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Empowering Graduate Students: A Decolonizing Mentoring Model for Scholar-Practitioners in a Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership
Friday, September 12, 2025, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
Category: Events

Empowering Graduate Students: A Decolonizing Mentoring Model for Scholar-Practitioners in a Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership

Date: September 12, 2025

Time: 1:00 PM EST

We propose a culturally sustaining mentoring framework designed specifically for doctoral students, grounded in the principles of decolonization. This approach challenges traditional academic norms that often dehumanize graduate students and reinforce exploitative, capitalistic structures within higher education. Our model centers on fostering healing, liberation, and self-affirmation through two critical dimensions that promote both rigor and care.

First, we emphasize the importance of relational conditions that cultivate trust between mentors and mentees. These relationships are essential for restoring students’ sense of humanity, nurturing their emotional well-being, and empowering them to develop an authentic scholar-practitioner voice. Second, we introduce instructional strategies that guide students in crafting dissertations that both meet institutional standards and creatively resist them. This dual approach encourages scholarly innovation while honoring students’ lived experiences and epistemologies.

We conclude by sharing outcomes from the implementation of this mentoring model. Key findings highlight increased student empowerment and the formation of transformative professional identities, demonstrating the potential of this framework to redefine success and scholarship in doctoral education.

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Facilitators:

Virginia Montero Hernandez

Dr. Virginia Montero Hernandez is a Professor and Program Director. She received her PhD in Education (Curriculum and Instruction/Higher Education) from the University of California, Riverside in 2010. She was a doctoral fellow (2005-2010) through the binational fellowship program by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the U.S (UCMEXUS) and El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) in Mexico. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the Graduate School of Education at UCR and Scholar in Residency at UCMEXUS. Through the CONACYT repatriation program, Dr. Montero Hernandez was appointed as an Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of the master’s Program at The Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (UAEM), in the city of Cuernavaca located in Morelos, Mexico. During her work in UAEM, she was honored as an active member of the National System of Researchers, Level 1 with CONACYT.

Stephanie Beaver-Guzman

Stephanie Beaver-Guzman, Ed.D., is a Special Programs Counselor at Columbia College.  She works for the Extended Opportunity Programs & Services (EOP&S) & Cooperative Agencies & Resources for Education (CARE) Programs, TRiO Student Support Services (SSS) Program, and is the designated Foster Youth Counselor, Native Students Counselor and CalWORKs Counselor.  She has helped coordinate the creation and implementation of Columbia's first campus program for current and former foster youth, Phoenix Scholars. She is also the liaison for the college and local tribal Nations. 

Dr. Beaver-Guzman is an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. She is a first-generation college student and a former foster youth. She earned her Associate’s degree in Social Sciences from Woodland Community College, her Bachelors of Science in Human Development from UC Davis, and her Masters Degree in Counseling from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her Master’s Thesis was creating a campus support program for current and former foster youth. Her Doctorate is in Educational Leadership from CSU Stanislaus. Her dissertation work is The Journey of Native American Female Faculty Across Contexts: Negotiating the Professional Self and Indigenous Womanhood Within and Outside of Academia.

Juvenal Caporal

Dr. Juvenal Caporale is an assistant professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Stanislaus. He completed his Ph.D. in Mexican American Studies at the University of Arizona and MA in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at San Diego. Dr. Caporale's research interests include healing, re-Indigenization, and re-humanization. Specifically, his work centers on Brown (Chicano and Mexican) and Indigenous men who participate in circles (extended kinship networks) and ceremonial practices to heal intergenerational trauma. Dr. Caporale is a Ford, Fulbright, and Bilinski Fellow, and he has authored essays in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Urban Education, Springer, and the University of Arizona Press.

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