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Culturally aware mentorship: Lasting impacts of a novel intervention on academic administrators and faculty.

ABSTRACT: National efforts to address the diversity dilemma in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) often emphasize increasing numbers of historically underrepresented (HU) students and faculty, but fall short in instituting concrete changes for inclusion and belonging. Therefore, increasing the pool of senior faculty who wish to become guides and advocates for emerging scientists from HU populations is an essential step toward creating new pathways for their career advancement. As a step toward achieving this goal, we created a novel eight-hour intervention on Culturally Aware Mentoring (CAM), a program of the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) targeted to faculty and administrators. A previous report of surveys at the end of the CAM sessions revealed substantial awareness and knowledge gains, with participants expressing intentions to use and implement new skills they had learned. In this paper, we provide the results of our thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with academic administrators and faculty, 18-24 months after participation in CAM. Interviews were designed to determine: 1) What changes in self-perceptions and interactions occurred as a result of participation in CAM? 2) What specific components of CAM are associated with changes in individual beliefs and practices? 3) How did participants actively make changes after the CAM workshop? 4) What barriers or challenges do participants encounter after the CAM intervention? The results demonstrate the lasting influences of CAM on participants' awareness of cultural differences, their assumptions about and approaches toward interactions with colleagues and students, and their efforts to change their behaviors to promote inclusive practices in their mentoring and teaching of HU students in STEM. Our findings provide evidence that CAM can be incorporated into existing mentor training programs designed to improve the confidence and capacity of senior research faculty mentors to make culturally-informed, scholar-centered decisions to more deliberately recognize and respond to cultural differences within their mentoring and collegial relationships.

SUBMITTER: Womack VY

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7413486 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Culturally aware mentorship: Lasting impacts of a novel intervention on academic administrators and faculty.

Womack Veronica Y VY Wood Christine V CV House Stephanie C SC Quinn Sandra C SC Thomas Stephen B SB McGee Richard R Byars-Winston Angela A

PloS one 20200807 8

National efforts to address the diversity dilemma in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) often emphasize increasing numbers of historically underrepresented (HU) students and faculty, but fall short in instituting concrete changes for inclusion and belonging. Therefore, increasing the pool of senior faculty who wish to become guides and advocates for emerging scientists from HU populations is an essential step toward creating new pathways for their career advancement. As a step tow ...[more]

PMID: 32764768

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Project description:ImportanceBecause mentorship is critical for professional development and career advancement, it is essential to examine the status of mentorship and identify challenges that junior surgical faculty (assistant and associate professors) face obtaining effective mentorship.ObjectiveTo evaluate the mentorship experience for junior surgical faculty and highlight areas for improvement.Design, setting, and participantsThis qualitative study was an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study including an anonymous survey on mentorship followed by semistructured interviews to expand on survey findings. Junior surgical faculty from 18 US academic surgery programs were included in the anonymous survey and interviews. Survey responses between "formal" (assigned by the department) vs "informal" (sought out by the faculty) mentors and male vs female junior faculty were compared using χ2 tests. Interview responses were analyzed for themes until thematic saturation was achieved. Survey responses were collected from November 2022 to August 2023, and interviews conducted from July to December 2023.ExposureMentorship from formal and/or informal mentors.Main outcomes and measuresSurvey gauged the availability and satisfaction with formal and informal mentorship; interviews assessed broad themes regarding mentorship.ResultsOf 825 survey recipients, 333 (40.4%) responded; 155 (51.7%) were male and 134 (44.6%) female. Nearly all respondents (319 [95.8%]) agreed or strongly agreed that mentorship is important to their surgical career, especially for professional networking (309 respondents [92.8%]), career advancement (301 [90.4%]), and research (294 [88.3%]). However, only 58 respondents (18.3%) had a formal mentor. More female than male faculty had informal mentors (123 [91.8%] vs 123 [79.4%]; P = .003). Overall satisfaction was higher with informal mentorship than formal mentorship (221 [85.0%] vs 40 [69.0%]; P = .01). Most male and female faculty reported no preferences in gender or race and ethnicity for their mentors. When asked if they had good mentor options if they wanted to change mentors, 141 (47.8%) responded no. From the interviews (n = 20), 6 themes were identified, including absence of mentorship infrastructure, preferred mentor characteristics, and optimizing mentorship.Conclusions and relevanceAcademic junior surgical faculty agree mentorship is vital to their careers. However, this study found that few had formal mentors and almost half need more satisfactory options if they want to change mentors. Academic surgical programs should adopt a framework for facilitating mentorship and optimize mentor-mentee relationships through alignment of mentor-mentee goals and needs.

