ERIC Number: ED635645
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 169
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: 979-8-3797-3954-6
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Mentoring Isn't a Panacea, It Can Kill: Exploring Novice Black Women Teachers' Experiences with Mentorship
Coote, Moza
ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo
Across the United States, the primary and often, the only intervention employed to support the induction and development of beginning teachers is mentoring. Mentoring is particularly important for beginning teachers who work in under-resourced, hard-to-staff schools, exactly the type of school Black teachers are most likely to work in. While mentoring is touted as a panacea for much of what ails beginning teachers, Black women are least likely to receive robust induction, and most likely to find their mentoring ineffective. Despite compelling research that raises alarm for more to be done to support beginning Black women teachers, the landscape of academic discourse examining their mentored experiences remains disquietingly sparse. This research, informed by narrative methodology, employed questionnaires, journey maps, semi-structured interviews to understand the mentored experiences of beginning Black women teachers. The findings from the study suggest that novice Black women teachers (1) have higher expectations of their mentors who share the same race and gender, (2) experience significant delays in their mentor matches, (3) value the community of belonging over the community of practice, (3) mentoring tends to reinscribe school culture and shapes how beginning Black women teachers understand their place in both the school and system culture. Mentoring spaces can be places of harm and injustice when undertaken without intention to dismantle power dynamics and positionality between a veteran and beginning teacher and can leave beginning teachers marginalized in the very places, they should feel centered and supported. To shift from the mindset of retaining teachers to sustaining them requires identifying the places where we exact harm and the murder spirits of new teachers. The findings of the study provoke questions related to reimagining current mentoring structures towards non-hierarchical mentoring models that center all voices and facilitate an ethos of authentic care and belonging for beginning Black women teachers. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]
Descriptors: Mentors, Beginning Teachers, African American Teachers, Teaching Experience, Expectation, Sense of Community, Communities of Practice
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Publication Type: Dissertations/Theses - Doctoral Dissertations
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A