Reflecting on Silence: Lessons Learned in Mentoring
Hi, I’m Kenna Klass (she/her) and I’m a doctoral student studying Justice and Diversity in Education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. My research interests center equity in higher education STEM fields, with a focus on how (and why) we should reimagine equity in STEM at both programmatic and individual levels. Most of my research is informed by my own lived experiences as both an engineer and retention specialist, including the constraints I felt when trying to engage with the field in a different way. Now, as a STEM educational researcher, I use my research to create more liberatory spaces for marginalized communities in STEM, and I’m a huge believer that community and relationship building are the key to doing so.
In January of 2022, VanguardSTEM published a framework for mentorship called Decolonized Mentorship that outlines an approach to mentorship in that reflects the deeper levels of systemic and ideological change we so desperately need. For this year’s National Mentoring Month, I have been exploring what Decolonized Mentorship looks like (and can look like) in our mentoring relationships. In the first article of this series, I explored decolonized mentorship from the perspective of a mentee by sharing how I experienced certain mentoring moments throughout my undergraduate experience.
In this article, I share how my struggles in being a mentor in group settings helped me realize what it means to be a mentor that embodies anti-oppressive approaches to mentoring.
For the most part, I lacked mentorship throughout my STEM career. While I had moments of being advised or mentored, I never really experienced a mentoring relationship. There were some programs early on in undergrad that paired me with a mentor, but they were more of a resource than a relationship. As an engineer, I was advised more than I was mentored, and there was still a lack of community. No one had the time to stop and listen, so I was usually given some superficial advice that rearticulated things I already knew. As a result, I was left with a stark reality of what it meant to be a Black woman in STEM that left very little hope for something different.
Ultimately, the lack of community I experienced in STEM eventually became the reason why I left my career in engineering. Leaving at that point felt like a loss that I still grieve to this day because I did the work and overcame so much to get there. When I was contemplating my decision to leave, I knew I didn’t want other STEM students from minoritized communities to be put in similar conditions, so I decided to become the mentor I never had. Armed with this resolve to create the community I’d never experienced, I started working in higher education, where I had the opportunity to do group mentoring with underrepresented students in STEM.
Since then, I have almost exclusively been a mentor in group mentoring settings, and I’ve found it quite challenging. I’ve often found myself being met with silence and nonverbal cues that reflect the awkwardness of the silence. I’ve noticed that when I try to bring identity into the conversation by sharing my own experience or trying to engage students in a conversation about their own identities, students respond with fidgeting bodies, diverted gazes, and panicked silent pleas for someone to fill the silence. When it first started happening, I just thought that maybe they weren’t ready for these discussions and that wasn’t the vibe they were looking for. But it kept happening, so I decided to figure out how I’m contributing to the discomfort in these spaces.
Confronting the Source of the Silence
After a lot of reflection and many conversations with friends and peers about my experiences in mentoring, I’ve come up with two plausible reasons for why this may be happening. I say plausible because I haven’t been able to get these responses from students directly. Instead, I pay a lot of attention to the discourse and the conversations they have with each other in our group mentoring sessions, and how they respond (or not) to conversations around identity. The researcher in me is very much intrigued by this idea of silence, but the mentor in me is very much struggling to find a rhythm with navigating differences in identity, experience, and needs in the same mentoring group.
“The thing that I find difficult about group mentoring is that I’m attending to a group’s needs, desires, and wants and while being mindful of (and sometimes calling attention to) the ways in which the group’s needs, desires, and wants aren’t always representative of everyone’s...”
When it comes to group mentoring in programs, I’ve had experience running groups as small as 4–5 students, and as big as 30 students. Some of these groups were explicitly advertised as group mentoring programs with more long term engagement, while other sessions function like a one-off “mentoring moment”. The latter are not explicitly mentoring sessions, but the topic at hand (usually related to navigating STEM environments) often creates opportunities for one-off mentoring moments / discussions. The thing that I find difficult about group mentoring is that I’m attending to a group’s needs, desires, and wants and while being mindful of (and sometimes calling attention to) the ways in which the group’s needs, desires, and wants aren’t always representative of everyone’s (especially students with intersecting identities). Understanding this tension is what led to my two plausible reasons for why silence is occurring during my group mentoring sessions.
