Chapter 13: Unveiling the Hidden Curriculum: The Mentoring and Socialization Experiences of an International TESOL Student

Despite the important roles that international doctoral students play in institutes of higher education in the United States, little is known about how they are mentored and socialized into their prospective professional roles. Much less is known about multiethnic and multilingual TESOL doctoral students in particular who face the added challenge of navigating various aspects of the hidden curriculum (e.g., the idealization of the white English “native-speaker”). This chapter addresses this gap by asking: What experiences and processes were involved in the socialization and mentorship of an international TESOL student from Lebanon pursuing a doctoral degree in the United States? How did the mentee and his mentor navigate aspects of the hidden curriculum throughout the socialization and mentorship process? Framed within Weidman et al.’s (2001) model of socialization of graduate students in higher education and adopting a duoethnographic design (Norris & Sawyer, 2012), both the mentee and his mentor reflect on and analyze the processes underlying the mentee’s socialization and mentoring experiences. Findings reveal that the socialization process involved mentorship into border-crossing research that affirmed the mentees’ multiple international identities and culminated into a defining key moment (presenting at the TESOL convention) where he was able to gain entry into the larger TESOL community and claim an identity of an emerging TESOL scholar. The socialization process also involved a collaborative mentoring relationship where learning was dialogic and reciprocal between the mentor and the mentee. Implications are presented relating to the preparation of international doctoral students in the field of TESOL.