Activating Social Capital: How Peer and Socio-Emotional Mentoring Facilitate Resilience and Success for Community College Students

This article details the impact of the intensive mentoring model, through faculty-to-student and peer-to-peer mentoring, utilized in WAESO-LSAMP community colleges. We pay particular attention to the practice of socio-emotional mentoring, the development of a “mentoring chain,” and the impact of communities of support on student and faculty participants. Specifically, we discuss how these separate modes of mentoring impact students from underrepresented students in developing and activating social capital, developing collaborative support systems, fostering confidence and self-efficacy, combatting impostor syndrome and stereotype threat, and embracing the importance of failure in the scientific process. Methods and data include qualitative analysis of forty-six in-depth interviews with program participants, including faculty mentors and community college students, at three community college sites within the WAESO-LSAMP alliance. We address specific implications for faculty working with underrepresented STEM community college students and provide evidence of best practices for setting up a community of support that leads to academic and personal success.

Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Geoscience (EDIG) initiative: A time to listen, learn, and act.

<p>The Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Geoscience (EDIG) initiative was created to better understand the experiences of the geoscience community with respect to prejudice, inequity, bias, exclusion, sexism, and discrimination. EDIG aims to provide a platform for learning for the wider geoscience community and promote progressive action to make geoscience more inclusive and equitable.</p><p>As part of our initiatives, we organised the virtual EDIG conference in December 2020 entitled: A time to listen, learn, and act. This virtual event aimed to facilitate learning on equality, diversity, and inclusion related topics relevant to the geosciences. It hosted sessions on where we have come from, where we are now, and where we are going. The conference especially focused on raising awareness around the challenges experienced by minoritized geoscientists, helping to involve more people in these conversations. The conference hosted 17 speakers on a range of different topics, from the history of diversity in geoscience, to how we can become more inclusive, to how we can move forward together, as well as a workshop on unconscious bias sponsored by the Institute of Geologists of Ireland (IGI) and the Irish Centre for Research in Applied Geology (iCRAG).</p><p>Prior to the EDIG conference, we launched a global survey to carry out research on equality, diversity, and inclusion in the geosciences. The survey asked people about their own experiences (or lack of) around EDI related topics. The survey received a large response, with 708 participants from 58 countries. The main themes from the survey data were used to structure our conference programme.</p><p>We will present the results of this survey, and our experiences of the EDIG conference. With these and future events we hope to bring together several online initiatives, establish a community of support and learning, and to help us all come together to make the geosciences more welcoming, accessible, inclusive, and equitable.</p>

Ensuring Success Among First-Generation, Low-Income, and Underserved Minority Students: Developing a Unified Community of Support

Recent research has demonstrated the value of comprehensive, integrated programs that combine and align several interventions to create a seamless learning environment for undergraduate students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). While there is emerging evidence of the value of these integrated programs for student success, there is little understanding of exactly how and why they are effective. This study of integrated programs at several California State University campuses indicates that successful integrated programs are effective because they create what we term a unified community of support for students, faculty, and staff. A unified community of support leverages structural changes to campus policies and practices to promote individual changes to faculty and staff knowledge, beliefs, actions, and relationships. This combination offers a unique and novel way of both organizing and conceptualizing student support within higher education, as most existing programs are based around either structural changes or individual support, rather than a mutually reinforcing combination of the two.

We Move Forward Together: A Prison Theater Exchange Program Among Three Universities in the United States and Brazil

In 2013, the Prison Creative Arts Project at the University of Michigan and Teatro na Prisão at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro began an international exchange of university-based prison theater programs. The theater faculty at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina joined the exchange in 2016 and began a new prison theater program at a women’s facility in Florianópolis, Brazil. Together, these three universities not only share best practices and resources but form a community of support and understanding as they engage in a highly specialized and challenging creative process inside prisons.

Digital Higher Degree Research (HDR) Scholarly Support and Community Building

In this chapter, the development of a digital support system for higher degree research (HDR) student training and development is conversed in the context of the young faculty of medicine at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. First, the case and the issues that need to be addressed in providing digital support to the HDR cohort are discussed. Then, the development of the digital platform is presented. Finally, an overall reflection is made with respect to the effectiveness and future directions in implementing the digital platform with a focus on developing a scholarly community of support for the faculty's higher degree research students, supervisors, and the wider research community.