Inclusive Mentoring in Engineering and Science: An Evolving Workshop Model (Experience)

Abstract Mentorship is a high-impact practice that is beneficial to undergraduate STEM students. Effective mentor-protégé interaction is positively correlated with various protégé-related outcomes such as an increased sense of belonging, better adjustment to college, enhanced self-confidence in professional skills and abilities, an increase in retention, bolstered academic performance, and greater student engagement with their major. These positive outcomes have led to a resurgence in mentorship practice and research. A National Academies Report emphasizes the importance of developing mentoring approaches as a scientific process. While students of mentoring on the impacts of mentoring students are abundant, studies on mentorship training models are relatively few. One seminal training model developed by a prominent national center dedicated to the improvement of mentoring experience considers theoretically grounded, evidence-based, and culturally responsive training of mentors. The authors of this paper recently proposed a workshop model for raising awareness of the training requirements for faculty, drawing from the experience of national mentoring award recipients who serve at Minority Serving Institutions. We have expanded this evolving training model to address the specific context of research mentors at a Department of Energy National Laboratory. Uniquely, this model focuses on developing statement requirements for federal grant programs. Our model includes exercises to highlight Underrepresented Minority student backgrounds through a case study, arrive at an operational definition of mentoring, identify facets of mentoring that make the mentor-protégé relationship more holistic, explore intrinsic and external motivations for improving the quality of the mentorship experience, and begin the process of developing research mentoring philosophy statements and plans. Each opportunity to offer a mentoring training workshop has led to reflective discussions on improving the delivery of content and engagement opportunities. In addition to the iterative development of the model, the Principal Investigators delivering the model develop a more nuanced understanding of mentoring in practice. Challenges discussed include the accessibility of online mentoring resources, the role of graduate students as mentors, a balance between content delivery and exercises, the perspective of community college faculty, the needs of neurodiverse mentors and protégés, the social wealth of mentors and protégés, and the familiarity to the US education system by international faculty and audiences. These challenges represent opportunities for improving our holistic mentoring training model and point to the need for understanding the context of students and participants.