Coaching toward the Professoriate: Race and Gender Conscious Mentoring for Black Doctoral Students in Engineering and Computing

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Across the nation, there is a dearth of underrepresented faculty in engineering and computing, and many explanations have been presented to explain the shortages in popular and scientific literature. Over the years, a plethora of strategies, initiatives, and programs have been created to address the broadening participation challenges in the engineering professoriate, but minimum visible gains have been achieved. This project is closely aligned with a long-standing interest of the National Science Foundation to increase the number of underrepresented faculty in the engineering and computing professoriate. By executing this project, the investigators expect that there will be an increase the number of Black engineering and social scientist faculty who are trained to serve as coaches and mentors for scholars from underrepresented groups at the crucial, pre-faculty career stage; increase in the number of diverse doctoral and postdoctoral scholars who become employed as engineering and computing faculty; and improvement of the success rate of Black engineering and computing faculty through the tenure process. As way of increasing the number of underrepresented groups who enter the engineering professoriate, the project's plan comprised the following: (1) Developing effective materials for coaching-based mentorship of future engineering faculty. (2) Recruiting and training current tenured faculty in engineering and social science to serve as coaches (3) Implementing the coaching-based mentorship. (4) Implementing a plan to sustain the coaching-based mentorship beyond the project funding. (5) Implementing a plan to sustain the coaching-based mentorship beyond the project funding. (6) Coordinating and assessing the coaching-based mentorship. Guided by the theoretical and scientific literature on Communities of Practice (CoP) and Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), the investigators outlined a comprehensive project to develop and implement a coaching-based mentoring program to enhance approaches to diversify the engineering and computing professoriate and to develop methods to teach and train tenured engineering and social science faculty effective mentoring skills. For this project, the investigators plan to extend this mentoring intervention to 40 underrepresented doctoral and postdoctoral scholars in engineering and computing, with a particular focus on those who are interested in pursuing faculty positions. Additionally, the plan includes the services of an external evaluator, who will execute multi-level, multi-phased, mixed methods data collections from all the key project stakeholders (e.g., coaches, mentees, postdoctoral manager, graduate students, and the investigators. This project is timely and likely to help improve engineering success outcomes in the professoriate and doctoral programs.