When I wrote an email thanking my mentor for her guidance as I applied to graduate school, she replied with a note of acknowledgement, but ended with the request that I “pay it forward.” She meant that the best form of gratitude would be to help others who come after me and those who seek my counsel in years to come. I took this to heart, and now I always spend time responding to those who reach out with questions about graduate school.

“Paying it forward” is a common refrain we tell ourselves and each other to help others the way we were helped. If you were lucky to have a teacher who went the extra mile, be that educator when it is your turn. If someone made time to meet with you and explain a difficult concept beyond what was necessary, channel the same generosity when your students need the same. This makes sense, and for many of us, paying it forward is even better than a thank you note.

Is it, though? As the end of the school year approaches and students write to me with questions about final exams and end-of-term concerns, the emails that stay with me are those that also thank me for a good semester. Of course, I hope that they will remember what they learned in the classroom and that they will pay it forward one day; but I also value that they explicitly appreciate the effort I put in. As much as I wonder where life will take them, and how they will change the world for the better, I also wonder if I left an impact on them and if it made any difference to their paths. I realized that all of my teachers are probably wondering the same thing.

These emails remind me of the teachers that left an imprint on me, and all that I owe them for the role they played in mentoring me. What if we paused and reconsidered the power of saying “thank you” to show gratitude to those who went out of their way to support our journeys? The time for paying it forward will come, but what about paying it backward?

Paying it backward is about saying thank you, showing gratitude, and recognizing those teachers who left an imprint on you. It is about going beyond the traditional genealogies of academic training that we are so accustomed to. The potential benefits of paying it backward are manifold: we amplify the importance of interpersonal interactions to intellectual growth, we expand our societal understanding of how learning happens, we expand our temporal horizon of teaching and learning, and we open new avenues for academic success.

What do we foreclose by reifying the power structures in academia that already sideline several components of the academic journey, like informal mentorship and teaching? At a time when we’re often focused on direct and immediate impact, highly visible outcomes, and measurable progress, paying it backward pushes against the grain to value indirect influence, long-term retrospection, and noticing the invisible labor of those who care for us. This necessarily invokes political stakes to paying it backward. Expanding on questions from feminist literature, how might we begin to resist the conventional power dynamics of academic publishing and acknowledgements that tend to valorize narrow expectations of citations, mentorship, and scholarship (Pereira 2017)?

The first step is reflecting on the mosaic of influences that have shaped who you are today, as a scholar, an educator, and a person. People can leave imprints on you without realizing it at the time. They might come in and out of your life without much direct involvement. Imprinting is a broader phenomenon observed in many species. My favorite example is the way water streams imprint on salmon. Salmon imprint on their natal water using olfactory cues, and this helps them navigate the water currents and find their way. The process of imprinting is almost undetectable, but all salmon are imprinted in some form (Bett et al. 2016). Who are the teachers in your life that have left an imprint, and how can you pay it backward?

I have relied on three strategies to reflect on who these people are, how they have shaped me, and how I can publicly recognize the value of their impact:

Reflection

When I encounter a math problem I cannot solve or a text that I cannot decipher, I get up and forget about it. I take a walk and actively think about something else, and when I come back to my computer or desk, I begin another task that requires less attention. Eventually, my brain figures out the initial puzzle in the background. I developed this habit from a teacher I had in high school, who tutored me through advanced mathematics and physics. His rule was that if I couldn’t solve a question or felt “stuck,” I should trick my brain into giving up. He told me the brain can work on things even while you’re actively doing something else, and then when you come back to it you feel refreshed and see the problem in a new light. Without fail, this is what I do now. Thanks to this habit I developed from this teacher's mentorship, I often come back to my desk with more creativity and ideas.

Taking stock of all the people and influences that have shaped you might take a while. Think of it like identifying various pieces of your scholarly habitus. How did you develop your teaching style in the classroom? Who helped you overcome writer’s block? Whose syllabi do you admire and aspire to simulate? It is only when I pause to think about how I developed as a scholar do I realize the breadth and depth of influences that I have to thank.

Give Credit

When I teach a writing seminar or workshop, I tell students to “always be writing.” Always be writing, “abw” for short, is the tagline of a professor I had in graduate school. He told us that even if we don’t know what to write, write anyway. To know what we think, write, he said. His window has a sign with “abw” that faces the street, to let the rest of the world also know to always be writing. When I used to tell students to “abw,” I often forget to mention where I learned this from. When I tell people about it now, I take one minute to tell them who passed on this nugget of wisdom to me, in what context it served me, and why the person who shared it with me dispensed so frequently with this advice.

In academia, we might think we are experts at giving due credit to others’ ideas and writing. We cite and trace scholarly lineages with rigor, often in spite of being aware of the bias and hierarchies we are reproducing. It is straightforward to follow these rules while writing for a scholarly audience or going through the review process. It is harder to do that in everyday conversation, especially when it comes to habits or actions that you learned from someone else. For me, giving credit to people like this professor is less about citation etiquette and more about valuing the multitude of forces that play a role in how I research, teach, and lead.

Say Thank You

When I wrote the email thanking my mentor—a professor whose class I took as an undergraduate even though it wasn’t part of my major field of study—it was one in a long thread of correspondence that we’ve kept up for a decade. What started as an email to thank her for such an interesting class that semester turned into a decade-long conversation. It is intermittent, but keeping in touch with this professor and several others has given me the chance to have lifelong mentors who have witnessed me grow and change through the years. Most recently, this same professor sent me several ideas of classroom activities to make my teaching more interactive. Of course, I sent her a thank you email. I am beyond grateful that mentors like her continue to support me. I have begun to voice that gratitude a little louder.

While paying it forward remains an invaluable approach to disseminating good teaching and mentorship, it doesn’t have to end there. Appreciating the teachers who have shaped us can amplify the rewards of paying it forward. In fact, I would argue that paying it backward is itself a form of paying it forward. When I receive a thank you email myself, I feel valued as well as confident that the student will carry it forward themselves.