ABSTRACT
When I founded the Youth Mentoring Action Network in 2007, I had no idea what I was doing. I knew that my role as an educator was somehow different from the role I would play as a mentor, but I was not quite sure how. I knew that the one-to-one work in mentoring was necessary to help marginalized and minoritized youth build, but I was unsure about what “help” really meant. What I did know was that doing the work of decolonizing spaces, centering youth, and partnering with young people to pass on knowledge, reimagine structures, and create bridges to resources was only part of what I would do. I also knew that this would require a new kind of thinking, a new kind of action, one rooted in ancient tradition but remixed for new youth living in a new age. Critical mentoring is that remix. It is mentoring augmented by a critical consciousness, one that compels us to take collective action and to do it alongside our young people, hoping to move mentoring to another level and inspire youth in new ways. Critical mentoring is about helping youth to construct powerful identities and gain valuable work and school experiences that they can use in legitimate ways. Critical mentoring is the next juncture in mentoring practice—practice that challenges deficit-based notions of protégés, halts the force of protégé adaptation to dominant ideology, and engages in liberatory processes that trigger critical consciousness and an ongoing and joint struggle for transformation. It differs from mentoring as we currently know it, in that it moves beyond the dyadic structure of mentoring. Mentoring becomes much more about interrogating context and acting based on a critical analysis of that context, rather than an immotile relationship reinforced by hierarchy and saviorism.
