Mentoring relationships between adolescents and adults are an important source of social capital that facilitates young people's academic and social development. Studies show that close relationships with teachers especially benefit socioeconomically disadvantaged adolescents, yet little is known about teacher-mentors' perspectives on mentorship. This study draws on in-depth interviews with teachers in low-income high schools and ethnographic observations to examine the dynamics that sustain student-teacher mentoring relationships. I engage social exchange frameworks to show that reciprocal exchanges that generated intangible rewards for teachers, such as gratitude and purpose, helped maintain mentorships. I find that teachers' motivations to invest in students were contingent on the strength of the relationship. Teachers withdrew assistance when they perceived that relationships became nonreciprocal. The context in which teachers interacted with mentees and the form of support they had given also influenced their evaluations of reciprocity. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature on relationships that challenge strict divisions between the function of strong and weak ties. Further, these findings contribute to social capital literature by showing that once accessed, social capital does not lie latent as network ties maintain the same willingness to help. In actuality, resourceful ties must be maintained.
This paper outlines key concerns for social service agencies working toward the establishment of an anti-racist organization. The spectrum of barriers at the individual, client-professional, organizational and community levels will be presented. These issues will be surfaced for h e purpose of alerting professionals and adminisfrators to both the discrete and concomitant sets of multicultural issues that can affect an organization's functioning. Moving towards an antiracist stance requires: (I) awareness of those issues impacting the agency's capacity for serviceability, psychological safety and a value added environment for the worker, the consumer and the neighboring community; and (2) a willingness to seek out expert consultation and information about a needed process of sustained diversity intervention. [Single or multiple copies of this article are available from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678, 9:OO a.m.for their criticisms, suggestions and help in editing this work.Note: The term anti-racist work/activity will be used to re€er to a series of perspectives, interventions, strategies and educational methods used to promote diversity, equity and the e l i i a t i o n of discriminatory bias within organizations and community networks. Cmespondence may be sent to: Social Consultants Inc., 4147 East 147th Street, Cleveland, OH 44128. [Single or multiple copies of this article are available from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-%78,9:00 a.m. -5:OOp.m. (EST).]
In the growing literature on upwardly mobile college students, there is evidence of students from working-class backgrounds experiencing exclusion on campus. Yet there has been insufficient attention to interactions between working-class students and their more affluent same-race friends. Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with undergraduates from working-class backgrounds at two private universities, the authors show that Black, white, and Asian American students experience classist interactions with same-race friends characterized by what the authors term hostile ignorance. Although these interactions challenged same-race friendships for each racial group, the precise form they took was inflected by racial dynamics. Furthermore, tensions in intraracial friendships led students to withdraw socially, thereby shrinking their social networks. These findings clarify how racially homogenous social ties can provide support yet also feature class-based antagonisms. As we consider students’ sense of belonging on campus, we must be more precise about where working-class students are exposed to classism and who is responsible.
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