Between Two Communities of Practice: (Un)Shared Experience of Undergraduate Peer Mentors and Mentees

• In Event: 16.059 - Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: 16.059-3 - Division C Section 1e: Enhancing Diversity in Computer Science and Engineering Education

Abstract

This qualitative study explores the major characteristics of 24 mentors’ and mentees’ experiences in the peer-mentoring program. Transition Coaching (TC).” We examined a subtle tension between two inter-related, yet slightly different communities of practice, on-campus engineering program community and the community of professional engineers. Our qualitative data analysis suggests that mentors and mentees exploited the TC’s fluid structure and situated social relationships to enact a specific type of discourse and identity conducive to their entry to one of the two communities of practice. TC functioned as a social space in which these two groups of students’ identities converged and diverged creating a flow of informal knowledge and self-reflection in relation to the two different communities of practice that they pursued.

Authors

• Jae Hoon Lim, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Bailey Macleod, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Peter Tkacik, University of North Carolina - Charlotte