Liberatory Race-Conscious Mentorship Practices: Collaborating for Change

Abstract

Mentoring can have an equalizing impact on educational outcomes by critically taking on the deeper issues around oppression and marginalization while bringing to light the cultural and institutional roots of intrapsychic (e.g. implicit bias) and interpersonal racism (e.g. microaggressions). Educators of teacher candidates have two openings for change: they can model an antiracist curriculum and pedagogy in their classrooms, and they can support teacher candidates to become teachers who adopt race-conscious, egalitarian, and humanistic teaching philosophies and practices. Using a liberatory race-conscious mentorship (LRCM) framework, we conceptualized 12 mentoring practices derived from eight years of critically-informed research training for nearly 330 undergraduate students and after delivering critical race theory-based mentorship training to 128 faculty mentors in biomedical fields. Each set of LRCM practices reflects one of four liberatory phases of antiracism–awareness, deconstruction, reconstruction, and praxis–and focuses on intrapsychic, interpersonal, and institutional levels of antiracism practice as starting points for local action.