Tag: 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)
Networked Community, Networked Practice

What Does the #SApro Facebook Group Actually Talk About?

Laura Pasquini

Wow. It’s the end of June. It’s been pretty quiet on this blog, and really on most of my social streams. I have intentionally turn off, deactivated, and ignored my social media channels to really dig into understanding more about networked practices in higher education. June has been filled with a many research and writing tasks: reviewing up interview transcripts, editing a couple of manuscripts for journals, reading even MORE literature, and cleaning/organizing extant data (e.g. digital archives, online community spaces, etc.). Sounds like fun, right?

To take a break, I’m emerging from my #ShutUpAndWrite hiding location to give an update on one community we examined. At the end of May, a few of us (Paul, Adam, Josie, & I) discussed how and why we researched the Student Affairs Professional Facebook Group on the Higher Ed Live episode: “Researching Student Affairs Professional’s Digital Communities.” In listening to this broadcast, I thought this conversation with Tony was helpful to open up about our process and explain more about this type of research. Although we presented this study during #ACPA18 and we currently have an article “under review,” I thought I’d offer some highlights from our conversation for graduate students and professionals in Student Affairs.

In combing through the empirical literature on Facebook groups, there are a number of industries and a variety of professionals who utilize this platform for their occupation. What is unique about the Facebook groups we looked at, in comparison, it was rare to have a community be actively sustained for such a long length of time (since 2009) and to find one as as scaled in membership (30, 866 members as of today).

The community members of the Student Affairs Professionals Facebook group share a significant amount of data (information that something happened) and knowledge (information about why something happened) via this social media platform (a digital infrastructure that enables two or more groups to interact (Srnicek, 2017). There are so many assumptions, observations, and anecdotes for this group; however very little evidence has been gathered using data to inform what is being shared within the conversations of this digital space — so we guided our study with these research questions:

RQ1. What topics and issues do member of the Student Affairs Professional Facebook group discuss over 14-month period of time?

RQ2. What topics and issues gain the most shares, comments, reactions, and interactions?

To learn more about the process for data collection, analysis, and our preliminary findings, watch the archived @HigherEdLive episode here:

Here are just a few of the questions Tony asked with the relevant response after this time stamp:

  1. Introductions and about the topic [Start]
  2. [6:42] You decided to study the Student Affairs Professionals  Facebook Group. Why did you think this group in particular was important to study?
  3. [9:05] How did you collect the data you analyzed?
  4. [15:23] There has been a lot of talk about privacy issues related to Facebook and other social media lately. How did you protect people’s privacy and why is this important for researchers doing social media research?
  5. [17:25] What types of analyses did you conduct and why were these the analytical approaches you decided to employ?
  6. [20:10] What are some of the ways professionals are using this space, based on your analyses?
  7. [27:42] Which posts garnered the most engagement? What might this say about our profession and the ways that professionals are using groups such as the Student Affairs Professionals Facebook group?

When solicited for advice or resources for digital communities our panel offered a few helpful suggestions. Thanks for asking the questions and having us talk about our research process out loud, Tony. Here are our parting thoughts that closed the conversation [57:12]:

  • Josie: Instead of a resource, find people to look to “lurking and learning” and watch how they use these social and digital platforms. Pay attention to behaviors, reach out to chat with them, and ask questions – find a mentor to discussion your professional digital self with. Seek out people, and not just paper. Find others to learn and grow from within your network.
  • Adam: Look beyond the field and engage with communities beyond the field of Student Affairs and outside higher education; think with an interdisciplinary spirit about your own practice to encourage a diversity of thought to your own campus.
  • Paul: We need more experience and exposure to learn how to research in the field about the field in these digital spaces. A few suggested books: Methods – Sage Handbook of Social Media Methods; Conducting Qualitative Inquiry of Learning in Online Spaces; Digital Tools for Qualitative Research and Journals: Social Media & Society; Computers in Human Behavior; Internet and Higher Education
  • Laura: “Study problems, not things.” by @veletsianos Forget the technology or the tools. What is the question or issue you want to explore? We need more practitioners to be part of this research and be part of this process in understanding how and why we engage in digital communities and spaces. We need more people to find evidence and share the work we do.

Suggested Reads:

Helpful Resources for Community Moderators:

  • Are you a moderator or admin of a Facebook group? You might want to use https://sociograph.io/ This can help you understand more about your community and group as the Administrator; this needs to be an open group to use the tool. This can be a good starting point to learn about your community.
  • Need to gather a hashtag to archive your Twitter community conversation and interactions? TAGS is a free Google Sheet template which lets you setup and run automated collection of search results from Twitter: https://tags.hawksey.info/ [Thanks, Martin Hawksey!]

