Category: Research

mentor, mentoring, PhD, Research

Cultivating Mentoring: Peer Mentorship Matters for Doctoral Scholars

Laura Pasquini

Mentoring of doctoral scholars vary between disciplines and domains of practice. Mentorship is generally seen as both a relationship and process between a minimum of two individuals seeking to share and build knowledge, expertise, and support (Williams & Kim, 2011). Mentoring occurs within informal and formal settings in terminal degree programs. Often (but not always) doctoral scholars are mentored by a faculty advisor or supervisor; however, even more are seeking mentorship from professionals, practitioners, and peers within their industry or workplace. In thinking back to your own graduate school or doctoral learning experience, who did you seek out or stubble upon for as a mentor? Where did you find professional support for your research and career plans? Who was part of your mentoring community for the work you do?

Over the past few years, I have been working with scholars and practitioners to understand how formal and informal mentoring experiences develop occupational pathways for academic writers, researchers, and higher education professionals. Traditionally, mentoring is viewed as a face-to-face, long-term relationship with interactions between an experienced colleague and a novice professional or learner to support professional, academic, or personal development of the protégé (Donaldson, Ensher, & Grant-Vallone, 2000). With emergent technologies and digital access to colleagues, this no longer needs to be the only model or experience for establishing mentoring relationships. Graduate students and early career scholars/practitioners are beginning to form peer networks to learn and thrive as they set out on their own professional paths. We can now find mentoring opportunities within our networks, communities, and areas of interest in online settings.

With the opportunity to connect to scholars and practitioners beyond geographic boundaries, time zones, and physical locations, it is possible to establish a mentoring relationship with one or many professionals/academics from afar. Also, the typical dyad of the mentoring experience is shifting as structures are evolving to support specific career goals and personal life changes. There is an increase in peer-to-peer, group, and networked mentoring opportunities. In a recent study, we wanted to know more about these digital mentoring experiences of doctoral scholars so we asked the following research questions:

  1. What type of mentoring opportunities are you involved with formally or informally to reach your personal and professional goals?
  2. What expectations and motivations did you bring to this mentoring relationship?
  3. What sort of resources, support, and kinship occurs within peer mentoring experiences in digital environments?

In exploring mentoring opportunities in-person and within digital environments, we learned most early career scholars sought out a mentor to help them with the follow areas of professional development and growth:

  • Navigating the norms, expectations, and experiences working in academia
  • Gaining career advice and guidance for planning their professional path
  • Improving or developing a particular applied skill related to scholarship (e.g. academic writing, research methods, instruction, etc.)
  • Learning from others on team-based projects, labs, or group assignments that had a shared vision, goal(s), and outcome(s)
  • Offering and receiving feedback, personal support, and professional advice from and among their peers
  • Identifying ways to communicate, virtually team, and work collaboratively from a distance

There are so many possibilities for early career scholarship mentoring, and part of this is just the beginning. I have no doubt that you might even have your own reflections or maybe research to share OR you are thinking about ways to support your graduate students. If you want to find out more about this research, I will be posting these findings and implications from this study here over the next couple of months: https://techknowtools.com/mentoring/

References:

Donaldson, S. I., Ensher, E. A., & Grant-Vallone, E. J. (2000). Longitudinal examination of mentoring relationships on organizational commitment and citizenship behavior. Journal of Career Development, 26(4), 233-249.

Williams, S. L., & Kim, J. (2011). E-mentoring in online course projects: Description of an e-mentoring scheme. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring, 9(2).

