Reciprocal Love

Abstract

Although mentoring programs can produce positive outcomes for youth, more research is needed that offers an account of how Black and Latino male mentors and mentees experience mentoring. This phenomenological study highlights the voices of a mentor and 14 Black and Latino males who are part of the Umoja Network for Young Men (UMOJA) an all-male, in-school mentoring program at an alternative high school that serves overage, undercredited students. We extend the concept of culturally responsive caring by examining notions of reciprocal love and an ethos of care that characterize the mentor's and mentees' discussions of their mentoring experiences.

Reflections of Preservice Teachers of Color: Implications for the Teacher Demographic Diversity Gap

“…Asset-based thinking draws together the work of several critical scholars through the recognition of the intellectual, cultural, and socioemotional strengths of marginalized students. This includes Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzalez's [33] work on funds of knowledge, Yosso's [34] work on cultural capital, and is also supported by other empirical studies that suggest that teacher focus on assets over deficits results in positive student outcomes [29,35,36].…”

“…First formally conceptualized by Roberts [21], CRCTC is rooted in the work of Ladson-Billings [26,27]. The framework elements have since been utilized in practice and research and further refined by critical scholar-practitioners in more recent years [19,[28][29][30].…”

“…Recent transformative action research demonstrates significant success with asset-based approaches such as in the enactment of CRCTC and other Culturally Relevant Pedagogies. Jackson, Sealy-Ruiz, and Watson [29] examined a mentoring program for African-American and Latino male high school students that employed the concept of reciprocal love through a gardening metaphor as a focus on capacity rather than deficit: "our public schools need more adults who imagine themselves as seed people whose purpose is to cultivate the academic, social, and emotional success of these young men" (p. 396). In their examination of the experiences of preservice science Teachers of Color, Mensah and Jackson [64] point to a need to purposefully examine issues of racism and power that pervade our educational spaces at every level.…”

Male teachers of color: charting a new landscape for educational research

“…These heteronormative assumptions can result in Black male teachers encountering different professional expectations than many of their peers (Woodson and Pabon 2016). For example, since Black male students are often stereotyped as fatherless troublemakers, and underachievers (Jackson, Sealey-Ruiz, and Watson 2013), Black male teachers are often expected to perform as father figures, meet dominant standards of exemplary citizenship, and overachieve as professionals in order to push back on expectations associated with their race and gender (Brockenbrough 2012;Haase 2010;Johnson 2005).…”

“College Material” Structural Care at a New York City Transfer School

“…Education researchers have established a strong positive correlation between teacher caring and improved student retention and academic success [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. In the literature, and in my own operationalization, teacher caring includes getting to know students personally, providing them socio-emotional support, fostering a sense of belonging, attending to students' physiological needs, and cultivating a sense of mutuality, connection, and desire to understand and help each other [3,4,10,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”