2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work will explore characteristics of mentorship which promote educational leadership development. The work will be framed within the professional social network of the author and the author’s mentor and mentee relationships who are engineering educators at various career stages.
Mentorship literature in the educational context primarily focuses on student-student mentor relationships, which demonstrate many benefits. Faculty and graduate student mentorship initiatives are often formalized around research and grant opportunities, including NSF grants to fund training efforts for faculty and scholars new to engineering education research. However, there is limited research around development related to educational leadership. Education leadership captures the numerous scholarly activities related to education, including forms of enactment (influence, enable, do), and dimensions of teaching (deliver, design, develop, disseminate)[UBC-CTLT, 2017].
Mentorship can occur through several different forms including: formal partnerships with defined roles, informal conversations, peer mentorship, and can bridge contexts between levels of seniority, across institutions, and focused within domains. Further, someone can concurrently identify as both a mentee and a mentor across their professional relationships. Utilizing a social network lens, aspects of mentorship can occur in various forms in relationships with mentors and mentees, with knowledge transfer flowing across the nodes within the system.
The guiding questions for this work are: (i) How do mentorship characteristics influence the development of educational leadership through social networks?, and (ii) How do key mentorship characteristics differ based on the type of relationship and aspect of educational leadership?
This paper will draw from methodologies including autoethnography, action research, critical reflection, and social network analysis. People (or ‘nodes’) within the social network (approximately 8 – 10 total) will answer a brief survey with open-ended critical reflection questions based on their relationship with the author. Thematic analysis will be performed on the responses, using the methods to promote the development of expertise from the Cognitive Apprenticeship Framework: modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, reflection, and exploration (Collins, Brown, and Holum, 1991) and an Educational Leadership framework: forms of enactment, and dimensions of teaching [UBC-CTLT, 2017]. The author will request a follow-up interview to discuss any responses which have the potential to add further depth to the analysis. Recommendations will be proposed to intentionally embed themes and strategies into mentoring partnerships, and educational leadership development initiatives.
This work has strong connections to Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory (1978), where learning is inherently social, influenced by surrounding societal and cultural beliefs. There are many additional theoretical frameworks that have evolved based on situational contexts, which will be further explored based on the key themes identified.
Effective mentoring has the potential to inspire agency, self-efficacy, improvement, and impact –qualities that can describe leadership. Leadership in engineering education often focuses on how educators develop leadership capabilities in students, overlooking how educators are developing as leaders themselves. Further attention to developing educational leadership capabilities in educators will have far-reaching implications on the continuous improvement of engineering programs, and engineering leadership initiatives.