Multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups facilitating change?

Abstract

This article discusses the potential of multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups to facilitate individual and institutional change. To do this, we view peer mentoring as a form of critical education praxis (Mahon et al. 2019), the purpose of which is to create a space for reflexive thinking and asking critical questions. The data were collected by interviewing all thirteen participants – doctoral students and more established scholars – of a multidisciplinary peer-mentoring pilot project. The results show a variety of both individual changes and desired changes within the university, which were brought into view as a result of the sharing of experiences, views and ideas in an open, confidential, multidisciplinary space. Based on these results, we argue that multidisciplinary peer mentoring has a high potential to offer an excellent space for collaborative, critical dialogue, which could ultimately facilitate change among individual academics, but also potentially more widely within higher education institutions.

Multidisciplinary Peer-Mentoring Groups Supporting Knowledge Sharing in Doctoral Education

“…Organising PMGs show the ability of the university to recognise some of the organisational sore points regarding supervisory practices and knowledge sharing, and willingness to offer solutions to those identified problems. Increased reflexivity in individual behaviour and amongst communities of peers and colleagues, and a better understanding among participants of the structures in play at higher education facilitated by PMGs might potentially also benefit the organisation at large (Aarnikoivu et al, 2020;Kalpazidou Schmidt & Faber, 2016).…”

“…The pilot participants, upon their agreeing to be interviewed, received written information about the study and their rights as interviewees, and were asked to sign a research consent form. The peer mentoring pilot originally had a very practical aim: to find out if multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups, comprising doctoral researcher peers and senior coordinators from multiple disciplines, would be useful for the participants and especially for the scholarly growth of the doctoral researchers (see also Aarnikoivu et al, 2020). We also wanted to know how such practice could be improved for future purposes.…”

“…While not typically part of doctoral curricula (Elliot et al, 2016b;Scott & Miller, 2017), also mentoring may support the wellbeing (for examples, see Lorenzetti et al, 2019) and retention of doctoral researchers (Brill et al, 2014), as well as the establishment of and success on a research career (Curtin et al, 2016). Most mentoring research, however, focuses on discipline or faculty-specific mentoring, and little research exists on multidisciplinary peer-mentoring groups (PMGs) which combine both the peer support and the support offered by experienced scholars (Aarnikoivu et al, 2020). As multidisciplinary collaboration is increasingly encouraged both inside and outside academia and can support exposure to different perspectives and disciplinary cultures early on (c.f.…”

Risk for professional learning when the academic community is forced online?

“…A communicative learning space cultivates and nurtures educators' professional learning through collaboration. Collaborative practices strengthen both the teaching and research practices (Aarnikoivu et al 2020;Mahon, Heikkinen, and Huttunen 2019). As in many other professions, the professional knowledge and learning, however, is complex.…”

Using multilevel mentoring as a situated learning approach to enhance the professional development of teachers in higher education

“…Even in educational settings where there are institutionalized mentoring systems with clear policies and structures, issues such as limited time for mentors to engage with mentees, insufficient institutional support to implement mentoring activities (Mena et al, 2020) and limited support for academics in minority groups (Bhopal, 2020) have been reported. At the same time, there is a growing body of literature that have proposed that educational institutions should explore and develop effective approaches to mentoring (Aarnikoivu et al, 2020;K apl ar-Kod acsy and Dorner, 2022;Mullen et al, 2020). One of such growing mentoring systems is multilevel mentoring (Brinia and Psoni, 2018;Mullen and Klimaitis, 2021) that include diverse professional development activities that are designed to support institutional missions and policies concerning the retention and promotion of academics.…”