult Partnerships (Y-APs) to situate CRC – “an ethical, emotional, and academic partnership with ethnically diverse students” (Gay, 2000, p. 52). Mitra (2009) defined Y-APs “as relationships in which both youth and adults have the potential to contribute to decision-making processes, to learn from one another, and to promote change” (pp. 407-08). Y-APs and CRC exist in a dialectical relationship; CRC creates conditions in which Y-APs can be constructed, and the redistribution of power in Y-APs ensures that CRC can be enacted. However, successful Y-APs can be difficult to develop in education systems where institutional power and authority hierarchies have a strong foothold.

Methods
Our Y-AP involves a bilingual peer mentoring program founded by a former 12th-grade student, Leticia, at a large, urban public high school in the U.S. South. In PMC, high-achieving bilingual students volunteer their time to mentor ELLs during unstructured study hall periods; some also tutor mentees during classes for course credit. Most mentors are immigrants and, including English, speak Spanish, Swahili, Arabic, and Albanian, reflecting the most common spoken languages among ELLs in the school. During 2018-19, we followed the program’s development, interviewing mentors and staff, and documenting mentoring sessions. We transcribed all interviews and engaged in collaborative open and thematic coding of transcripts.

Data sources
Data sources included semi-structured interview transcripts with bilingual mentors and high school staff, audiorecordings of interviews, and fieldnotes taken during mentoring sessions.

Findings
We identified tensions surrounding role expectations, the imposition of power, as well as communication conundrums. Although we conceptualized our roles as participant-observers and faculty support, we also recognized what we assumed to be Leticia’s desire to lead the project. We noted an implicit assumption among participants that adults should not interfere, “co-opt” or provide too much advice since this was a “student-led program.” Finally, stakeholders held different ideas about specific needs of ELLs in the school. Some staff argued that the school provides for all of its students while other teachers and students positioned PMC as “providing resources that the school is not.”

Significance
We recognize in the tensions surrounding communication conundrums, role expectations, and differing perspectives on ELLs’ needs how we missed opportunities for strengthening CRC and our Y-AP. We suggest guidelines to support new Y-AP researchers in navigating these tensions and circumventing assumptions that may prevent CRC from taking hold in schools: (a) explicate clear and regular channels of communication, (b) facilitate discussions about power and roles, and (c) determine shared goals early in the partnership.

Authors

• James S. Chisholm, University of Louisville

• Melanie Jones Gast, University of Louisville

• Ashley Shelton, University of Louisville