Advising With Care: Advancing Generative Advising Practices for Graduate Students

• In Event: Attrition (Optional) and Relationships (Required): Educational Relationships and Decision Making to Increase Engineering Graduate Student Persistence

Abstract

The relationship with one’s advisor has been considered one of the most important relationships in graduate school. In advising roles, faculty often serve as thought-partners, mentors, confidants, counselors, role models, and coaches. For some students, faculty advisors can also serve as hoarders of resources, gatekeepers of opportunities, and arbiters of terror. Students’ experiences with advisors are mixed, which likely contributes to a significant proportion (approximately half of those who enroll in graduate programs) not completing their degrees. This paper examines the complexities of advising. Through interviews with students, salient characteristics of students’ advising experiences are identified. Additionally, their stories contributed to the development of a new theoretical model detailing how advising experiences influence a host of engineering education outcomes necessary for retention through graduation and the engineering workforce.
This study used an exploratory basic qualitative approach to center the voices of 42 students attending engineering graduate programs across four historically and predominantly White institutions (HPWIs). All students participated in at least one, semi-structured, in-person, one-on-one interview, after first completing an eight-item demographic form. Follow-up semi-structured, in-person, one-on-one interviews were voluntary and included 15 of the 42 participants. Additionally, two in-person focus groups were conducted with 11 total participants. Thematic analysis techniques were used to analyze the data across interviews. Two phases of data analysis included open coding and selectively identifying data related to students’ interactions with faculty (e.g., formal advising, informal advising/mentoring, research supervision, classroom instruction). Finally, exclusively focusing on advising experiences, we more intentionally explored how students characterized their advising relationships and experiences ultimately developing and forming categories that form our themes.
This paper reports four crucial elements required for generative and caring advising experiences and relationships: 1) communication; 2) demonstrated interest; 3) accessibility; and 4) advising toward wholeness. The ways students explained their experiences and desires for improved advising relationships describe a linked tapestry of the power of words and behaviors from their advisors. The findings offer a new theoretical model detailing how the four advising elements influence a host of outcomes (e.g., researcher development, persistence in graduate school, graduation, engineering identity, career development, long-term participation in engineering).
Our findings provide evidence not only of students’ wish for more care, but also some of the consequences to students—both psychologically and in terms of progress toward degree completion—when these needs and desires are not met. The present study departs from existing research in the level of clarity about what caring advising may look like for some students. The findings contribute to our understanding that more care within advising relationships may be essential for students to make progress and feel whole, rather than emotionally and psychologically depleted.
Engineering graduate students must navigate STEM systems and structures that often relegate them to the margins. Advising relationships characterized by more generative care could promote student persistence, sense of belonging, and sense of wholeness, thereby increasing retention and graduation rates, as well as participation in the engineering workforce.

Authors

• Brian A. Burt, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Joshua Wallace, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Blayne D. Stone, University of Wisconsin - Madison