Making Spaces, Taking Chances
A Statement on Mentoring
William P. Banks
As a gay man who ran from his rural Georgia life toward the academy in order to survive – in order to find a space where he might not be actively hated and risk daily physical assaults – I’ve always wanted to see higher education, universities in particular, as spaces of safety and inclusion. Having taught in higher education for over twenty-five years, however, I know this isn’t remotely our reality. Higher education is fundamentally conservative in nature, as are most institutions, and faculty tend to imagine themselves as parental figures in a reproductive economy that expects our young (graduate students) to emerge from our mentorship adhering as closely as possible to the people and disciplines that trained them. As a teacher and mentor, I work hard to disrupt that cycle in order to create spaces where new voices and new bodies become part of the shared work of reshaping my discipline.
Because my sense of mentorship is shaped by my research in queer and feminist rhetorics and critical race theories, my job is not to reproduce the status quo, nor is it merely to challenge it — but to do both at different times and in different contexts. Ultimately, this work is about rendering parts of the academy more transparent than they have traditionally been; modeling that sort of work for students is key to effective mentoring. As a mentor, the hardest thing to do is to really listen to mentees, to hear what they’re interested in and to ask questions as they work to shape their thinking. It’s easy (and perhaps a bit lazy) to mold their idea into something normative, something acceptable to my field or discipline, something that could be quickly presented at a conference and then published in a journal. But sometimes, we really stretch ourselves and our colleagues when we focus less on discreet outcomes and more on goals/intentions, when we forget business-as-usual and wonder what if – whether that’s in writing style or content or trans-disciplinary exploration – when we accept failure as a practice, and not simply a stepping stone to success. These are queer practices of mentorship, and they are important to me in the ways they disrupt the neoliberal thrust of the academy in the current political climate.
To that end, I see students, particularly graduate students, as early-career professionals that I get to work with, although I know that I bring to the relationship different experiences inflected by my own positionality. Perhaps I know how to prepare a manuscript for submission, or I know some of the rhetorical moves used in our field to organize a manuscript, but students bring just as much to the equation in enthusiasm, in interest for emerging topics, in offering non-normative, even challenging ways of making arguments, of what counts as data, etc. Students can see the discipline differently and their “why” questions must be taken seriously. Answering a student’s “why?” with “well, that’s how it’s done” may be an answer, but it’s anti-educational and ultimately insufficient: a student’s “why” says to me that this isn’t obvious, and perhaps, if it’s not obvious, it’s also not necessarily common sense. So what is the sense of it? Why do we (the field, the discipline, the profession) do it? And what possibilities might emerge if we didn’t keep doing it that way?
My mentorship of graduate students, both at ECU and at other universities, tends to be more individualized than with undergraduates. In my sixteen years at ECU, I have mentored nearly 20 doctoral students on dissertation projects and/or on candidacy exam preparation and completion, over 60 master’s theses or non-thesis professional projects, and more than 16 graduate research assistants working on topics in my areas of study. I have also been honored to support many of these master’s students in their applications to doctoral programs, and I have happily served as an ongoing resource for professional mentorship as they worked on their PhDs. While my disciplinary home is Rhetoric, Writing, and Professional Communication, I am also an affiliate faculty member in Multicultural and Transnational Literatures and in Women’s and Gender Studies, which has broadened the reach of my mentorship and engagement with graduate students. Through my leadership in the Queer Caucus and the Qualitative Research Network of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, as well as my ongoing participation as a discussion leader with the Graduate Research Network at the annual Computers and Writing Conference, and my current work on the NCTE Research Foundation’s Cultivating New Voices initiative, I mentor and support a diverse group of graduate students as emerging researchers, and I lead a number of discussions and workshops focused on academic and professional job placement success. This work, along with my service on advisory boards for academic journals, on conference proposal review committees, and on administrative committees for multiple professional organizations, has allowed me to have a significant impact on my field by providing me with spaces to promote a diverse range of emerging research professionals who can help chance the reshape our current professional organizations, conferences, journals, and books.
Much of my work around mentoring, not only with students and colleagues but also within my field more broadly, has been focused on my desire to diversify and thus strengthen departmental programs, campuses, and disciplines I’m part of. In the last decade, my work with undergraduate students has focused primarily on the groups I take to London each summer as part of a study abroad program and on the students we hire in the University Writing Center. There is something magical about working with students outside the traditional classroom and becoming a confidante who can answer questions that are bigger than just those around a text or essay. In London, I spend a great deal of our out-of-class time in conversations about how to apply to graduate school, what sort of career paths students might pursue, and how they can do the work they want and need to do given existing hierarchies and structures. Part of what makes our London program different, I believe, is that my colleagues and I have worked hard to keep the cost of the program low so that more students have access to international study; and we have focused our curriculum on rewriting the imperialist history of British literature, tuning students into the marginalized voices and the experiences of immigrant groups who have made London home in large numbers since the 1940s. As an administrator, I have worked with our writing center directors to ensure we have a diverse staff; most recently, I have supported our writing center consultants in significantly revising our mission statement to demonstrate our commitments to social justice in the center.
Most important of all, in mentoring relationships, is to be human, to be part of a network of human beings, mentors and mentees, interacting in humane and meaningful ways. To mentor is to be mentored, to be open to the work that mentees send back, to welcome that return whether it comes in questions or frustrations or excitement, and to care deeply and meaningfully for myself and for those with whom I work, one human being to another.