M Mentoring and Decolonization Mary Jo Hinsdale Westminster College, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Introduction What is the intent of mentoring university stu- dents from marginalized groups: students of color, first-generation, low-income, LGBTQ, and disabled students? Is it merely to increase their numeric representation in higher education and atone for past wrongs? This would serve only to assimilate marginalized and minoritized students into academic norms, values, experiences, and dominant knowledge systems that are the heritage of European colonization. However, given that these students can bring unique perspectives to bear on the deeply pressing social and scientific concerns of our times, mentors might take a decolonizing approach that could transform the academy by introducing powerful subjugated knowledges and new research methodologies. Because mentors teach Eurocentric disciplin- ary norms and knowledge bases – the rules of the game, so to speak – they risk alienating students from marginalized groups; this is especially so when mentoring occurs across social differences. However, some mentors seem to have an innate ability to develop transformative relationships with their protégés. They help students attain a degree of comfort in the academy, teaching disciplinary content and methods while maintaining students’ personal, scholarly, and cul- tural integrity. These tasks are deeply compli- cated, but the answer is not simply for students to seek mentors of a similar background: given the dearth of faculty from underrepresented groups, this is not a practical solution, neither would it necessarily provide the best academic fit for the student. Decolonial mentoring brings together several areas of study each of which has its own deep and broad literature: decolonial theory, the sociology of education for marginalized groups, and the traditional work on mentoring. Examining these strands of inquiry can reveal fruitful ways for- ward, especially for mentors who work with underrepresented students. Colonialism and the Academy Mary Louise Pratt might describe the contempo- rary university as a “contact zone” between mar- ginalized students and the dominant academic culture: it is a “[social] space of imperial encoun- ters” (Pratt 2008, p. 8) where “cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in con- texts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991, p. 34). Indeed, Sylvia Hurtado, director of UCLA ’ s Higher Education Research Institute, once wrote that university # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2016 M.A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory , DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_511-1