Reconceiving relationships between universities, schools, and community organizations through research-practice partnerships, and building capacity for partnership work, necessarily entails rethinking the mentorship of graduate students. In this article, we describe our findings on what mentorship looks like in a now 9-year RPP focusing on educational equity through participatory approaches. The authors include the two project principal investigators and three doctoral students who participated at different stages of the project, one of whom is now a faculty member. In our analysis, we identify dimensions of a more horizontal form of mentorship, involving qualities and skills that extend beyond traditional practices of academic apprenticeship: universalizing who is an intellectual, cultivating community responsiveness, implementing collective structures and protocols, and constructing a shared vision. Our findings shift conceptions of mentorship from individual apprenticeship into a narrowly defined discipline to a collective undertaking that aims to democratize expertise and enact a new vision of the public scholar.
This article explores what happened when we co-constructed language and literacy curricula with Latina/o immigrant families and youth in two interrelated community-based educational classes as part of a research partnership with a diverse Catholic Parish. We employ theories of publics/counterpublics to characterize the participants' racialized and criminalized experiences within the dominant public discourse on immigration, as well as their agency in resisting such framings. We argue that adopting an inquiry stance into our practice, which situates teaching within larger sociopolitical contexts and power dynamics and encourages self-reflexivity, was a necessary component for our dialogic pedagogy. Our findings illustrate how participants mobilized their cultural resources for social critique through learning experiences that reflected community concerns, and promoted civic engagement. We conclude by identifying four ways in which we were able to create the conditions for dialogic teaching that tapped into participants' multilingual counterpublics.
In this article, we share findings from three qualitative studies, illustrating how children of color and their families make meaning of the racial, linguistic, cultural, and gendered worlds in which they develop. The first study examines how White adoptive Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ) parents engage in race conscious child-rearing of their young African American son and the dialogism of racial identity formation and racial literacies; the second study examines the family literacy learning and teaching practices of one adult English to Speakers of Other Languages student; the third study examines how Latinx parents engage intergenerational sharing of stories as tools of resistance. Utilizing critical race theory, LatCrit theory, and sociocultural perspectives on literacy and intergenerational learning as analytical lenses, this article illuminates the consequential nature of intergenerational learning that occurs through the lived and embodied literacy practices of children and families of color and the implications for literacy researchers and practitioners.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.