Traditional mentorship in academia assumes a linear trajectory from graduating to being hired as an assistant professor to being tenured – and so “good mentors” often offer advice that adheres to a narrow view of success, ultimately upholding an unjust system that places research and its corresponding “impact” (i.e., journal articles, conference presentations) at the top of the academic hierarchy. As duoethnographers working in two very different but both urban universities, we have learned that because our personal values are often misaligned with institutional values, we did not always adhere to the (often unsolicited) advice we received from so-called “good mentors.” In this paper drawing on the frameworks of social bases of power and good trouble, our duoethnography explores the concept of “good” and “bad” mentorship and the tensions between mentoring for “success” and mentoring for “change.”
I have spent my life inside programs that told me I was capable and worthy, and I have also spent years quietly carrying the cost of that belonging. Dominant mentorship discourse in higher education tends to construct mentors as either good or bad, helpful or harmful. This paper challenges that binary by examining the insidious harms within well-intentioned mentoring relationships, particularly in programs serving historically excluded populations. Using community-based participatory research and critical narrative inquiry, this study centers the voices of 35 participants across the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) McNair community, including current scholars, alumni, staff, and Friends of McNair. Participants described mentoring that was simultaneously transformative and harmful, revealing how power, race, and institutional pressure shape even the most caring relational encounters. Grounded in Holistic Critical Mentoring (HCM), a framework integrating Critical Race Theory, Community Cultural Wealth, Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology, and Critical Pedagogy, this paper interrogates how mentors can become complicit in institutional harm when operating without critical reflexivity. Autoethnographic reflection, grounded in my own formation as a McNair Scholar, a Meyerhoff Scholar, and a Baltimore native who taught mathematics in the city’s public schools, surfaces my own contradictions as a director who has at times reproduced the very norms I sought to dismantle. Harm frequently manifested through the policing of attire and language, pressure to suppress cultural or spiritual identity, and expectations to perform resilience without care. This paper positions mentorship as a relational and systemic practice capable of both reproducing oppression and enacting repair.
Educational equity is commonly assessed through achievement, attainment, and persistence. While important, these measures offer limited insight into how educational environments may create unequal exposure burdens that affect developmental experiences and opportunities over time. Using the Racial Battle Fatigue (RBF) framework and a theory-forward qualitative approach, this study examines Black women’s retrospective accounts of K–12 schooling to identify institutional mechanisms that produce differential developmental experiences. Based on qualitative interviews about participants’ educational trajectories, the analysis traces how racialized institutional experiences varied in frequency, duration, and intensity across participants’ accounts and accumulated across developmental periods. Two primary developmental mechanisms were identified: (1) academic misrecognition and talent suppression and (2) demands for emotional self-regulation. Across both mechanisms, participants described disciplinary surveillance and racialized gendered expectations as cross-cutting institutional processes. Participants described these experiences as recurring and cumulative, which this study conceptualizes as School-Based Cumulative Exposure Load (School CEL). Extending the RBF framework, the study uses the RBF-FDIC exposure framework, which emphasizes frequency, duration, intensity, and cumulative exposure load, to examine how racialized institutional stressors accumulate across educational time. The findings further indicate that Black girls in the same school environment may experience Differential Developmental Realities (DDR), or unequal developmental conditions that result when exposure burdens are unevenly distributed. The study also introduces Developmental Resource Reallocation (DRR), the process through which Black girls and women described redirecting developmental resources toward institutional navigation rather than learning, identity development, leadership, relationships, and talent cultivation. The study reframes educational equity as a question not only of outcomes and opportunities but also of unequal exposure burdens and developmental conditions.
Traditional mentoring models in education often emphasize hierarchical relationships between an expert mentor and novice mentee, frequently overlooking the relational, reciprocal, and community-building dimensions of mentorship. This study explores an alternative conception of mentoring through a collaborative autoethnography involving three authors occupying different generational and institutional positions: a university professor, a K-12 teacher, and a high school student. Drawing on personal narratives, artifacts, and collective thematic analysis, we examine how a mentoring relationship that originated in formal educational settings evolved through shared experiences of grief, youth participatory action research (YPAR), activism, travel, writing, and friendship. Findings suggest that meaningful mentorship emerges through authentic relationships rather than expertise alone and is strengthened by vulnerability, trust, reciprocity, and shared purpose. We introduce the concept of a cascade of mentorship to describe how mentorship flows across generations and contexts, producing expanding networks of support rather than isolated mentor–mentee dyads. The narratives further illustrate how mentoring can resist adultism and evolve into enduring communities characterized by belonging, mutual care, and collective growth. We argue that mentorship is best understood not as the transfer of knowledge from one individual to another but as a relational ecosystem sustained through solidarity, shared inquiry, and reciprocal humanization.
