WIDE Research Center as an Incubator for Graduate Student Experience (original) (raw)
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EMOTIONAL LABOR, MENTORING, AND EQUITY FOR DOCTORAL STUDENT AND FACULTY WRITERS
Diverse Approaches to Teaching, Learning, and Writing Across the Curriculum: IWAC at 25 , 2020
Writing Across the Curriculum scholars are well positioned to improve educational access and maintain the free exchange of ideas by developing pedagogy, policy, and programming rooted in research on faculty and doctoral student writers' needs and experiences. This chapter uses results from a study of emerging scholars' writing development to examine the effects of emotional labor in mentorship experiences. Although emotion is a natural aspect of writing, learning, and development , our analysis reveals how institutional discourses impose norma-tive expectations that create additional labor for writers in managing emotions; this labor impacts some groups of writers more significantly than others. The chapter concludes with recommendations and structural interventions for revising writing mentorship practices. Historically, WAC researchers have not focused on graduate student and faculty writers. Two decades ago, WAC for the New Millennium (McLeod et al., 2001)-much like this volume-sought to document a moment in time. In that collection , "faculty writers" did not appear in the index at all. Faculty were treated as potential allies in cross-curricular writing instruction but not as writers in their own right. Graduate student writers garnered slightly more attention. Thankfully , interest in graduate student and faculty writers has expanded. The call for increased attention to graduate student mentorship, in particular, is represented in this collection; Rachael Cayley (this volume) describes a genre systems approach to mentoring publication-based thesis writers and Alisa Russell, Jake Chase, Justin Nicholes, and Allie Sockwell Johnston (this volume) highlight the need for mentorship as a factor leading to the founding of WAC's growing graduate
Writing Center Journal, 2021
Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers takes us from narratives to research. I was interested in and looked forward to reading this book, as, over the summer, some graduate students and I read Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School (McKee & Delgado, 2020), and I wanted to see how the books complemented each other. While Degrees of Difference was more personal, more narrative-based, and more interdisciplinary, both books stressed the importance of mentoring. But I am especially excited to bring some of the ideas from Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers to my Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) campus. Our graduate population at The University of Texas Permian Basin is growing, and we need to offer it more support. The book is divided into three parts with a total of 14 chapters, plus an introduction and an afterword. Part 1: Voices, considers graduate student experiences in five chapters; Part 2: Bridges and Borders consists of two chapters; Rebecca Day Babcock is the William and Ordelle Watts Professor at the University of Texas Permian Basin, where she teaches writing and linguistics and serves as the Freshman English Coordinator and Director of Undergraduate Research. She has authored, co-authored, or edited books and award-winning articles on tutoring, writing centers, disability, and meta-research, as well as recently published her first book not about tutoring, Boom or Bust: Narrative, Life, and Culture from the West Texas Oil Patch, co-edited with Sheena Stief and Kristen Figgins. Theories and Methods of Writing Center Research, edited with Jo Mackiewicz, won last year's AWAC best edited collection award.
Journal of Research Practice, 2013
“Research assistant” is a term used to describe student researchers across a variety of contexts and encompasses a wide array of duties, rewards, and costs. As critical qualitative scholars situated in a discipline that rarely offers funded research assistantships to graduate students, we explore how we have engaged in faculty-student research in one particularly understudied context: the independent study. Using narrative writing and reflection within a framework of collaborative autoethnography, the first three authors reflect as three “generations” of protégés who were each mentored through independent studies during their MA programs by the fourth author. We explore the environmental context, mentor facets, and protégé facets that highlight the light and shadow, or successes and struggles, of our mentoring relationships. Reflecting on our own experiences of collaborative research through independent studies, we suggest a model for feminist research mentorship that may be enacted across disciplines.
