Guest editor’s overview

Each year the University Council for Educational Leadership (UCEA) honors a deserving educational leadership professor with the Jay D. Scribner Mentoring Award for making ‘substantive contribution[s] to the field’ and mentoring students into their future roles. The award is named after Dr. Jay D. Scribner, Professor Emeritus of the University of Texas at Austin, USA, who for decades mentored students, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, by helping them navigate academia and become exemplary scholars and citizens. In recognition of the importance of mentoring for building professional communities, UCEA established the award in 2006 to pay tribute to those who contributed to this legacy of mentoring the learning and careers of others, and to signal that this kind of work was essential and valued.

This ‘Dynamic Mentoring Groups, Programs, and Structures: Legacy Special Issue’ of the Mentoring & Tutoring journal was created to bring greater visibility to Scribner recipients’ important work in mentoring within research and pedagogical contexts. Another reason I invited awardees to write for this volume was that I believed they would have special insights into mentorship theory, research, and practice given their groundbreaking approaches to mentoring in practice. Further, I believed their insights could inspire countless others to reimagine the world and their own place in it. These are but some of the unique characteristics of the award recipients that made me want to share their perspectives. Additionally, as the 2016 recipient of the Jay D. Scribner Mentoring Award, I have a special place in my heart for Dr. Scribner, whom I met many years ago, as well as for all my colleagues who have been honored since the award was initiated. Thus, it was exciting for me to gather distinguished mentoring awardees in a single publication so as to learn from them about mentorship in the educational leadership and administration (EDL/ADM) profession and to gain insights into how they connect with scholars in the field and practitioners in the trenches.

When I invited the Scribner recipients to contribute, I found that some had not previously had the opportunity to share highlights from their research and practice in the very area for which they are known – exemplary mentoring. A challenge put to the contributors was to dynamically feature a mentoring partnership, collective, group, network, program, or structure, thereby bringing to life alternative mentorship. A tall order perhaps, nonetheless the Scribner awardees other than myself (Carol Mullen) whom I approached in June 1999 – Frances Kochan, Betty Malen, Encarnación (Chon) Garza, and Mark Gooden – all had original research in progress that fit the topic of dynamic mentoring. They were excited about contributing aspects of what they are doing in mentoring and sharing impactful capacity-building for preparing future generations and professionals throughout the career span.

Although only some of the entire group of Scribner scholars has published in the mentoring literature and view mentorship as a research area, all of them intimately understand leadership theory and practice for social justice within educational, sociocultural, political, legal, and historical contexts. Likewise, they strive to ensure that the culture of higher education focuses on caring for and cultivating others while enriching the literature and improving the profession to model deep change and inclusiveness. However, although all hold these values, some Scribner awardees I approached opted not to participate because their research does not currently include mentorship. (A few awardees could not be reached, and one is deceased.)

As the concept for this collection unfolded, I also decided to contact mentoring researchers connected to the Scribner award who are not recipients. An article is included by collaborators Donald Hackmann and Joel Malin, whom I invited as potential contributors owing to their unique study of Scribner awardees’ mentoring from the perspective of awardees (Hackmann & Malin, 2018) and mentee beneficiaries (Li, Malin, & Hackmann, 2018). Although the authors were invited to contribute to this issue, all manuscripts underwent review and were revised to ensure quality and relevance to educational mentoring.

This issue has many unique, stimulating features. Readers will encounter stories and analyses that reflect the character, nature, and focus of mentorships. The articles illustrate alternative, dynamic, and exploratory approaches to mentoring as lived experience on behalf of certain populations and the EDL/ADM profession, also extending to the healthcare profession. Mentoring groups, programs, networks, and structures, while part of the culture in some settings, are seriously under-researched, so there is much to learn about and from them. Besides enriching people’s learning and interrogating as appropriate, new forms of mentoring foster meaningful learning, practice, research, and development and advance academies, schools, cultures, and societies. These opportunities attract forward-looking, at times activist, educators wanting to thrive – not just survive – and change the world. Social justice mentorship, as in making mentoring culturally relevant and just, is viewed from different angles in this special issue.

In the first article, Gooden, Devereaux, and Hulse reflect on culturally responsive mentoring in relation to two doctoral dyads using autoethnography. ‘#BlackintheIvory: Culturally Responsive Mentoring With Black Women Doctoral Students and a Black Male Mentor’ address addresses race, racialization, and racism in the academy. Critical consciousness and cultural competence and compatibility are dynamic forces presented within the mentored learning relationships. Insights encompass racially attuned, productive ways to engage Black female doctoral students in particular and move forward in places of higher learning.

