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Over the past year, Prof. James Carifio of the Graduate School of Education has published research articles with seven of his former doctoral students, including the one who 16 years ago authored the first dissertation Carifio chaired at UMass Lowell.
Cultivating such lasting relationships is part of what makes Carifio a great teacher and mentor – and the reason he was recently presented with the Thomas F. Donlon Memorial Award for Distinguishing Mentoring from the Northeastern Educational Research Association (NERA).
“For over 40 years, he has been mentoring and life-coaching undergraduate and graduate students, beginning with his early work as a doctoral student,” says Samantha Feinman, a professor at Pace University and chairperson of the award committee. “He has spent much of his professional life mentoring students who had numerous obstacles to overcome on their road to higher education.”
Feinman says the committee was particularly struck by letters from Carifio’s current and former students, who described him, she says, as “a teacher who cares and struggles through with his students and challenges them to achieve the extraordinary and mentors them even when it is inconvenient, without time constraints.”
And there have been many such students. Anita Greenwood, interim dean of the Graduate School of Education, points out that Carifio “has chaired 22 dissertations and continues to work with many of our graduates as they develop their own careers.”
Rocco Perla is one of them. Now a biologist and researcher at HealthAlliance Hospital, Perla earned his doctoral degree in education from UMass Lowell in 2006 – with the help of Carifio.
Perla nominated his former professor for the award.
“Like many students before me, Prof. Carifio helped me not only as a student but at every point in my professional development, well beyond my days at the Graduate School of Education and well beyond anything that could be expected from a faculty member,” he says. “I was compelled to nominate Prof. Carifio for an award that characterizes everything he stands for. I think Prof. Carifio is the standard by which all faculty mentors should be measured.”
Carifio says the award was validation of a personal goal he set for himself about 20 years ago, which was to focus a significant portion of his efforts on serving students.
“Mentoring is about really having a chance to teach with a capital T and not a small t. … It is about shaping and changing the future qualitatively and making a difference in someone else’s life as well as your own. Mentoring is about paying forward gifts you have been given, and it is about being generous with what you have rather than the opposite,” says Carifio, who points to his father, Geno, as having been the ultimate mentor.
Carifio is particularly proud that many of his mentees have gone on to “pay it forward” themselves. In fact, while a founding teacher years ago at The Hyde School in Bath, Maine, Carifio had a student “who is now quite successful financially [and] contacted me last year to ask me how he could return the help I had given him then and over the years,” he says.
“I told him to pay the tuition and fees of some worthy student going to UMass, which he did and found it so satisfying that he did the same for two students this year and is thinking about expanding his ‘program’,” Carifio continues. “It is immensely satisfying seeing and hearing about the good work and successes of former mentees; mentoring really is the gift that keeps giving.”