A Flexible Curriculum for Promoting Inclusion through Peer Mentorship

The MaGE Training curriculum prepares computer science students for the task of inclusive peer mentoring and teaching. The curriculum raises awareness of the role of social identity in learning, emphasizes active learning within computer science, and provides preparation for technical code review. This article presents an overview of the MaGE Training curriculum where it has been used to train six cohorts of near-peer mentors and its impact on more than 500 students at a liberal arts college. While rapid growth in course enrollments has presented many challenges, results suggest that the MaGE curriculum has helped to address some of these challenges by maintaining high quality feedback to, and close interaction with, introductory students. Effectiveness is evidenced through increases in mentor self-efficacy, positive impact on student belongingness and continued enrollment, and reports of buffering the instructor workload. The flexibility of the curriculum is supported through a set of modules that can be engaged with via in-person discussions or viewed remotely. This enables easier adoption of the curriculum for use at other institutions.