Editor’s Introduction

Abstract

The Journal of Minority Achievement, Creativity, and Leadership (JMACL) serves as a lens that brings into focus the myriad experiences and perspectives of minorities across the P–20 educational continuum and beyond. JMACL is bricolage and each author, luminary, practitioner, scholar, and thought-leader is bricoleur. Through their critical insight, contributors provide a piece of the structure this publication is building—a structure that provides shelter for those who seek a home among contemporaries who share a zeal to foreground best practices, narratives, and frameworks that underscore asset-based approaches related to the achievement and success of minority populations. While most future volumes will include unsolicited peer-reviewed submissions, this first issue includes seminal scholars, thought-leaders, and researchers, each of whom contributes a novel perspective on scholarship related to minority achievement, creativity, and leadership.Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, PhD, in “‘I can only put together thoughts filed away in my brain: Who would pay me to do that?’” highlights the assets and critical skills she received in her childhood that helped her be resilient throughout her career and life. Her scholarly personal narrative provides an opportunity to reflect and share recollections about creativity, achievement, and leadership.Kakali Bhattacharya, PhD, in “Mentoring from the Margins” uses a critical and de/colonial focus to trace the unfolding of her experiences, as a Desi woman, mentoring two Black women as they pursued doctoral degrees in education. Using personal narratives, she explores the intersections of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and colonizing structures of higher education that create and maintain power differences. Mentoring in this terrain requires space-making that centers minoritized perspectives, in this case knowledge construction by Black women.Don Ambrose, PhD, in “Interdisciplinary Exploration Clarifying Barriers Hindering Minority Achievement,” provides clarity and illuminates contextual challenges and opportunities that minority populations encounter, specifically students of color. He asserts that these investigations are key in further strengthening the work of scholars who study the barriers that influence education of minority populations.William A. Smith, PhD, Jeremy D. Franklin, PhD, and Man Hung, PhD, in “The Impact of Racial Microaggressions Across Educational Attainment for African Americans,” examine, empirically, the role that racial microaggressions have in predicting African American college graduates’ general happiness and job satisfaction at three levels of educational attainment.Terrell L. Strayhorn, PhD, in “Measuring the Relation between Sense of Belonging, Campus Leadership, and Academic Achievement for African American Students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs): A ‘Gender Equity’ Analysis,” measures the relationship between sense of belonging, campus leadership, and academic achievement for African Americans at HBCUs, paying close attention to potential sex differences or “gendered effects.”Donna Y. Ford, PhD, Joy Lawson Davis, EdD, Kenneth T. Dickson, MEd, Michelle Frazier Trotman Scott, PhD, Tarek C. Grantham, PhD, James L. Moore III, PhD, and Gloria D. Taradash, PhD, in “Evaluating Gifted Education Programs Using an Equity-Based and Culturally Responsive Checklist to Recruit and Retain Underrepresented Students of Color,” provide an innovative and practical article that focuses on ways to support administrators who seek viable ways to frame and maintain equitable GATE programs in schools.Our desire is for JMACL to serve as liminal space, allowing the reader to construct meaning in the “in between,” as border pedagogy, providing context as to how to dismantle rigid lines of demarcation, and as an intersectional axis highlighting the simultaneity of competing identities.