Mentoring undergraduate research in global contexts (MUR‐GC): An integrated model

Abstract

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly unveiled a set of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), in the form of complex, even controversial, challenges that have global implications. Inherent in each of the SDGs was the need for collaboration, communication, and coordination across conventional disciplinary and geo-political divides. The sheer magnitude of goals such as “affordable and clean energy” and “reduced inequalities” (“The 17 goals: Sustainable development, n.d.”) also necessitated the cultivation of new approaches to problem-solving, focusing less on identifying ready solutions and more on navigating ambiguity in creative and constructive ways. Organizations around the world mobilized in response to the challenge of meeting these goals, and higher education was no exception. The SDGs identified a clear role for universities under the heading of education, with a particular emphasis on increasing access. In addition to access, higher education theorists, in particular, have articulated a broader role for the university as “a driver for the achievement of the full set of goals, through their role in human formation, knowledge production, and innovation” (Chankseliani & McCowan, 2021, 1). While the theorists speak to academic research, the SDGs suggest that universities are responsible for providing students with opportunities to develop the skills and dispositions required to grapple with these incredibly complex—some might even say wickedly complicated—global challenges. Exactly how universities might address this pedagogical responsibility remains an open question. To explore how that question might be answered, this chapter describes a multi-institutional survey-based research study intended to provide an overview of current mentoring practices related to global education. Our findings suggest that new forms of mentoring have emerged which seek to provide the collaborative, convergent, and integrative context to develop the next generation of “wicked problem” solvers (Edmundson, 2016). Mentored experiences are not the only modality through which students might gain the knowledge and awareness necessary to navigate global challenges. In many cases, attention to the SDGs has been integrated into disciplinary curricula, in models ranging from individual stand-alone courses to full integration across degree programs (Rusinko, 2010). The challenge with curricular models is that they often focus on one or two SDGs at the expense of others, and/or they provide students with limited exposure to cross-disciplinary thinking. For these reasons, many general education programs have also sought to integrate attention to SDGs, which serve to bolster long-standing values embedded in general education, including the cultivation of inter- and multi-disciplinary perspectives (Phillips, 2018; Wiek et al., 2015) as well as the fundamental civic mission that undergirds many public universities (Pasquerella, 2018). Outside of specific courses, scholars and practitioners alike have emphasized the role of high impact practices (HIPs), including study abroad/global learning, undergraduate research, and service learning, in cultivating essentials tools for wicked problem-solvers (Hanstedt, 2018; Ramaley, 2014; Yukawa, 2015). Many, perhaps even most HIPs, span curricular and co-curricular boundaries, occurring outside the framework of conventional courses. One factor that contributes to their high impact is the differentiated nature of the relationship that students may have with faculty and/or their peers through these experiences (McKinsey, 2016; Miller et al., 2019; Zilvinskis, 2019). Because of the deeply transformative nature of most HIPs (Acheson et al., 2022; Allocco & Fredsell, 2018), participating faculty serve less as instructors or imparters of specific content, but rather as more holistic mentors, guiding students through multiple facets of academic knowledge, personal growth, and professional development. In other words, the rise of HIPs has challenged higher education professionals to redefine mentoring (Mullen & Klimaitis, 2021) and realign mentoring practices to embrace the increasing complexity of both academia and the world it inhabits. Against the backdrop of these shifts in faculty-student relationships, both practitioners and researchers have sought to identify best practices in mentoring to maximize the known benefits of HIP participation. This line of inquiry is perhaps most robust in the context of undergraduate research, in which mentoring has been shown to enable students to gain disciplinary knowledge; build skills such as thinking critically, analyzing data, and communicating effectively; clarify career and educational goals; and develop professional identities in preparation for careers and graduate school (Hall et al., 2018; Hunter et al., 2007; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2018). Using language derived from Kram's influential theoretical framework, mentorship in the context of HIPs fosters opportunities to blend an instrumental (goal or product) orientation with the psychosocial (personal development) and relational (social) facets of mentoring relationships (Kram, 1988). In order for students to have these high-impact, transformational experiences, we know that faculty must help create a meaningful learning environment through intentional mentoring pedagogies (Crisp et al., 2017; Vandermaas-Peeler, 2016; Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2015; Ziwoya & Falconer, 2018). Shanahan et al. (2015) undertook a systematic review of existing literature and identified 10 salient practices of undergraduate research mentoring, which begin with strategic pre-planning and culminate with some form of dissemination of research. The practices have been applied across multiple contexts and disciplines, including interreligious studies (Allocco & Pennington, 2022), teacher development (Walkington & Rushton, 2019), theatre and dance (Shawyer et al., 2019), and Writing