The second article by Mullen, Boyles, Witcher, and Klimaitis is titled ‘Dynamics Shaping Collaborative Peer Group Mentoring Among Educational Leaders.’ The authors present a thorough review of the literature on peer mentoring groups, then using a self-study approach descriptively analyze three dynamic EDL/EDA polyads in which they participate. Experiential accounts produced insights into issues of justice, change, power, and hierarchy that can facilitate navigation of mentoring groups, foster the renewal of academic cultures, and spur social justice action.

In the third article, Ramos-Diaz and Kochan feature engagement in transformative co-mentoring as experienced by participants in the Roots to Wings program: Middle and high school and medical school students. ‘Transformative Co-Mentoring: Changing the Healthcare Profession by Honoring Roots and Fostering Wings’ describes a collaboration among universities, tribes, schools, and a school district with the goal of creating lasting changes and increasing the influence of American Indian/Alaska Natives and Latinos in the health professions.

Collaborative collective learning experiences and other pedagogical mentoring processes are examined in Garza’s article ‘Exploring the Praxis of Collective and Reciprocal Mentorship: Leadership Preparation Through the Urban School Leaders Collaborative.’ Collective critical consciousness is described for developing relationships with students that support authenticity, equity, and reciprocity. A caring relationship that claims space for a liberatory education is the centerpiece of the mentoring presented.

A reflection on mentoring practice is titled ‘What Matters to Mentees: Centering Their Voices.’ In this article by Malen and Brown, letters penned by diverse mentees – graduate students and new entrants to the professoriate – were analyzed regarding the mentoring experienced from a seasoned professor. Lifelong benefits included advancing their scholarship, helping them navigate institutional contexts, and humanizing mentoring relationships.

The sixth article titled ‘From Dyad to Network: The Evolution of a Mentoring Relationship’ by Hackmann and Malin narrates the mentoring stage of redefinition through a dyadic relationship that evolved from an advisement to a partnership to a network. They examine their informal mentoring relationship around the theme of redefinition and enliven relational dynamics, extending to capacity building for absorbing international students and others. In effect, they diversify not only classical mentorship but also the EDL/ADM field.

Our hope is that this legacy collection by award-winning mentors and their colleagues will advance the very best of mentoring in unprecedented and revolutionary times. Readers in search of fresh, authentic, and progressive ideas of mentorship should find this volume useful and, we hope, inspiring.

Dedication

This special issue is dedicated to the legacies of Jay D. Scribner and the Jay D. Scribner Mentoring Award recipients (www.ucea.org) – all ‘prominent trailblazers.’ Those who are retired continue to have an impact and those who are deceased live on through the many they have mentored throughout their lives. The affiliations listed reflect awardees’ locations in May 2020.

2019 Allison Borden, University of New Mexico

2018 Encarnación Garza, University of Texas at San Antonio

2017 Mark A. Gooden, Teachers College, Columbia University

2016 Carol A. Mullen, Virginia Tech

2015 Betty Malen, University of Maryland

2014 Catherine A. Lugg, Rutgers University

2013 Edward J. Fuller, Penn State University

2012 James Joseph Scheurich, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

2011 Frances Kochan, Auburn University (Professor Emerita)

2010 Martha N. Ovando, the University of Texas at Austin (Professor Emerita)

2009 Paul Bredeson, University of Wisconsin–Madison (Professor Emeritus; deceased)

Linda C. Tillman, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Professor Emeritus)

2008 Bruce S. Cooper, Fordham University (Professor Emeritus)

2007 Leonard C. Burrello, the University of South Florida (retired); Indiana University (Professor Emeritus)

2006 Jay D. Scribner, the University of Texas at Austin (Professor Emeritus)

Acknowledgments

As guest editor, I am grateful for this opportunity to bring a dream to fruition with a collection featuring the mentoring of Jay D. Scribner awardees. Dean Michelle Young of Loyola Marymount University, former UCEA Executive Director, shared information about the history and value of the Jay D. Scribner award that benefitted this project. I also appreciate Editor Beverly Irby and Assistant Editor Elisabeth Pugliese’s support and review of my special issue proposal. Thanks also go to the reviewers of manuscripts for their timely and astute feedback. The authors deserve a shout-out for ensuring that this legacy project saw the light of day!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.