Presents narratives of scholars of education on how critical mentoring can dismantle institutional –isms to improve the experiences and degree attainment of underrepresented groups in doctoral programs.

Student affairs work—like higher education—is fundamentally about change. Principally, the change work performed by student affairs practitioners is about supporting the growth and development of individual students and student groups. Increasingly, that work has called for practitioners to become more active in working to change higher education so that it lives up to its radically democratic, inclusive ideals. This means adopting new strategies to transform student affairs staff, students, and institutions, and drawing on insights from critical, liberatory theories. This text represents an effort to describe and document these practices of intentionally centering critical theories.The first section of this text examines the ways that critically-minded practitioners lead through equitable, liberatory frameworks, offering important models for reimagining the future of higher education. In the second section, the editors take up thinking and acting to support the development of critical consciousness in students, providing examples of programs, initiatives, and student support offices that center social justice in their work, and foster a critical lens through their interactions with students. In their conclusion, the editors provide a model for critical praxis, offering enduring strategies for practitioners seeking to incorporate critical, socially just praxis into their everyday work, and defining areas for future research and praxis, including identifying strategies for effective assessment of critical praxis, and modalities for “scaling up” the work for maximal impact.

This edited volume seeks to interrogate the structures that affect the perceptions, experiences, performance and practices of Black women administrators. The chapters examine the nature and dynamics of the conflict within that space and the ways in which they transcend or confront the intersecting structures of power in academe. A related expectation is for interrogations of the ways in which their institutional contexts and, marginalized status inform their navigational strategies and leadership practices. More specifically, this work explores mentorship as critical praxis; that being, the ways in which Black women’s thinking and practices around mentoring affect their institutional contexts or environment, and, that of other marginalized groups within academe. A discussion of Black women in higher education administration as critically engaged mentors will ultimately diversify thought, approaches, and solutions to larger social and structural challenges embedded within academic climates. Praise for Mentoring as Critically Engaged Praxis: Mentoring as Critically Engaged Praxis: Storying the Lives and Contributions of Black Women Administrators, the authors present insights on the challenges Black women face and how mentoring networks and strategies help them transcend professional and institutional barriers. Each chapter intentionally creates a space to elevate their voices, depicts the reciprocity on how they are transforming and being transformed by their institutional context, and offers hope for improving the status of women leaders. The power of this book is that it is an acknowledgement of Black women being the architect of their lives and is filled with meaningful content that is nuanced and offers a glimpse into how black women leaders continue to lift as they climb. - Gaëtane Jean-Marie, Rowan University Mentoring as Critical Engaged Praxis perfectly captures a process that Black women have been facilitating, practicing and innovating prior to and since their entry into the higher education. Deirdre Cobb-Roberts and Talia R. Esnard have assembled a strong cast of scholars who eloquently speak to the role that Black women administrators play in their daily practice of “Lift as we climb.” Despite the limited number of Black women in senior leadership roles across academe, most, if not all of them must consistently tackle institutional and societal injustices that shape their experiences and influence their capacity to mentor. - Lori Patton Davis, The Ohio State University

Educators, teacher practitioners, and social activists have successfully used critical pedagogy as a tool to help marginalized students develop awareness and seek alternative solutions to their poor educational and socioeconomic situations. However, this theory is often criticized as being mostly dominated by privileged white males, bringing issues of race and gender to the forefront. This volume provides insight on how critical pedagogy can be helpful to scholars and teachers alike in their analysis of racial, gender, linguistic and political problems. It features a wide range of respected scholars who examine the way and the degree to which critical pedagogy can be used to improve education for students of color, women and other marginalized groups.

This book introduces the concept of critical mentoring, presenting its theoretical and empirical foundations, and providing telling examples of what it looks like in practice, and what it can achieve. At this juncture when the demographics of our schools and colleges are rapidly changing, critical mentoring provides mentors with a new and essential transformational practice that challenges deficit-based notions of protégés, questions their forced adaptation to dominant ideology, counters the marginalization and minoritization of young people of color, and endows them with voice, power and choice to achieve in society while validating their culture and values.Critical mentoring places youth at the center of the process, challenging norms of adult and institutional authority and notions of saviorism to create collaborative partnerships with youth and communities that recognize there are multiple sources of expertise and knowledge. Torie Weiston-Serdan outlines the underlying foundations of critical race theory, cultural competence and intersectionality, describes how collaborative mentoring works in practice in terms of dispositions and structures, and addresses the implications of rethinking about the purposes and delivery of mentoring services, both for mentors themselves and the organizations for which they work. Each chapter ends with a set of salient questions to ask and key actions to take. These are meant to move the reader from thought to action and provide a basis for discussion.This book offers strategies that are immediately applicable and will create a process that is participatory, emancipatory and transformative.

"This text represents an effort to describe and document these practices of intentionally centering critical theories"--

Laboring Positions aims to disrupt the dominant discourse on academic women’s mothering experiences. Black women’s maternity is assumed, and yet is also silenced within the disembodied, patriarchal, racist, antifamily, and increasingly neoliberal work environment of academia. This volume acknowledges the salience of the institutional challenges facing contemporary caregiving academics; yet it is centrally concerned with expanding the academic mothering conversation by speaking against the private/public spheres approach. Laboring Positions does so by privileging the hybridity between Black women’s mothering experiences and their working lives within and beyond the academy. The collection also intentionally blurs essentialist boundaries of mother and “other”, which dictates and generates alternate border zones of knowledge production concerning Black academic women’s working lives. In doing so, the diverse perspectives captured herein offer us cogent starting points from which to interrogate the interlocking cultural, political, and economic hierarchies of the academy. The editorial goal of Laboring Positions is to offer a polyvocal collection embodying themes that privilege and arouse Black mothering as central in the narratives, research, and models of existence and resistance for Black women’s survival within the academy. The contributors utilize a wide variety of methods and perspectives including Black feminist theory, intersectional feminism, Womanist research ethics, hip-hop feminism, African-centered epistemologies, literary analysis, autoethnography, policy analysis, memoir, qualitative research, survival strategies and frameworks, and situated testimony that are all collectively bound by Black women’s intellectual lives, activist impulses, and experiences of mothering or being mothered. The critical embodied perspectives herein serve as evidence that Black women exist beyond the institutional and ideological boundaries that have attempted to define their journeys. Laboring Positions’ chapters speak to each other and some conversations are louder than others; yet together they offer us a complexly nuanced portrait of the emergent literature on race, gender, mothering, and work.