An Invitation to Join Our Journey
This chapter describes the journey of our duoethnographic, phenomenological study into teaching and mentoring experiences with graduate students in the field of English education. This description is also an invitation to join us as we enter an explicit conversation about roles and experiences involved in mentoring between university teacher-researchers and graduate students. Education research into mentoring has largely focused on beginning and early-career P-12 teachers (Goldrick, 2016; Lieberman, Hanson, Gless, & Moir, 2012; McCann & Johannessen, 2009), but as we sought research to guide our work, we turned to scholarship on mentoring graduate students in English education and literacy studies (Cobb et al., 2006; Smith, Basmadjian, Kirell, & Koziol, 2003; Turner & Edwards, 2006). Resurfacing the conversation started by Smith, Basmadjian, Kirell, & Koziol (2003) in English Education, the current study uncovered our roles in mentoring graduate students through investigation into the phenomena of teaching and mentoring interactions. This study marked the beginnings of an interpretive journey as we excavated the phenomena of our interactions with the hope that our experiences might inspire colleagues to expand the construction of critical work with graduate students in and out of the classroom.
Almost twenty years after Smith et al. (2003) called on university programs to attend to mentoring within English education graduate studies, the need to educate and prepare graduate students who will lead English and literacy education in P-12 and university classrooms remains a policy imperative. As alternative certification proliferates, more teachers experience truncated preparation programs, and as such, instructional leadership work in schools falls heavily on teachers who seek to return to the university as graduate students in pursuit of advanced knowledge. For this reason, we believe graduate students should be both recipients of and partners within mentoring relationships that support their advanced study and prepare them to mentor others in their professional lives.
Our phenomenological investigation began as an attempt to improve our advising and teaching. We entered the investigation from different vantage points: Crag is a tenured professor, and, at the time of research, Julianna worked in a non-tenure, renewable contract position. Across this diversity of experience and position, the research intention centered on a recursive, explicitly dialogic engagement, examining narrative and cultural artifacts from our mentoring-teaching lives. This conversation-based examination existed as a critical collaboration between two teacher-researchers focused on uncovering and remaking our understandings of pedagogical practice, instructional improvement, and mentoring graduate students within a state university context.
Throughout this (re)search we placed our thoughts, stories, and interpretations as phenomena under investigation, so as to better understand the effects of our teaching and mentoring interactions. Together we sought to investigate the transformative possibilities of praxis through duoethnographic (Sawyer & Norris, 2013; Wiant Cummins & Brannon, 2022; Wiggins, Morton, & Wolkenhauer, 2018) and co/autobiographical methods (Coia & Taylor, 2009). These methods of self-study allow collaborators to push conversation into focused interrogation. More than “friendly chats” (Kinnear & Ruggunan, 2019, p. 3), the conversations were intentional and guided reflective interactions. Throughout the exploration we focused on places of tension and struggle, eventually crafting critical incident narratives (Halquist & Musanti, 2010; Kennedy-Lewis, 2012; Orland-Barak, 2003) as data centerpieces to generate additional interrogation.