ABSTRACT
In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks recalls her own experience in graduate school to explain how faculty teaching styles can harm students of colour: ‘The vast majority of our professors often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power’ (1994: 5). She provides a way of conceptualizing the academy as a site of political and personal struggle over knowledge. How we mentor can lead students to feel silenced, excluded, and as though their personal narratives of racial and ethnic identity are of little consequence (Anderson-Thompkins et al. 2004; Gasman et al. 2004). hooks challenges those working within the academy to create supportive learning environments by transgressing boundaries. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the possibilities of creating trust in collaborative narrative research relationships, particularly when faculty mentor graduate students of colour. Specifi cally, we examine how power differentials in terms of faculty-student status can be intertwined with inequities in race, ethnicity, socio-economics, and gender. We posit that it is possible to overcome these differences by developing meaningful trusting relationships through the creation of collaborative research projects in which students are mentored and valued as co-researchers.
