This article compares a White teacher's approach to authority with that of an African American warm demander. Ethnographic methods and discourse analysis illuminated how an African American teacher grounded her authority with African American students in shared culture, history, and frame of reference. A comparative analysis makes visible what White teachers need to do differently to establish cross-racial authority with African American students, such as prioritize interpersonal relationships, communicate in culturally congruent ways, link care with justice, develop a critical race consciousness, ally with students, and critique curriculum. The article offers a reconceptualization of the warm demander relevant for White teachers.
This article explores the affordances and risks of practicing friendship and mentorship as methodological approaches in two qualitative studies: (a) the mentor’s study in a diverse 9th grade classroom and (b) the protégé’s subsequent study of teacher professional development in the same school. Friendship methodology, as theorized by Tillmann and others, is extended to include protection and mentoring. The effect of mentoring is demonstrated through examples of the former protégé’s own research. Explosive moments in each study demonstrate how research can be analyzed and the course of the research projects influenced within a friendship/mentorship context. Like friendship-as-method, mentorship as methodology can result in rich data, but there is also the potential for more transparent and rigorous data analysis when the researcher is a mentor because the mentor can model research skills for the protégé-participant. Thus, mentorship as methodology socializes peers into the conventions of qualitative research.
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.