During orientation week, Barnard held a mixer for the families of incoming international students that my parents, sisters, and I were ecstatic about. I didn’t know anyone else going to Barnard or really anyone who had ever been, and as the eldest child, my parents had never taken a child to college before, and so the event was a way for all of us to meet other kids and families in the same boat. We walked around, meeting people, making connections, and waiting to get some 1-on-1 time to speak to the event’s keynote, the Dean of the College.
She was Black with beautiful, tightly-done locs and and warm and reassuring tone that she used to quell our fears and anxieties. She smiled and affirmed me and told me I’d do great. She fielded my parents’ questions, promising to reach out to them if anything happened, which of course it wouldn’t. Then she moved on to the next group and we let out a collective sigh, feeling better about this new journey we were embarking on. A few days later, my family flew back to Tanzania and I got an email assigning me an academic advisor for my freshman and sophomore years, and I excitedly called my mom to tell her the Dean was going to be my advisor.
In our first advising session, we sat in her office, tucked away to where all the other administrators were housed, and I rambled on about everything from the upcoming Hillary Clinton presidential campaign to Lean In, all of which she listened to patiently as she smiled politely in response. During my rare moments of pause, I asked her about her experiences attending Barnard as an undergraduate and how it felt to return to her alma mater, and as she answered, I stared at her, wheels turning, as I realized that she was who I wanted to be. Service-minded, incredibly smart, and badass.
Education can provide windows to students or it can provide mirrors. The former refers to the ways in which an education can reflect back to students their own experiences, and the latter puts a portal in the hands of students that transports them into the lives of others. Both can be achieved through the books read, the histories taught, and the cultural milieus in which the schools exist. But education can also be a third thing — a map, that lights the way for students looking for themselves and who they want to be in the world.
An education prepares students for the world and sometimes that looks like showing them who they can be, often most effectively through the example of the adults making that education possible. The principal sharing her story of growing up in the same neighbourhood as her students. The coach encouraging his players to pursue the same athletic scholarships that he did. The school counselor creating a safe space for those in her office that inspires others to do the same when they grow up. These role models and at best, mentors, turn students into cartographers, plotting the course of their lives to where they want to go. Students need these figures to energize and galvanize them through an education that can sometimes seem rudderless by showing them what potentially awaits them at the finish line, and this can be particularly vital for students holding marginalized identities needing to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
What is the role of a mentor or a role model in an education, and how has the imagery of that figure been both overstated and understated in our discourse? What mechanisms are at work within those relationships and how do we codify all that works and problematize all that doesn’t? How do we create and sustain education systems and institutions that show students who they can be and how they can get there, in part in order to achieve larger goals of academic achievement and professional advancement, and additionally to support self-actualization and personal fulfilment? What maps can an education provide?
For my first Thanksgiving, my plan was to rewatch old episodes of Martin and be the only person in my building for the long weekend. My advisor heard this and immediately invited me to her house in Brooklyn for Thanksgiving dinner. I walked around her kitchen and listened to stories about her childhood, I sat in her living room and talked to her siblings and family, and I dug in to a beautiful meal and reflected on how thankful I was that despite only meeting a few months earlier, she had made me feel cared for and at peace when I didn’t even realize I needed it.
The following year though, she really began to push me. I joined a committee that was part of student government and decided to make it my mission to get free laundry at Barnard. Because my advisor was the Dean, I figured I could use our sessions as a way to advocate for my cause and I would get what I wanted quickly — but she would not budge. She brought up sound points about financing and overhauling the machines, and I would respond with disrespect, to the point that one day I had to check myself and apologize for an earlier interaction. And yet she humored me, always listening, always taking me seriously, always giving me the respect that my hard-headedness was not great at reciprocating. Then the year eventually ended, we never got free laundry — it would happen the year after I graduated — and I managed to find an excuse back in her office despite the end of our advising period by formally joining student government.
When I started planning for the future, I of course consulted her. I had declared as an Education Studies minor and was working at a daycare off-campus and a daycare on-campus, and my plan was to go to graduate school right after college. My first choice was going next door to Teachers College and when I mentioned it to her, she reminded me that was her alma mater too. Without even thinking about it, my dreams were following in her footsteps, going from Barnard to Teachers College to a career in education working with students. And as I considered her life and her role in mine, the thought of being to others what she had been to me was deeply fulfilling. After all, she was who I wanted to be.
In education — and in life — much feels like happenstance. Why the people in our lives pick us to guide and mentor us feels superfluous, especially when we consider how our teachers and professors and guidance counselors and more get paid to do one job, but go above and beyond for us for free. And yet it is these seemingly random acts of kindness that sustain an education. Our literature and media understands how essential these figures are, from A Different World to Coach Carter, but when we think and talk about schools and all the things that make them work, we downplay the salience of the relationships beyond the student-teacher dyad within the four walls of the classroom.
In our valid criticisms of schools, we forget that at their best, they are the spaces where the village comes to life. The mentors housed in schools are the maps students need to guide the way and show them where to go. But our amnesia is well-earned, a consequence of the uncomfortable realities around how abusive, predatory, and problematic these relationships can turn. We hold valid fears around the negative sides of these vertical relationships and become understandably avoidant in order to protect young people. But what would it look like to promote more relationships, not less, so that students have places to go if things go wrong?
We need schools and institutions that attract, sustain, and retain the teachers, principals, professors, deans, coaches, tutors, and all the other adults who make up a school community, so that they are able to step into roles of mentorship and be the examples that students can look to on the road to their own development. That means changing the conditions that we work in, compensating all work that is done, and prioritizing social-emotional learning and mental health wellness as much as we do academics and professional preparation. We also need to move away from cultural practices and mental frameworks that center the self and be more open to serving others, even and especially if there is no personal gain to us. Rejecting the common and often applicable adage of “putting your mask on before helping others,” and thinking instead, how can I help others, how can I be there for others, even when I don’t feel at my best, because help and care and compassion towards others is what will give me that oxygen I need to survive. And the more we practice that with others, the more we model that to young people, the more altruistic world we create.
At home during the summer before my senior year, I got a school-wide email that our dean would be leaving and moving to California. I knew that she loved Barnard and any move would have been a hard one, and I was also never would have thought that the person who was there at the start of my journey wouldn’t be there for my last. But throughout the year, she would send me text messages checking up on me, making it hurt a little less.
Graduation day was a rush and it was busy and it was exciting, namely because I got to sit on stage right next to our commencement speaker (and one of my original maps), Viola Davis. There were so many people, and I felt so much love, but at one point sitting there, I got the strange sense that something was missing. And of course, as soon as I got off the stage, I had a message waiting for me from my Dean telling me that she was proud of me.
I never ended up going to Teachers College. I did, however, still continue to follow the same map that I had been moving by going to California. Not Southern California where she had moved, but the Bay Area where she had lived before moving back to Barnard. I took the map, made it my own, and I was grateful to have had it with me the whole time. I couldn’t have done it without.