| This dissertation examines coordination of power, knowledge, and discourse in education, focusing on how historically underserved but successful college students learn to use the power of their intellect and the power of the discourse of their discipline through interaction with faculty mentors during apprenticeships in knowledge making. Participants were low-income and first-generation or underrepresented juniors, seniors, and a graduate student designated as McNair Scholars and their faculty mentors engaged in research. The purpose of the study was to see how the process of academic mentoring influenced acquisition of the discourse of the disciplines.;Data for four case studies were gathered through observation and audio taping of student/mentor meetings and semistructured interviews. Units of analysis were determined and "markers" of each utterance's position ("inside" or "outside") were defined. A database was designed for preliminary analysis of the coded transcripts. Each unit of analysis was also analyzed for the action in the talk. Actions were entered in the database and were explored as emergent themes. The qualitative phase of the analysis included extensive case journaling, thematic freewriting, and discourse analysis.;Statistical analysis suggests two categories of mentoring actions: supplemental and enabling. Supplemental actions are monologic and are often used in classrooms; enabling actions are dialogic, requiring the give and take of conversation. Those used most frequently were translation, elicitation of information, and validation. Student action categories were participatory actions (classroom activities such as reading, taking notes, or composing text) and engaged/enabled actions (which took place through being a partner in a dialogue). Qualitative analysis suggests that, beneath the surface work of teaching and learning to conduct research in a discipline, mentors were teaching and students were learning a new coordination of power, knowledge, and discourse. That reorganization seems to begin with an authorizing act---being mentored---and progresses as students learn to act in authorized ways, to interrogate everything and to be explicit as they gain validation. This dissertation, written in a narrative style, is a hybrid form of research writing addressing issues of learning to teach and to write in a remodeled margin while contributing to the work of remodeling. |