Making Sense of the Silence
The first reason is that some students just don’t feel safe in this space. Students definitely notice their peers’ discomfort when I discuss my intersectionality as a Black woman in STEM. They notice how quickly their peers are ready to steer away from conversations about identity, specifically race and gender. They feel how vulnerable they are in this space, as their peers (for whatever reason) don’t want to engage in conversations around identity and intersectionality. Since they don’t feel safe engaging, they don’t — and rightfully so! The tension of not wanting to and wanting to talk about identity, but not feeling safe to do so, creates the very awkward silence.
“We need to remember that students experience their intersectional identities differently. As a result, different experiences require specific and intentional support and resources.”
I feel the only way to really address this issue is to be more intentional about the groups we create. We need to remember that students experience their intersectional identities differently. As a result, different experiences require specific and intentional support and resources. The scope of many STEM support programs (including mentorship) are likely too broad to offer the intentional and specific support that many minoritized students really need.
The second plausible reason for silence is almost a direct result of the first reason: I failed to center students’ needs and wants for this space. I want to clarify that it wasn’t because I didn’t care about their needs, but it happened because I didn’t understand their needs. This is likely because students didn’t know what they wanted from the group, or they didn’t feel comfortable sharing what they wanted from the group. When either of these things happen, it makes it incredibly hard (almost impossible) to have any intentional connection within the group.
If the vulnerability that allows for connection isn’t there, then I rely on my own experiences in STEM and research to structure the group mentoring session. Given my research background and my own experiences in STEM, I often strive to create identity affirming spaces that allow students to have the honest conversations I believe they want to have. However, I’m starting to realize that this structure doesn’t work for every minoritized student, and this is where I really failed. My approach to mentoring often excludes the needs of minoritized students who are drawn to STEM as a “neutral” or “objective” space where they don’t want their identities to be considered first. As a researcher, I have many thoughts about this. But as a mentor, reflecting on what it means to support these students has completely changed my approach to group mentoring.
Adapting to the Silence
I’ve come to realize that my lack of understanding these minoritized students who might want to experience STEM in an “identity neutral” way has led to me attempting to assimilate them into a more critical perspective. I used to justify this as a way of holding students accountable, or me advocating for their well-being by arming them with anecdotes and research-backed tools for fighting oppression, but I’ve come to realize that this approach perpetuates the same harmful behaviors that frustrated me about mentoring. If a student wants to navigate their STEM journey focusing on just that, and not dismantling and battling oppressive systems, then they should be able to. I’ve come to the conclusion that my role as a mentor was never to change minds, opinions, or beliefs because mentoring should center the needs, wants, and desires of the person being mentored. If I feel the need to change a student, then I need to consider the possibility that I might not be the right mentor for them
.In the process of understanding what’s contributing to the silence in my group mentoring sessions, I was left with questions: what does anti-oppressive mentoring look like when the mentee isn’t ready to engage in anti-oppressive approaches to mentoring? Can a mentor that uses these approaches mentor someone who doesn’t want to engage with these ideas? While it is possible, I think there is a risk to both the mentee and the mentor. The mentor risks being unheard, constrained, and perhaps even misunderstood, while the mentee is at risk for assimilating into something they don’t want to be.
“If anything, the silence has ultimately taught me that I can’t be for everybody if I want to be a mentor that embodies anti-oppressive approaches to mentoring…”
If anything, the silence has ultimately taught me that I can’t be for everybody if I want to be a mentor that embodies anti-oppressive approaches to mentoring, and this realization has brought me a lot of peace.
This article was originally published on January 15, 2024 as part of our National Mentoring Month series.
If you enjoy our original content, consider donating to our parent not-for-profit, The SeRCH Foundation, Inc., to help support this work.
