Associate Librarian for SPA and SIS Graduate Programs American University
Learn about the ways in which professionalism, community outreach, and reference services result in informal mentoring, which impacts the public good and increases the perception of library value. Librarians are uniquely positioned to help identify mentoring opportunities and to provide resources to mentees, because our professional tenets focus on developing service relationships with patrons and colleagues. Participants in this workshop will learn from current research in higher education, practice constructing a mentoring constellation, and develop a plan to implement a similar research and mentoring program in their own library.
High-Impact Practices (HIPs) were introduced to higher education by George Kuh in 2007. A doctoral-level university in the southeast is conducting research related to mentorship as an additional HIP. As part of that university’s mission to investigate this concept, they are funding several interdisciplinary teams. Learn from one team of researchers from across the United States and Europe who are using ethnographic research methods to investigate current mentoring conditions on six campuses. One tool being used is the mentoring constellation diagram, which illustrates connections to support people and relationship strength for the mentee. This diagram provides opportunities for a deeper conversation about mentoring gaps and helps mentees identify additional support persons.
Service work can often recede into the background; diagramming mentoring constellations helps to illustrate hidden support roles. Mentoring constellations also highlight the roles of marginalized groups and support people that do not fit into traditional mentoring categories. Use of mentoring constellations encourages participants to acknowledge unseen labor and to evaluate the strength of their current relational networks. This model allows librarians to find ways to support greater diversity within mentoring networks, improve outreach by including additional resources, and to deepen connections to patrons and colleagues.
Learning Objectives:
Consider research methodologies used in higher education in order to prepare similar investigative research at your own library
Interpret constellation mapping on diverse college campuses in order to identify opportunities for focused patron outreach
Recognize aspects of mentorship in order to express the relationship between mentoring and high-impact practices (HIPs)
Recommend additional support tools and persons in order to prioritize underrepresented voices