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Central to culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is the notion that we sustain what we love by decentering the white gaze. Elevating CSP and the five core social-emotional learning competencies, we honed in on how Black and Brown girls developed knowledge and skills to manage their emotions, achieve goals, show empathy, and maintain healthy relationships within the context of a single-gender summer STEM program. These opportunities to engage in critical conversations to learn, unlearn, and relearn, while showing up as their full and authentic selves, are not often afforded in traditional STEM classes. This paper focuses on dialogue and interactions amongst four program participants—Samira, Rita, Brandy, and Joy. Critical discourse analysis was employed to challenge the dominance and reproduction of discourses by examining social contexts and systemic structures that they addressed in conversation. Findings revealed the importance of cultivating trusting and intentional learning spaces for Black and Brown girls to engage in open dialogue and critique oppressive discourses. It also displayed the significance of leaning into difficult conversations and pluralism to help adolescent girls realize the complexities of culture while also promoting joy and social-emotional development. Creating spaces that affirm Black and Brown girls matter; their contributions and work that they do matter.

 

In this essay, we share historical and structural components of mentoring within institutions of higher education and grapple with technical and moral obligations of support. We argue for more humanizing approaches that embed personal, social, and cultural aspects of mentoring, and seek to disrupt the purposes of mentoring, and for whom? Using a critical approach, we promote justice-oriented and equity-driven models of mentoring that account for excessive teaching loads and service commitments for faculty at minority-serving institutions and Black and Brown faculty at predominantly White institutions. Current promotion and tenure publish or perish models neglect the intellectual and scholarly contributions made through teaching and service and therefore hold the same level of expectations for engagement in and dissemination of research. We share our own stories as Faculty of Color navigating institutional structures during the promotion and tenure process, while also negotiating incongruent cultures of our personal and professional lives. Furthermore, we address the need for mentoring and networking within exclusionary spaces to support the productivity and critical research agendas of Black and Brown faculty that often challenge the white heteronormative cultures of our institutions, professional organizations, peer-reviewed journals, and prestigious funding mechanisms. Implications of this essay include an acknowledgment of oppressive systems that early-career Black and Brown faculty often navigate and a call for diverse mentoring programs and supports that conform with and validate our lives and needs. Furthermore, we provide recommendations on evidence-based resources and approaches that are available to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty and science educators.