Mentoring provides an effective way of assisting emerging researchers to understand more fully how academics engage in research activities, enhance their research skills and gain confidence in pursuing their own research interests. Although mentoring can be constructed in diverse ways, the most valuable mentoring is that tailored appropriately to meet the developmental needs of the mentee (Brown & Daly, 2009). In this paper we examine mentoring as a form of researcher development and our own approach which emphasises mentoring with, and alongside, other researchers. Two academics assembled a research team for a collaborative project and, while they oversaw the project, roles were assigned to individuals through discussion and consensus. This paper identifies the parameters for the collaborative venture, identifies the focus for mentoring and provides the reflections of the two mentees who look back on their experiences of being part of a research team. We affirm our contention that mentoring can be an evolving process as well as an active relationship in which assistance and reflection go hand in hand. The narratives provided by the mentees indicate that mentoring as part of a collaborative research project is not an occurrence, but an ongoing developmental process and an opportunity to learn and contribute simultaneously. Keywords: Tertiary research; mentoring; research culture; collaborative research
Journal of College Teaching & Learning (TLC), 2011
In the past decade, college and university officials have tried to formalize avenues that provide undergraduate students with opportunities to conduct research, either in direct collaboration with a faculty member or as independent research under the supervision of a faculty member. Administrators and faculty have worked to institutionalize these programs because they recognize the intrinsic benefits of these faculty student collaborations. Since most faculty balance a wide range of demands, we wanted to understand how faculty members view these partnerships in the larger context of their work. In 2008, as the Undergraduate Research Conference at our midsize public New England University entered its ninth year, the evaluation committee administered a survey to examine faculty members’ attitudes toward undergraduate research endeavors. Our results show that faculty felt overwhelmingly positive about their role as mentors. Full professors indicate more satisfaction in this role tha...
Opportune Encounters: hosting extramural mentoring programmes for new scholars
This article explores the new and important ® eld of mentoring in higher education. It describes a pilot project that launched the mentoring of new scholars through an academic writing programme. In its inaugural year, this national programme attracted educators from the US, Canada, and the UK who are international members of a US-based conference. The analysis of the extramural programme uses the formative evaluations of the 48 participantsÐ mentors (established scholars) and mentees (graduate students, recent graduates, and beginning faculty). The questionnaire data are organised into issues highlighting preliminary insights for programmatic development at professional venues. Salient elements of the Mentoring for Academic Writing (MAW) Programme are provided to encourage the development of other mentoring opportunities for new scholars. Bene® ts and limitations are included. An overview of the current mentoring climate that supports new models of human relationship is given. Discussion covers the relevant literature and recommendations for programmatic improvement.
Reflective Practice, 2010
Universities and colleges seek to help all students succeed. However, foreign graduate students experience a different set of challenges than domestic students. Culture shock and writing in a foreign language are just a few examples that threaten their overall success. This qualitative participatory action research study describes and explains how two graduate students and a faculty mentor engaged in mentoring and structured reflective writing activities designed to address these challenges. The research data include a focus group interview, analysis of selected journal pages and conference presentations. Results indicate that reflective journal writing and mentoring help foreign graduate students de-stress, learn the tacit knowledge of the academy and participate in scholarly activities like conference presentations and publishing.
Creating collaborative capacity in early career research writers
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Given evidence of enhanced productivity and citations achieved by collaborative writers, it is important for researchers to develop collaborative capacity (Abramo, D’Angelo & Di Costa 2009; McCarty, Jawitz, Hopkins & Goldman 2013). Our theoretical paper defines the concepts of Collaborative Capacity and Informed Research and incorporates them within a Collaborative Research Culture Framework. We also present five stories that illustrate how elements of the Framework, including Collaborative Capacity, can help the collaborative research writer to overcome challenges and engage successfully in collaborative opportunities. One story focuses on a student and supervisor collaboration to highlight the role of trust and respect; another describes how student collaborations can enrich and enable informal, formal and sanctioned networks; a third describes the innovation, inclusion and initiative achieved through writing collaboratively; a fourth demonstrates how leadership capacity facilitat...