 

Thanks to Janet Salmons for asking me to share my reflections on these findings at #SAGEMethodSpace (https://www.methodspace.com/) you can find a version of this blog post cross-posted HERE.

highered, Podcast, Research

The State of Higher Ed Podcasts in 2019

Laura Pasquini

Over the last couple of years, I have been looking at the landscape of podcasting within higher education. Today podcast and audio listening now has 50% of the US ear (The Infinite Dial 2019 report), as we witness some exodus from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.  With the options of audio streaming platforms and increased ownership of smart speakers, I was not surprised to see the increase in weekly audio online listening:

As someone who listens to, creates, hosts, and enjoy podcasts, I have been following how my college and university colleagues have been involved in developing their own podcasts for the past couple of years: https://higheredpodcasts.wordpress.com/ Thanks to iTunes U, universities found a way to share their audio and video lectures, lessons, and student-produced podcasts. Now, we have innovative colleagues willing to share about their scholarship, offer suggestions for teaching, and tell more about their own practice on campus. I have shared shared some of this research and training materials in a previous blog post: Pod Save Higher Ed: Resources for Podcasting.  Over the Spring Break, I completed a review and update of the podcasts my peers are making. There are a number of additions, updates and archives, especially as more higher ed professionals are finding accessible ways to create and stream their audio productions.

For the purpose of my research, I am investigating podcasts that share about the higher education professional (graduate students, staff, and faculty) experience. These specific types of podcasts may offer a new way to learn, offer professional development, share a story, and/or improve to our practice in teaching, research or service. My review is to look at the genres, topics, audiences, issues, and ideas being shared in the higher ed podcast land. Here is the list of podcasts I’ve curated and I am currently examining in 2019 [also shared http://bit.ly/higheredpodcasts]:

If you have a podcast I should include in this review of podcasts in 2019, please let me know! Here is how I am defining a “higher ed podcast” for the purpose of this study:

  • the podcast content is created and shared to support professional development, learning, and/or information distribution
  • the podcast has a target audience which might include graduate learners (e.g. masters or doctoral researchers), professional school students (e.g. social work, medicine, etc.), staff/administration, and/or faculty in higher education
  • the podcast is in an audio and/or video format that can be subscribed, downloaded, and/or streamed from an electronic device (e.g. computer, laptop, tablet, or mobile)
  • the podcast is a program, show, broadcast, and/or episodes with a specific purpose or topic focused on the higher education domain
  • the podcast includes original content development intention: it was designed for a podcast, e.g. recorded college/university lectures, conference panels/presentations, professional learning webinars, recorded meeting, etc. (unless it was edited to fit into a podcast)
  • the podcast can be active or archived (no production since 2017)
mentor, mentoring, Research

How Were You Mentored as a Doctoral Student? Tell Us About It!

Laura Pasquini

Mentoring of doctoral students is varied and diverse depending on the degree, discipline, and institution. I know that mentoring happens informally and formally from peers, professors, colleagues, and more. Sometimes it is from a faculty advisor or supervisor; however, more often then not we meet professionals, practitioners and other scholars who offer some form of personal/professional mentoring while completing a terminal degree. In thinking back to my graduate school experience, there was definitely a tribe of mentors who supported my professional development, research and career plans. From my departmental ATPI Research/Writing Group and LPQ Journal editing on campus to digital networks like #phdchat, many #edtech colleagues, my @BreakDrink podcasting family, the @AcAdvChat community, and MANY more, who mentored me formally and informally during my Ph.D. journey.

HOW were YOU mentored as a doctoral student or in your terminal degree program?

  • What sort of mentoring experiences did experience in your Ph.D., Ed.D., or M.F.A. program?
  • Who did you seek out to build formal or informal mentoring relationships?
  • How did you “stay in touch” or connect with these mentors from a distance, if they were not on campus?
  • How did these individual, group, or peer-to-peer mentoring experiences impact your own career development and professional growth?
  • OR if you feel like you didn’t really have opportunities to be mentored formally/informally, tell us what you WOULD have liked during and post-graduate degree?

Exploring the Impact of Mentoring for Doctoral Students

If you have some answers to any or all of the above questions, consider helping one of my own doctoral scholars with her research project. We are curious to learn about the nature and dynamics of mentoring relationships, specifically HOW they impact students in terminal degree programs. This might include mentoring experiences outside of the faculty advisor/supervisor role and even beyond campus. Mentoring experiences we know often occur from conference attendance, academic meetings, professional organization involvement and within your own or other disciplines of scholarship/work

The goal of this research is to understand how doctoral students experience mentoring during and after the completion of their terminal graduate degree programs in both face-to-face and distributed environments. There are a variety of campus stakeholders and professionals who form a collective of mentoring experiences for individuals who are pursuing a terminal degree. With a variety of career paths post-degree, we want to know how doctoral students establish, communicate, and sustain mentoring relationships that support their personal and professional development. We want to know more about these mentoring relationships through the shared narratives of doctoral students who are currently in-progress and/or who has recently completed (in the last 2-5 years) a terminal graduate degree (e.g. Ph.D., Ed.D., M.F.A, etc.).