If you’re interested and want to learn more about the larger research project OR perhaps even get involved with research in this area — please reach out! To learn more the about networked practices in higher education and student affairs study, that is, general updates, publications, and presentations can be found here:  https://networkedcommunityofpractice.wordpress.com/

Reference:

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
mentor, mentoring, PhD

RESEARCH STUDY REQUEST: Exploring Doctoral Researchers’ Mentoring Relationships

Laura Pasquini

As previously shared, mentoring has been a significant interest in my personal and professional career. I am working on drafting the findings from previous mentoring program study at the moment; however, I am thrilled to share a study one of my doctoral scholars is currently working on related mentoring for doctoral scholars.

The goal of this research is to understand how graduate students experience mentoring DURING and AFTER the completion of their terminal graduate degree programs in both face-to-face and distributed environments. We really want to know how doctoral scholars establish, communicate, and sustain a mentoring relationship that contributes to their personal and professional development. Also, we are curious to learn about the nature and dynamics of this relationship and to understand if any of these mentoring experiences occur from a distance or involve mentoring with a professional/scholar beyond their own institution of study.

If you are (or know of) a doctoral researcher who is in-progress or has recently completed (in the last 5-8 years) a terminal graduate degree (e.g. Ph.D., Ed.D., M.F.A.), please consider volunteering 30-minutes to participate in a research interview. If you are interested and available please complete this informed consent form: https://unt.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_d06SO2d0GL8al6d

Here is more information about this research study is posted by my co-investigator, Meranda Roy, directly from her blog.

#AcWri, #AcWriMo

Still Writing and Working On My Practice

Laura Pasquini

In reading Dani Shapiro’s book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of Creative Life, she shares different segments of advice for her own creative writing practice. Much of this book is focused on her journey and experience of her own writing crafts, with anecdotes for what she has learned in the process of her creative work. Although this was not intended for academic writing practice, I think Shapiro shares helpful suggestions for academic writers and early career scholars to borrow as they develop their own writing process. It is through the beginnings, middles, and ends of writing, where some of the writing advice shares reflections and advice on writing during the struggle and flow times.

Here are a few pieces of advice from Shapiro (2013) that resonated with me the most, as I thought about how I continue to develop my own writing practice:

  • Being Present: “Drop down, drop in” (p. 59). Being concentrated and directed in your writing process is a critical way to hone the craft of academic scholarship. Be focused on a single task when your are writing. Make this your primary and only priority. Consider ways to engross yourself in your writing work or project at hand. What ways do you prepare yourself to be present in your writing? How are you dropping into your writing to be in it each day?
  • Rhythm: “…3 pages a day, 5 days a week” (p. 100) is Shapiro’s writing pattern or habit. What is your writing rhythm? What sort of continued pattern are you developing for your writing practice? Think about this as a habit, and consider how you develop a pattern or rhythm of writing actions around this habit. How are you building rhythm with your writing and research work? What is your schedule for treating writing as work?
  • Practice: “Practice involves discipline but is more closely related to patience” (p. 131). I would say returning to the process and understanding that writing and academic work is more of a marathon. Your writing practice will involve your willingness to continue the work and know that your incremental writing practice is contributing to the larger project, piece, or manuscript. Keep at it! What keeps your patience in check for daily writing practice? How do you  maintain motivation with on-going writing projects or revisions on manuscripts?
  • Cigarette Break: “gazing out the window at the courtyard below, and allowing my thoughts to sort themselves out… writers require that ritualized dream time” (p. 158). I don’t smoke, but I can see the value in stepping away to space out. Taking a pause to breathe and ponder work without distraction is vital. Breaks offer writers a critical time to process thoughts, ideas, and concepts. Maybe you step away from your desk, leave your screen and devices, and find a space to just take a pause to have a bit of a think. Let your mind wander and see what comes about from a bit of spaced out time when you’re not creating or doing. How do you find mental space to space out or mind wander? How do you encourage creative thoughts to stew with your writing practice and when you’re engrossed in research projects?
  • Steward: “Don’t leave that essential place. Be a good steward to your gifts” (p. 207). Figure out how to best protect your own writing craft and these habits. Stewardship means tending to the needs and practices you require to be productive in your writing work. Is there a particular place that lends to your productive writing practice? Are there particular times and days that allows you to write your best? What are the essential tools you will need to focus on writing or working on a particular research project? How do you create a bubble or force-field around this writing space and time?

Reference:

Shapiro, D. (2013). Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of Creative Life. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.