Retaining and Supporting Faculty Who Are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color: The Promise of a Multi-Leveled Mentoring-Partnership Model

Abstract

A greater number of predominantly White institutions (PWIs) in the United States have focused their efforts on recruiting a more diverse faculty body to better reflect the students and surrounding communities they aspire to or currently serve. More of these institutions are actively moving beyond recruitment efforts and are seeking to explicitly focus on retaining diverse academic personnel through formal and informal mentoring initiatives. However, most dominant mentoring models at PWIs do not generally address the socioculturally specific challenges and realities that many faculty who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) experience and negotiate at PWIs. This article describes a field-tested mentoring-partnership model for BIPOC faculty in education and allied fields that could be adapted and applied across various institutional contexts and settings. For over a decade, the author, who is a Woman of Color faculty member, leader, and scholar, has designed equity-focused multi-leveled models of mentoring support for PWIs and other White-dominated organizations that have expressed interest in retaining, supporting, and advancing BIPOC employees. The model describes alternative paradigms for conceptualizing mentoring as dynamic partnerships with differentiated, equity-focused, and multi-leveled systems of support that explicitly center anti-racist and anti-deficit frameworks as core values.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank her core mentors for sustaining her over the years: Violet Harris, Kevin Kumashiro, Gary Marshall, Jody Neathery-Castro, Yoon Pak, John Pyle, Mike Reynolds, Phil Smith, and the late Peter Suzuki. She especially thanks Ali Moddares for truly modeling equitable and inclusive leadership at all times, serving as an example for all leaders.