This chapter presents one faculty member's narrative in which academic research, teaching, advising, and mentoring coalesced into an activist agenda for transformative learning and social justice.

Narratives are seen as intimate expression, a form of revelation, and a way of constructing a bridge of understanding between the narrator and the audience. However, narratives are also a way of understanding the world, the communities, and one's families. In this chapter, the author first examines how narratives can be used for personal…

White privilege is a large part of the hidden infrastructure of American society, directing, driving, and often invisibly and subtly determining outcomes such as employment, housing, education, and even interpersonal relationships. In order for white privilege, a system that allows whites to prevail, to exist, there must be a counterbalance, a…

Personal examples of the authors' experience of race and gender in career development are used as a springboard to a discussion of career socialization, external obstacles faced by women, mentoring, and the implications for adult education. (SK)

Narratives of three graduate and five undergraduate black women reentering education were analyzed using black feminist thought. They faced issues involving power relations based on race, gender, and class that are usually ignored in studies of reentry students. They used strategies of silence, negotiation, and resistance. (SK)

Examines the educational narratives of eight reentry black women in higher education to determine what common experiences shaped their academic lives. Results include the indication that participants entered higher education to better their lives and possibly the lives of their children, regardless of past school failures and lack of family…

Cross-cultural mentoring relationships can be sites of struggle around the issues of race, class and gender. In addition, the mentor/protege relationship offers micro-cosmic insight into power relations within western society. The authors of this paper, a black woman associate professor and a white male professor, use the example of their…