Mentorship Pedagogy From the Penitentiary to the Professoriate

• In Event: First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service

Abstract

Mentorship is actualized in various forms including formal and informal practices that center relationship building towards collective well-being. Jain and Solórzano (2015) describe the versatile art of mentorship as a valuable tool to establish institutionally supported relationships within higher education, as well as the everyday practices that assist graduate students and faculty of color to navigate the nuances of academia. In this critical race testimonio, I detail how my personal transitions and transformations from the penitentiary to the professoriate were heavily influenced by prison mentorship, and how these unexpected lessons informed my adaptation to the academy. While incarcerated, mentorship was key to my survival, and mentorship remains at the core of my pedagogy as a formerly incarcerated student and current first-generation contingent lecturer who primarily serves first-generation college students.

Critical race testimonio is a cultural narrative in which researchers examine their lived experiences as members of racialized communities, and as a means to understand larger social, political, and economic phenomena shaping our lives and those with whom we culturally identify or are identified (Huber, 2009). Testimonio entails storytelling that centers how structural racism and personal resistance to such injustice serve as a powerful mechanism towards nuanced and historicized portrayals of people of color and against dominant depictions. This paper draws on four personal anecdotes spanning my time from formal schooling, within the penitentiary, and through higher education post-incarceration.

The challenges of becoming an educator stemmed in part from the trauma of incarceration, which constantly made me question whether I was equipped to teach at the university level. Because of my criminal background, I felt I was lacking the confidence, support, and resources to excel as faculty. Mentorship by critical allies helped me to recognize what Giraldo, Huerta, and Solorzano (2018) identified as the funds of knowledge people possess due to their incarceration histories. Mentors were integral to deconstructing the implicit (and explicit) racialized barriers I faced, which is particularly true for contingent faculty of color with first-generation status.

While formerly incarcerated people are severely underrepresented and underserved in higher education, we are virtually non-existent among the faculty ranks. I hope to identify the beauty, struggle, resilience, and diversity that first-generation faculty of color who are formerly incarcerated or systems-impacted bring to higher education. By utilizing critical mentorship as a tool to help formerly incarcerated faculty integrate into academia, we challenge dominant narratives surrounding the actual potential of marginalized scholars while rewriting cultural and societal constructs of who we are.

Author

• Alex Ojeda, Los Angeles Valley College