We would love to know how technologies shape and support these mentoring relationships? This might be to stay in touch, communicate, share on social networks, or even exist within digital learning environments. With the opportunity to connect to scholars and practitioners beyond geographic boundaries, it is now possible for graduate students to establish mentoring relationships with other scholars, peers, and professionals from afar. How are these doctoral scholars finding resources, support, and kinship within peers in online networks? What type of mentoring opportunities have doctoral learners found either formally or informally to reach their personal and professional goals? Are there mentoring groups, peer-to-peer, or professional experiences that have guided their early career decisions and/or direction?

To volunteer for a 30-minute interview for this study, please complete this form: https://unt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d06SO2d0GL8al6d

To learn more and/or participate in the project, please find further details about this study here: https://ltiwithme.wordpress.com/2018/04/27/exploring-mentoring-relationships/ or contact Laura Pasquini (Laura.Pasquini@unt.edu) or Meranda Roy (Meranda.Roy@unt.edu).

#AcDigID, #EdDigID, #HEdigID, Research

HOW TO: Set Up Your ORCID

Laura Pasquini

ORCID Logo image c/o the Wikimedia Commons

What Is an ORCID? https://orcid.org/

An ORCID is a unique 16 digit ID for researchers, academics, and scholars. The ability to set up an ORCID personal account is that it allows you to attach a specific digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other scholar, and it is free! I encourage most collaborators I research and write with to set up their own account, as this persistent digital ID is often used as an integration tool for a number of journals and grant applications. Plus it’s often used as to sign in to complete some academic conference proceedings and/or to peer review manuscripts for journals. Additionally, other key research protocols integrated into digital portals for scholarly work may also require an ORCID. Additionally, an ORCID account allows you to aggregate other digital professional activities or networks (e.g. ResearcherID, LinkedIn, etc.) and scholarly outputs into one online space to ensure your work is recognized and credited to you!

ORCID around the world from ORCID on Vimeo.

Having an ORCID will help:

  • Allows your work to be discoverable by others.
  • Provides a means to distinguish between you and other authors with identical or similar names.
  • Links together all of your works even if you have used different names over the course of your career.
  • Makes it easy for you & others to connect to research outputs (e.g. journal log in, grant funders, etc.)
  • Ensures that your work is clearly attributed to you.
  • Helps minimize repetitive data entering – when submitting manuscripts for publication or applications for grants – systems using ORCID will help pre-populate your contact details/information.

Where are ORCID in Use? 

  • By publishers in manuscript submission and data repositories.
  • By some professional societies to manage membership, authorship, and conferences.
  • By some funding agencies (e.g. NIH or SciENcv) to generate the required bio sketch.
  • By some metrics tools, such as Impactstory.org.  Add ORCID to you Impact Story profile to import your citation information – and view to see altmetrics displayed for your publications.
  • By researcher profile tools (e.g. ResearchGate, Mendeley, etc.).


SET UP YOUR ORCID:

  1. Start by Registering for an ORCID iD here: https://orcid.org/register
  2. If you have any questions or issues with this setup, be sure to visit the Create an iD: Website User site: http://support.orcid.org/knowledgebase/articles/171598-create-an-id-website-user

Here is a “how to” Video for ORCID registration c/o the Research Medical Library: 

