Relational-Reciprocal Teaching: Benefits for Inclusive and Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Mentorship

• In Event: Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 5: Mentorship and Research in the Classroom

Abstract

Encouraging interdisciplinary mentorship fosters innovative research, benefits students’ professional outcomes, and promotes diversity in institutional support. However, the majority of academic research mentorship occurs within similar fields of study. Often, variation in research methods, writing practices, and job requirements continue this pattern. With these challenges in mind, mentorship for students outside of sociology requires ongoing and flexible communication regarding 1). students’ goals for the mentorship; 2). the skills they can and would like to glean from our sociological expertise; and 3) how our mentorship fits into students’ wider network of support. In this presentation, I argue that relational-reciprocal teaching (Rishel and Zuercher 2016), a practice based in Native Hawaiian pedagogy, helps provide and respond to these three considerations. Importantly, it also calls us to use our sociological imaginations not only empirically but relationally with our students, by helping them to integrate and leverage their experiential, ancestral, and disciplinary knowledge. Through this presentation, attendees will learn practical advice on how to implement relational-reciprocal teaching to facilitate holistic, culturally responsive, interdisciplinary mentorship.

Author

• Elisabeth Shimada, Pomona College