Storying our Academic Career Transitions Within a Peer-Mentoring Community

• In Event: Women’s Ways of Mentoring in the Academy: Reflections Across Transnational Borders

Abstract

Careers in academia involve multiple transitions (Reynolds, 1992). These transitions may involve new places, new roles, new colleagues, new opportunities, new challenges, and new constraints. In this paper we describe our engagement in a peer-mentoring community. Members of the group include six early career science and mathematics education female faculty members, all located on different university campuses. Through the storying of our individual and group narratives we examine our personal stories of transition and the ways in which our involvement in the group has supported our movement through these transitions. Through this analysis, we seek to elucidate how this form of mentoring differs from other forms of mentoring available to new faculty.
In this narrative inquiry our field texts include our stories, our recorded conversations, and our writings gathered through our reflections on our experiences of transitions and our interactions with others in the group (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Our stories include examinations of transitions that occur as we shift from graduate students to assistant professors to tenured professors. Our stories describe movements to new campuses, new states, new countries, and new roles in the same institution. It is in the telling and retelling of these stories that we work our way through these transitions. Telling our stories to the group and reflecting on our experiences encourages us to examine our thinking and decision-making as we navigate through the transitions. The transitions of one group member give context to the transitions of the other members of the group and help with understanding their own shifting professional identity.
As members of the group experiencing various forms of transition, we draw on the similarities in the lived experiences of the group members as well as the diverse strengths that come from our various backgrounds and university contexts. Through our participation in this group we are able to examine our choices, challenges, and possibilities within a space of safety and support. Our engagement allows for dialogue about the writing process, research agendas, scholarship, teaching, advising, service, career choices and decisions, politics of higher education, and the process of promotion and tenure. The presence of group members at different university campuses provides an external perspective that is free of evaluative, competitive, or political motives. The goals and focus of the group are flexible and based on the current and specific needs of each individual as she navigates the transitions of her academic career. Our interactions involve an interweaving of the personal and professional, acknowledging the complexities of the lives of faculty and the needs of women. By examining our personal stories of transition, we explore the issues that early career women in academia face and the role that peer-mentoring communities can play in this process.

Authors

• Jerine Pegg, University of Alberta

• SueAnn I. Bottoms, Oregon State University

• Hilary Smith Risser, Montana Tech

• Anne E. Adams, University of Idaho

• Anne L. Kern, University of Idaho

• Ke Wu, University of Montana