Project description:PurposeAlthough mentorship has been associated with promotion, job satisfaction, and retention, data are limited on the mentorship experience of clinical- versus research-track physicians as well as feasibility and relative priority of formal program components.Methods and materialsWithin a single-institution, multi-site, academic network, we implemented a Radiation Oncology AcaDemic Mentorship Program (ROADMAP) for junior faculty. Validated surveys assessing mentee satisfaction were distributed at baseline and 1 year. The statistical analysis included Wilcoxon rank sum and signed tests. Mentees assessed the likelihood to recommend each program component (10-point Likert-type scale), and means with standard error (SE) are reported.ResultsAmong 42 eligible junior faculty, 36 (86%) opted into the program. The median time since residency was 2.5 years (interquartile range, 1.75-5.25) on the clinical track (n = 12) and 3 years (interquartile range, 2.75-5.00) on the research track (n = 24). At baseline, research-track physicians reported higher satisfaction with mentoring than physicians on the clinical track (2.92 vs 2.16; P = .02). Among 32 physicians completing 1 year, overall satisfaction with mentoring increased compared with baseline (2.72 vs 3.87; P < .001), which persisted on subset analysis for both clinical- (2.16 vs 4.03; P < .001) and research-track physicians (2.99 vs 3.77; P = .005). At 1 year, 28 mentees (88%) opted to continue the program. Program components were rated 8.25 (SE, 0.37) for mentor-mentee pairings, 7.22 (SE, 0.39) for goal setting, 6.84 (SE, 0.47) for administrative support, 6.69 (SE, 0.44) for peer mentoring, and 6.53 (SE, 0.45) for steering committee oversight. Ratings of peer mentoring were not associated with track (P = .59) or years in practice (P = .29).ConclusionsClinical-track physicians may be less satisfied with mentorship than research-track faculty. However, all junior faculty, regardless of track, appeared to benefit from formalizing dyadic mentor-mentee relationships, goal setting, and peer mentoring. Further work is needed to determine the role of mentorship in addressing physician burnout.

Project description:BackgroundAs higher education institutions strive to effectively support an increasingly diverse student body, they will be called upon to provide their faculty with tools to teach more inclusively, especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classrooms where recruitment and retention of students from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups present long-standing challenges. Pedagogical training approaches to creating inclusive classrooms involve interventions that raise awareness of student and instructor social identities and explore barriers to learning, such as implicit bias, microaggressions, stereotype threat, and fixed mindset. Such efforts should focus on embracing diversity as an asset leveraged to benefit all students in their learning. In this paper, we describe the impact of multiday, off-campus immersion workshops designed to impart faculty with these tools. Based on analysis of workshop participant data, we report the resulting changes in faculty knowledge of factors affecting classroom climate and student success in STEM, attitudes about students, and motivation to adopt new teaching practices aimed at fostering equitable and culturally responsive learning environments.ResultsKey findings indicate that attendees (1) increased their knowledge of social identities and the barriers to learning in STEM classrooms, particularly those faced by students from underrepresented groups in STEM or socioeconomically challenged backgrounds; (2) changed their attitudes about students' abilities as science majors, shifting away from a fixed-mindset perspective in which characteristics, such as intelligence, are perceived as innate and unalterable; and (3) modified their teaching approaches to promote inclusivity and cultural responsiveness.ConclusionFaculty members, who are linchpins in the evolution of college classrooms into settings that provide students with equitable opportunities to succeed academically in STEM, can benefit from participating in immersion workshops structured to support their awareness of issues affecting classroom culture related to race/ethnicity, LGBTQ status, religious affiliation, ability, socioeconomic status, and other social identities that contribute to disparities in STEM achievement and persistence.

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Culturally aware mentorship: Lasting impacts of a novel intervention on academic administrators and faculty.

Publications

Culturally aware mentorship: Lasting impacts of a novel intervention on academic administrators and faculty.

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