Toward a Conceptualization of Mentoring for Black People in STEM: A Multigenerational-Multidirectional Approach

• In Event: Black epiSTEMologies: A Multidimensional-Multiplicative Approach to Examining Blackness in STEM

Abstract

Research indicates the importance of mentoring relationships for underrepresented students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields (Dahlberg & Byars-Winston, 2019). Mentoring takes on many forms and is important for professional development. Despite its importance, mentorship does not receive the focused attention, evaluation, and recognition of other aspects of the professional development process, such as teaching and learning (Irby et al., 2017). This paper seeks to highlight our collective commitments to humanizing research, mentoring, and supporting the needs of research team members across multiple research sites who are employed in varying roles including principal investigator, graduate research assistants, undergraduate research assistants, and undergraduate advisory board members.

Our research team members are at various stages of their careers and trajectories. With a collectivist frame in mind, undergirding all our work on this research project is that everyone has the capacity to be mentored, mentoring can be multidirectional, and that our mentoring must consider the ways Blackness is positioned within the academy. To that end, we draw on anti-deficit (Harper, 2014) and humanizing pedagogy (Salazar, 2016) as a conceptual frame.

We employ a critical qualitative approach in this inquiry (Bhattacharya, 2017). Data sources used to speak about our mentoring originate from recorded team meetings and trainings, and memos. We have mentoring meetings with participation from all research team members to build community, determine if the mentoring is appropriate and humanizing, and to teach necessary research skills. In addition to our weekly site lead meetings, dependent upon the role on the research project other members are meeting either semesterly, quarterly, monthly, or weekly. The advisory board members have mentoring that exists outside of the research team structured meetings. Each site has a set up similar to Figure 1.

A salient claim here is that mentoring is multidirectional, and not just from a position of power to a student. At least two examples demonstrate how the research collaborative is making sense of mentoring across different roles and positions. First, mentoring occurs as the team engages theorizing about Blackness. It became clear that our expertise is grounded in a slew of different fields (e.g., STEM, education, and/or sociology), and thus there have been different learning curves across the leadership team. Another case is during our summer research training in which there was mentoring in the instructional decisions and approaches within the qualitative research training. Mentoring all members in how to engage in this research was not just top down, it was also lateral. It was powerful for our students to know site leads were also being trained alongside them.

There is a longstanding history of Black people mentoring each other in STEM contexts. Although these perspectives are less reflected in the mainstream higher education and STEM education literature, they provide crucial insights into the ways Black people intentionally mentor one another in STEM contexts and how supportive mentoring spaces in STEM are created. This research explores the mentoring that occurs among Black research team members at various stages of their career and trajectories.

Authors

• Nickolaus A. Ortiz, Georgia State University

• Shari E. Watkins, American University

• Andrea L. Tyler, Tennessee State University

• Brian McGowan, American University