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Mentorship is critical to student academic success and persistence, especially for students from historically underrepresented (HU) groups. In the Cal-Bridge program, a program designed to support the academic success of HU undergraduates in STEM who wish to pursue a PhD in those fields, students experience comprehensive support including financial aid, highly-engaged mentoring, dual faculty mentorship, professional development workshops, and summer research experiences. Scholars in this program consistently report that faculty mentorship is the most impactful feature. While mentorship was rated highly, preliminary evaluation indicated an early deficit in a sense of community among scholars. In response, faculty professional development and support for peer networking were implemented to expand and enhance the relationships that support scholar success. Here we present a promising multifaceted model of mentorship that can support the academic success of HU undergraduates.
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The Village: Infrastructuring Community-based Mentoring to Support Adults Experiencing Poverty
Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants followed by semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals’ infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a “village” model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and protégé, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1901171
- PAR ID:
- 10346600
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 17
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Community intergenerational mentorship offers an opportunity to address older adults' social isolation while providing valuable one-on-one or small group learning experiences for elementary school students. Current organizations that support this kind of engagement focus on in-person visits that place the burden of logistics and transportation on the older adult. However, as older adults become less independent while aging, coming to schools in person becomes more challenging. We present a qualitative analysis of current intergenerational mentorship practices to understand opportunities for technology to expand access to this experience. We highlight elements critical for building successful mentorship: the importance of relationship building between older adults and children during mentoring activities, the skills mentors acquired to carry out mentoring activities, and support needed from teachers and schools. We contribute a rich description of current intergenerational mentorship practices and provide insights for opportunities for novel HCI technologies in this context.more » « less
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Introduction: Indigenous peoples have documented their culture’s history in oral stories, revealing lessons about holistic relationships fostering perseverance. Despite vast differences in time, relationships and stories are equally important today. Athabascans retain their values, life skills, and wellness through cultural practices. Creating opportunities for youths to learn through reciprocal relationships increases wellness in Indigenous communities, highlighting the significance of community-developed programs that connect youths to their place and culture. Method: Athabascan youths in rural Alaska get hands-on experience and Elder mentorship working with sled dogs in the Frank Attla Youth and Sled Dog Care-Mushing Program (FAYSDP). Through a community-based participatory research partnership with the community of Huslia and Jimmy Huntington School, we examined how FAYSDP affects youths, and how relationships within culture and land promote wellbeing. Fifteen middle and high-school youths shared their perspectives on how FAYSDP impacts them and their community using photovoice and digital storytelling. Nineteen adults contributed their perspectives in focus groups. We used emerging themes (inductive) and Athabascan cultural values and elements of social capital (deductive approaches) to analyze the qualitative data. Results: Findings illustrate how FAYSDP promotes wellbeing by empowering youths to apply what they learn to generate their own knowledge, while centering communities around culturally significant practices such as dog mushing. It connects youths to their home and their cultural values, using dogs as the driving force to bridge generations and foster youth wellness. Discussion: We discuss implications for community-based programs that engage Elders as teachers and the land as their classroom to promote youth holistic wellness.more » « less
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Background: The current study explores how characteristics of individuals, their communities, and their relative exposure to nearby Covid-19 cases are associated with specific fears or perceived threat/risk of the virus itself during the early stages of the pandemic in March 2020. Aims: Drawing from research emphasizing the intersectional relationships between individual social vulnerabilities, community characteristics, and Covid-19 outbreak locales, we test several hypotheses predicting fear. Method: Using data from a large-scale survey of 10,368 U.S. adults from March 2020, we construct a series of hierarchical linear and logistic regression models that nest individuals within their residential counties in order to account for key socio-demographic characteristics of individuals, communities, and each respondent’s geographic proximity to Covid-19 cases. Results: Results show that individual fear and perceived risk to oneself and family is predicted by individual social vulnerabilities, the type of community in which respondents live, and the relative presence of the virus in nearby places. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of understanding fear, particularly as a possible mediator for both mental and physical health outcomes. Likewise, we emphasize ongoing efforts aimed at understanding how different groups and communities respond to fear and/or concern over Covid-19 as the pandemic remains ongoing.more » « less
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This paper discusses feasible means of integrating mentorship programs into engineering and engineering technology curricula. The two main motivations for investigating the development of such programs are to improve retention rates and to augment the efforts toward increasing the enrollment of minority students. In fact, it can be argued that a mentorship program can also indirectly assist in the achievement of critical student outcomes for accreditation. The model of mentorship presented in this paper involves a vertical integration of cohorts through a series of project-based learning (PBL) courses. Furthermore, this attempt is enhanced by the introduction of incentives that encourage student involvement in undergraduate research as well as on-campus engineering organizations. The specific focus of the mentorship is on student-student relationships in addition to the conventional faculty-student relationships. These relationships allow students to learn from each other since they are able to strongly relate to each other’s experiences among their peer group. The mentoring model proposed in this paper formulates a learning community that allows the student to form a support group and a mechanism for preventive intervention, as discussed in other studies on mentoring programs. Such student engagement is commonly acknowledged to significantly benefit the students as well as the student mentors involved in the program. Data from an initial student survey that measures the efficacy of the proposed mentorship program is included in this paper and these data are discussed in detail. A 1-5 Likert scale is used for quantitative analysis of the data in order to evaluate the self-efficacy of the program. The group size of the mentorship cohort has been limited to a maximum of thirty students at this stage. Preliminary analysis of the data indicates that the participating students have a strongly positive opinion of the program.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501949