#HEdigID, Learning Community, Networked Community, Research, StudentAffairs

Opening the Discussion: Digital Practices and Online Interactions at #ACPA18

Laura Pasquini

This week, I am excited to be in Houston for the 2018 ACPA Convention (#ACPA18) to open up the dialog and start a discussion about how we engage digitally as student affairs educators and higher education professionals.  The two sessions I am involved comes directly from our research study in progress: Networked Communities of Practice.  The first session we’re facilitating will be today, Tuesday, March 12th (10:45 am- 12:00 noon) will be to discuss case studies around digital practice and interactions online. We are honored that our 75-minute competency-based session will be sponsored by the Graduate Student & New Professional Community of Practice. Check out the other sessions they are sponsoring this conference:

We Need to Talk: Digital Practices & Ethics in Our Profession

As Student Affairs educators leverage technology for professional practice, we have failed to discuss how our digital lives intersect with our work lives. This competency-based, case study guide is designed to facilitate conversations about expectations and realities of what it means to be a professional online. To help you discuss ways to support digital-ethical professional practice in higher education, we have identified a few scenarios to discuss and develop a positive culture online. We encourage you to start an open dialogue on these issues and identify potential solutions to address unwanted interactions and inappropriate behaviors in professional online networks. Please feel free to bring these case studies back to your campus and/or graduate programs to continue the conversations. This resource is shared with the following Creative Commons license: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Goals

At the end of this competency-based session, participants will be able to:

  1. Describe professional, ethical issues related to digital practices and online behavior.
  2. Identify actions and responsibilities within professional online networks and digital communities.
  3. Outline resources and effective strategies to support the digital professional practice.
  4. List questions, issues, and concerns about digital professional practice and ethics online.

Guidelines for discussion

Let’s have a real discussion about digital practices and issues online:

  • We want open conversation
  • No “stupid” questions/ideas
  • Candid problem-solving
  • Transcribe your main points, questions, & resources
  • Share suggestions for practice

#ACPA18 Convention Workshop Resources: http://bit.ly/sadigitalethics

Cite and download a copy of the workshops case studies:

Pasquini, L. A., Eaton, P. W., & Ahlquist, J. R. (2018). We need to talk: Digital practices & ethics in our profession. 2018 ACPA Convention, Houston, TX. figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5971354.v2

Student Affairs Professionals on Facebook: An Empirical Look

On Tuesday, March 13th (11:15 am-12:15 pm), we will be sharing our findings of what we have learned about the Studnet Affairs Facebook Group. We hope to share WHAT and HOW this online community of practice engages its members.

Paper Abstract:

Research on networked practices in higher education often focuses on how social and digital technologies are utilized by academics for teaching, learning, and research.  Very little attention has been given to understanding how postsecondary educators are interacting and disclosing both personal and professional experiences on social networks.  Social media platforms have been embraced by educators as a way to extend communication, share information, network, and build communities. However, there is limited empirical research examining the topics and issues disclosed by student affairs and higher education practitioners within these networked environments.  Facebook is one of the key social networking sites utilized by postsecondary professionals to mediate conversation and develop community online. This study focused on understanding how higher education staff, student affairs educators, and graduate students use one particular Facebook group – The Student Affairs Professional Facebook group.  Through descriptive and qualitative analysis of Facebook group posts, shares, comments, and interactions, this study identifies the central topics and issues discussed over a 15-month period of time. This research shows how professionals and graduate students join this Facebook group to share professional development, offer learning/training resources, and disseminate graduate education information. In addition to professional practice, this Facebook group is often used as a forum for offering/soliciting advice, individual self-help support, personal storytelling, and to share humor with colleagues.

This Research Paper session is structured to have three papers within a one-time block. This means we will only have 12 minutes to present our study findings with minimal discussion.

That being said, we know this research study needs to be discussed more broadly with the field. We want to open up the dialog with the Student Affairs Facebook Facebook Community members. We plan on hanging out after this session, and we are thinking about other ways to share our findings and open conversation online after ACPA. Let us know how we can share more with you in the comments below or send us an email: networkedcop@gmail.com

Reference:

Eaton, P. W., Pasquini, L. A., Ahlquist, J., & Gismondi, A. (2018). The student affairs professional Facebook group: An empirical look. 2018 ACPA Convention, Houston, TX.