Studies (Moore et al., 2022). Mentoring in the context of global learning presents distinctive challenges of its own. While HIPs have had a demonstrable influence on student success across multiple higher education institutions, these practices have recently faced criticism regarding equity, access, and inclusion. Generally speaking, because many HIPs are resource-intensive, they can be challenging to make available to large numbers of students. More specifically, some HIPs have come under particular scrutiny for access issues, perhaps most notably study abroad. Participation in travel-based learning can be costly in terms of both time and money, not to mention potential environmental impacts, and also carries the additional challenge of engaging in other cultures that may have different perspectives on significant aspects of identity, such as gender, race/ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation (BrckaLorenz et al., 2017; Stewart & Nicolazzo, 2018). Just as the expansion of undergraduate research experiences (UR) led to the identification of effective pedagogical practices in mentoring, the equity issues raised by scholars, practitioners, and students contributed to generative strategies intended to foster greater equity and inclusion across all HIPs (Zilvinskis et al., 2022). This development had perhaps the strongest impact on study abroad, which was expanded to include global learning in multiple forms, including virtual exchanges. With expanded participation came increased interest in the pedagogy of intercultural learning (Habashy & Cruz, 2021) and particularly in how faculty can mentor students to navigate personal and professional relationships with others whose cultures differ from their own (Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2018). Advocates attest that it is not sufficient to assume students will intuitively understand cultural differences: these differences must be critically engaged in the context of the mentoring relationship to capitalize on the transformative potential. Indeed, there are some who believe that mentoring in this context takes on an additional purpose, namely that of raising students’ consciousness regarding the persistent social injustices that exist between and within the geographical areas of participating institutions so that these can, ultimately, be redressed (Johnstone et al., 2020; Jones, 2019). Research on HIPS has indicated that the benefits to student success that accrue from engagement in these practices are maximized when students participate in multiple iterations over the course of their undergraduate tenure, and the benefits of intensive engagement accrue especially to students from historically underrepresented populations (Kuh & Kinzie, 2018). While intensity most often refers to HIPs taken at different times, similar benefits are believed to occur when HIPs are stacked, that is, when different modalities of HIPs are combined, such as engaging in service learning as part of a first-year seminar, or, most relevant to the present chapter, conducting undergraduate research in a global context. While mentoring models for undergraduate research and global learning respectively are well-established, less is known about what it means to mentor the two together, and research and practice have only recently emerged (Allocco & Pennington, 2022; Goeltz & Duran, 2018). As a teaching and learning practice, mentoring undergraduate research in a global context (MUR-GC) has been defined as “the process of undergraduate students engaging in an intellectual, critical inquiry, guided by mentorship, that situates their cultural epistemology within a host culture different from their own” (Patch & Berends, 2020, 10). A typical MUR-GC project might involve STEM students conducting field research in ecologies outside of their home countries, or perhaps nursing students engaging in community-based research in areas affected by public health challenges not present in the home country. MUR-GC is intended to enable students to integrate the spirit of inquiry-guided learning (from undergraduate research) with cultural humility (from global learning) in ways that empower them to engage with wicked problems on a global scale. An increasing number of anecdotal indicators suggest that interest in MUR-GC is rising across US higher education. Recently, the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U), along with the Forum on Education Abroad and Elon University's Center for Research on Global Engagement created a multi-institutional task force to assess the current state of MUR-GC practice and advance both research and practice related to its implementation. Because little was known about the current state of MUR-GC, the authors of the present chapter (all members of the broader task force) elected to conduct a US-wide survey that would simultaneously serve as an environmental scan, needs assessment, and inquiry into best practices. The IRB-approved survey, disseminated electronically in Spring 2021, asked institutional representatives (n = 148), ranging from professional staff to faculty, to identify and describe programs and practices related to MUR-GC on their respective campuses. Our findings suggest that MUR-GC presents distinctive contexts, challenges, and opportunities for expansion of conventional mentoring modalities. MUR-GC Participants. The respondents represented a broad range of institutional types, disciplinary perspectives, and roles, with a median response coming from a non-tenure track STEM faculty member at either a research-intensive or comprehensive university. While faculty, tenure and non-tenure, were reported as the primary mentor, our results (see Table 1), also demonstrate that compared to traditional models of undergraduate research (e.g., one faculty mentor, one undergraduate student), there are many different potential mentors (e.g., community members, other staff). This finding suggests that when planning mentor development and training, there may be different needs depending on the experiences and knowledge of the mentors. MUR-GC