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Session Description

Ticketed event
The goals for this session will be to help faculty more confidently engage in building and sustaining productive mentoring relationships with graduate students from diverse backgrounds and increase their familiarity with useful tools to facilitate culturally responsive mentoring. Culturally responsive mentoring has been shown to improve retention of gender-minoritized and racially/ethnically marginalized groups in STEM, as it helps contribute to an improve sense of belonging and self-efficacy. However, most faculty do not receive formal mentorship training as a part of their academic professional preparation. The goals for this session will be to help faculty more confidently engage in building and sustaining productive mentoring relationships with graduate students from diverse backgrounds and increase their familiarity with useful mentoring tools to facilitate the process.
We will emphasize culturally responsive mentoring practices and explore ways in which the mentor relationship should be approached with an inclusive lens to create a supportive space for professional growth. In addition to reflecting on their own mentoring needs and abilities, faculty participants will also explore lenses from the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, mentoring maps, and case studies in common dysfunctions that arise in some mentoring relationships. The workshop will encourage individual reflection and group discussions to prepare participants to leave with a concrete plan for developing and improving their mentoring strategies.

Speakers

1. Dr. Karen A High

   Clemson University

   Dr. Karen High has been active in faculty and graduate development for over 31 years. She has delivered a number of workshops, special sessions, faculty learning communities on faculty and graduate student development, inclusive and online teaching and educational research at ASEE, CoNECD, and other professional societies and universities. Jennifer Brown is currently working on her dissertation that focuses on effective mentoring of women in engineering disciplines to improve doctoral completion rates, and much of the research projects and grants she has collaborated on have been about faculty and graduate professional development using holistic mentoring frameworks. Jennifer has conducted several workshops on related topics with her advisor at both Clemson University as a part of the GRAD 360 professional development series and at the ASEE national conference as special sessions in both the graduate studies and faculty development divisions. Dr. Karen High holds an appointment in the Engineering Science and Education Department (ESED) at Clemson University which develops future faculty through its PhD and certificate programs. She has been active in faculty and graduate student development for over 31 years. She has been involved in the Faculty Development Division of ASEE. She is active in other faculty development organizations (POD, AERA, NARST, AIChE, etc.). She conducts research on STEM Faculty Development (karenhighed.org). She is a co-editor of the forthcoming Handbook on STEM Faculty Development. Karen delivered an NSF funded workshop to develop a research agenda on STEM faculty development (stemfacdev.org). She is engaged with the M360 Mentoring Initiative (engineeringunleashed.com/mentorship-360). She has been very active in the ADVANCE Project at Penn State and is an institutional member of WEPAN. Prior to being at Clemson, Karen was at Oklahoma State University where she was a professor for 24 years in chemical engineering pursuing technical and educational research. She initiated the Women in Engineering Program at Oklahoma State University.

2. Mrs. Jennifer Brown

   Clemson University

   Jennifer Brown is a current doctoral student in the Engineering and Science Education Department at Clemson University. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and B.A. in Modern Languages (German) from the University Honors Program at Georgia Southern University in 2017. She earned her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University in 2020. Jennifer has taught the introduction to SolidWorks class at Clemson as an instructor of record, and prior to that, she was the lead teaching assistant for junior-level mechanical engineering laboratories. Her primary research focuses on faculty development with an emphasis on graduate student mentoring, and she has collaborated with the Leonhard Center at Penn State to study the entrepreneurial mindset as a framing for professional development of engineering graduate students. Her research goal is to support the holistic growth of future faculty through aligning mentoring expectations and needs through a culturally responsive approach.