Dr. Alecia Jackson, professor in the Department of Leadership and Educational Studies, was inducted into the Cratis D. Williams Graduate School’s Academy of Outstanding Mentors for 2022-2023 on April 4, 2023, at the annual awards event hosted by the graduate school.
Each year, up to four inductees are selected by a team of faculty and alumni based upon documentation of their ability to impart knowledge and to inspire inquisitiveness and the desire for continued learning, concern for students’ intellectual growth, concern for students’ personal and professional development, and history of significant mentoring over an extended period of time.
“The most rewarding aspect of my professional life is mentoring new scholars in qualitative research methodology and social theory. Being alongside their journeys as they grow into what they could not have anticipated is a relational (and ethical) responsibility that I truly treasure.”
“The most rewarding aspect of my professional life is mentoring new scholars in qualitative research methodology and social theory,” said Jackson. “Being alongside their journeys as they grow into what they could not have anticipated is a relational (and ethical) responsibility that I truly treasure.”
For Jackson, she believes that students should “come away from their graduate school experience at App State as critical consumers and producers of their professional lives.”
“I structure my mentoring with materials that enable this growth, and I provide earnest support as students struggle with difficult concepts, new ways of thinking, and the very hard work of cracking open normalizing practices so that they can ‘talk back’ to common-sense ideologies that infuse educational spaces,” she added.
Jackson fosters learning that “engenders discovery, creativity, knowledge construction, critique, and proactive change.”
Utilizing a pedagogy of deconstruction to analyze the ways in which structures of knowing and being are unstable and can fall apart at any time, she keeps students in a stance of critical questioning and reflexivity that benefits them not only in their daily lives but also as educators and educational leaders.
“In essence, before educators can change the structures of their social words, it is necessary to examine how they might change themselves,” said Jackson.
“I push students to examine the assumptions of their knowledge and experiences,” she continued. “They work the edges of those most cherished attachments to see how they limit them and protect them from engaging what and who is different from them. Intellectual comfort is not always the goal of my mentoring process.”
Jackson has been on the faculty at Appalachian State University’s Reich College of Education for 19 years. As a professor of research, she teaches graduate-level research methods and social science theory courses to students who are pursuing master’s, specialist, and doctoral degrees in various program areas, both within and outside the College of Education.
“I have directly and closely mentored 40+ students in their dissertation and thesis research across a range of disciplines – from higher education to music therapy to English.”
“I have directly and closely mentored 40+ students in their dissertation and thesis research across a range of disciplines – from higher education to music therapy to English,” noted Jackson.
She has also chaired 20 dissertations to completion, with four of her mentees having won the Naylor Outstanding Dissertation Award.
Alecia Jackson
