Professors Who Share Students’ Identities Help Turn Awareness into Action

Gómez, R. F., Bañales, J., & Romero, A. (2026). Cultivating critical consciousness in higher education: Mentoring, validation, and sociopolitical development among college students. The Urban Review, 58, Article 78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-026-00855-y

Main takeaways

Undergraduates who score high on critical consciousness, the capacity to analyze structural inequality and act against it, take more sociopolitical courses and earn higher grades, according to a mixed-methods study in The Urban Review (Gómez et al., 2026). The researchers surveyed 63 students at a Hispanic-Serving Institution in the Southwest and split them at the median of a validated critical consciousness scale. The high group reported completing about 3.5 sociopolitical courses, such as Ethnic Studies, compared with 1.4 for the low group. The high group’s mean GPA was 3.55, compared with 3.27. Both differences were moderate in size.

A focus group with four high-scoring students yielded five themes: intersectional awareness, critical pedagogy, mentoring and validation, institutional risk, and communal belonging. Every participant named at least one professor, usually one who shared their racial, ethnic, or gender identity, who affirmed their experiences and widened their sense of possibility. All four also named their mothers as enduring role models.

Commentary

While coursework may spark critical awareness, relationships ultimately sustain it. Students described weighing real social costs before speaking up. Mentors and peer communities made that risk bearable.

Readers should hold the numbers loosely. The data are correlational and self-reported. The sample is small and 85% female, and no low-scoring students joined the focus group. The study cannot show that courses raise GPA or consciousness, only that the three travel together. Its real value lies in students’ accounts of how mentoring works when the political stakes are personal.

Implications for mentoring

Identity-matched mentors mattered deeply to these students. Programs that depend on such mentors should account for the load this places on a limited pool of faculty. Mentors can also discuss risk openly, helping students judge when and how to act. Participants already saw themselves as role models for younger students, a reciprocity that programs can cultivate deliberately. As legislatures restrict instruction on race and gender, the authors argue that institutions must fund and defend these classrooms and the mentoring networks around them.

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