Modalities. The survey respondents indicated a wide range of modalities in which MUR-GC practices took place. While the highest number were short-term study abroad/away experiences, course-based, -embedded, and virtual modalities were also prominent. Interestingly, the conventional full-semester mode of study abroad ranked relatively low compared to the growing number of alternative modalities. This divergence is also reflected in the relatively large number (n = 8) of responses in the “other” category including summer bridge programs, micro-credentialing initiatives, and independent research projects (Table 2). Salient Practices. The survey asked how important the salient practices were in MUR-GC. There were three distinct categories, including highly important (mean > 4.4), moderately important (mean 4.1–4.3) and least important (mean < 4.0). Those practices identified as highly important included setting clear expectations, dedicated time to one-on-one hands-on mentoring, increasing student ownership of research over time, and encouraging students to share findings. The two practices reported as least important, supporting students’ professional development and creating opportunities to learn mentoring skills, may be related to the often shortened timelines of global experiences. In other words, MUR-GC might require its own version of salient practices (Table 3). Challenges with MUR-GC. Survey respondents were asked to rank the degree to which a set of pre-identified challenges applied to their engagement in MUR-GC (see Table 4). Not surprisingly, dedicated time for individual students emerged as the most critical challenge, a factor which may contribute to interest in group and/or collaborative mentoring models, such as constellation mentoring, in which just under half (38 out of 81, or 47%) of all respondents had engaged (Yip & Kram, 2017). Respondents indicated that activities related to instrumental mentoring, especially research and presentation skills, were the least challenging aspects, and those related to psychosocial (e.g., emotional support) and relational (e.g., building community) mentoring were ranked higher. Professional Development. The findings from the survey reveal significant gaps in professional development related to MUR-GC. The majority of respondents indicated that they had received little to no formal training and/or professional development related to MUR-GC (65%, 39 out of 60) and for those who had training, the predominant mode was “learning by doing” (80%, n = 17). A slight majority (61%, 30 out of 49) indicated they had received training related to intercultural learning, but the majority of that training came either from personal experience (67.7%, n = 29) or informal networking (71%, n = 22). When asked about weaknesses, one respondent indicated, “I feel quite unprepared for this work, since my institution offers no faculty development to support it,” and another affirmed the sentiment, noting a lack of “adequate faculty development for the purpose, responding to the actual needs of faculty and students.” Overall, the respondents expressed considerable confidence in their ability to assess the outcomes of MUR-GC experiences (an average of 9.14 on a 10-point scale, with an SD of 1.05), but this confidence appeared to be belied by the predominance of low-level measures, such as course assignments (26%, n = 37) and self-created surveys (12%, n = 17), suggesting an implicit need perhaps not for additional training per se, but enhanced assessment literacy. One respondent suggested the need for more “stretch and flexibility” in assessment frameworks to respond to the growing complexity of MUR-GC practice. Opportunities. One of the most revealing questions on the survey turned out to be an open-ended item asking about future opportunities, in which the respondents articulated often highly eloquent aspirations. These fell primarily into three categories: enhancing the learning process, creating sustainable models, and wicked problem-solving. For a number of our respondents, MUR-GC presented opportunities to shift thinking from UR as primarily product-oriented (i.e., presentation and/or publication) to instead re-focus on the learning process. As one respondent stated, “I'd like to move my practice deeper into reflective learning spaces around the framing of research as process rather than outcome based.” Others looked for opportunities to develop sustainable pathways for MUR-GC, whether at the curricular (e.g., one respondent suggested creating “ladders of success” starting in the first year) or institutional level. These pathways include deeper integration of UR and intercultural learning (e.g., developing “teaching and modeling approaches that keep students cognizant of their own biases and limitations as well as open to challenges from global contextualization”). For a number of respondents, the integration of both research and global learning is perceived as critical for addressing the wicked problems in global contexts. In their MUR-GC practice, respondents indicated that they wanted students to have “a better understanding about the world in general.” Others emphasized disciplinary dexterity (e.g., “by using supra-disciplinary methodology, students come to realize that real-world issues are complex ‘wicked’ problems that must be approached from intercultural perspectives”). Another respondent reflected on their own positionality, writing “[I want to] help educate students to see themselves as citizens of the world so that solving problems in the world MUST be done in equal collaboration with everyone else and with equal respect for all types of people.” Another recognized that MUR-GC can have even broader impact, noting that “the more people get to be mentored in cross-cultural contexts, the more understanding and tolerant people will become, leading to a more peaceful and better world for all.” Overall, this study has highlighted the modalities, challenges, and opportunities related to an emerging practice in higher education, MUR-GC. Through our ongoing engagement in research in MUR-GC, we (the research task force) have increasingly come to the realization that working with students to navigate the complex intersections that arise when conducting research related to SDGs in global contexts may itself constitute a case study in wicked problem solving. Our findings affirm previous studies indicating the need to adapt conventional mentoring models, whether in form, practice, and perspective, to account for these complexities more effectively (Goerisch et al., 2019). MUR-GC requires a willingness to embrace aspects of mentoring that extend beyond the instrumental and perhaps even beyond the psychosocial and relational, to develop a form of mentoring that is inherently more collaborative in structure and agentic in orientation (Reeve, 2013). We propose a pedagogical and professional development model that is also more than the sum of its parts. In other words, MUR-GC practice should not simply be a combination of mentoring practices from UR and global education, but rather a distinctive framework of its own. Instead of focusing on the development of skills associated with each respective HIP, we propose an emphasis on the integration of inquiry and intercultural learning, including practices such as perspective-taking, creative problem-solving, and cultural/epistemological humility. It should be noted that few of these could be described as “competencies” that can demonstrably be mastered, but rather they are often highly individualized, lifelong practices, a state of affairs that challenges conventional assessment models in higher education. MUR-GC, and practices associated with it, may challenge more than assessment. For some, at least, engagement in MUR-GC requires the cultivation of a certain set of dispositions or qualities that philosopher Ron Barnett (2004) refers to as “open ontologies” about the evolving purpose of higher education. As the world faces increasingly complex, heretofore unknown, and potentially insurmountable challenges (such as SDGs), he argues, perhaps universities should be the vehicle not only through which students (and future citizens) are educated, but also through which they learn to remain undaunted by this complexity (Barnett, 2000). Rising to challenges that may not be resolved in our lifetimes necessitates the recognition of the inherent value of the processes by which we are engaged—collaboratively and creatively—in confronting what the future holds for interconnected, interdependent global communities. Laura Cruz is a research professor (full) with the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence at Penn State. She has previously served as the director of two centers for teaching and learning, as well as the editor of four journals in the fields of teaching, learning, and scholarship. Her extensive body of research focuses on innovation and organizational change in higher education. Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler is founding director of the Center for Research on Global Engagement and a professor of psychology at Elon University. Her scholarship on academic mentoring encompasses faculty and student development and is particularly focused on guiding students’ inquiry-based learning during high-impact practices such as undergraduate research and study away. She is a co-editor of the volume Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018), has numerous presentations and publications on related topics, and has received university awards for scholarship and mentoring. Eric Hall is a professor of Exercise Science and director of the Undergraduate Research Program at Elon University. His primary research interests are in physical activity and mental health, as well as the impact of concussions on student-athletes. Additionally, he is interested in the influence of high impact practices on student development and the role of faculty mentorship. At his institution he has received awards for his mentorship of undergraduate students and scholarship. Amy L. Allocco is professor of Religious Studies and the founding director of the Multifaith Scholars program at Elon University. She is an ethnographer of South Asian religions whose scholarship focuses on everyday Hinduism and ritual practices in South India. In addition to teaching study abroad courses in India, she is an active mentor of undergraduate research and has published on this high-impact practice, especially as it intersects with global and intercultural learning. Allocco has been recognized with awards for scholarship, teaching, and mentoring by her institution. Kate Patch is the senior international officer and the senior director of Global Initiatives at Grinnell College where she currently directs the Institute for Global Engagement. She is a trained cultural anthropologist who developed and taught faculty-led, study abroad programs to Ghana. She also facilitates and leads a peer-mentored, global research program for undergraduate students. She previously held administrative and teaching positions at private-liberal arts colleges and large research universities. Jennifer Hamel is an associate professor of Biology and an associate director of the Undergraduate Research Program at Elon University. Her primary research interests are in the behavioral ecology and evolution of insects. She is also interested in how students benefit from undergraduate research experiences, including course-embedded research. She has mentored individual and course-embedded research experiences in Panama and has been recognized by Elon for undergraduate research mentoring. Jacqueline McLaughlin is a professor of Biology at Penn State University-Lehigh Valley where she specializes in life science education and the integration of high-impact teaching and learning practices into the biology curriculum. She is also an award winning and internationally known educator, science diplomacy advisor, and visionary in study abroad conservation and sustainability programming. She is the Founding Director of Penn State's CHANCE program—a distinctive educational model which combines study abroad with undergraduate research.