Shifting our gaze toward mentoring practices, programs, and pedagogies at Minority-Serving Instituti

In 2018, I stood on the TEDx stage in Atlanta, Georgia, to challenge students and faculty to engage in mentorship for social change. Through my talk, I sought to address the shortage of STEM professionals from diverse backgrounds and paint a hopeful picture of the future of STEM. Staggering statistics show people from underrepresented groups are primarily left out of STEM majors and careers. Recent reports from the American Council for Education (ACE) point toward minority-serving institutions as critical parts of higher education that serve millions of diverse students in an increasingly diversifying nation. Two years later, and mere months after the FUTURE Act and hundreds of minority-serving institutions were nearly threatened with cuts to government funding, that TEDx talk resonates more than ever.

Mentoring at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs): Theory, Design, Practice, and Impact (McClinton, J., Mitchell, D. S. B., Hughes, G. B., Melton, M. A., & Carr, T, 426 pp., paper, $45.99) considers how mentoring programs are developed and executed to influence mentees and mentors from diverse backgrounds. The volume is a timely conversation about how minority-serving institutions (e.g., HBCUs, HSIs, AANAPISIs, TCUs) leverage mentorship on campus. MSIs are at the forefront of mentoring students and faculty from underrepresented backgrounds. So there is much to be gained from understanding the vast resources that exist on MSI campuses to promote the professional and academic development of the people they serve. The book is made up of 19 chapters that are divided into 6 sections. These sections include gender-focused mentoring programs, graduate students mentoring programs, STEM mentoring programs, frameworks in mentoring programs, student-focused mentoring programs, teacher education, and school administration mentoring programs). The editors’ organization of these studies into 6 sections make this volume an easy-to-access resource and most relevant to anyone interested in starting a mentoring program or improving mentoring for diverse students and faculty. Each chapter presents an empirical study of practices and pedagogies that work with MSI faculty and students. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies make this volume a detailed description of the experiences of faculty and students in minority-serving mentoring programs. Examples occur throughout the book, to describe successful accounts of peer mentoring among students, peer mentoring among faculty, buy-in from administration, effective program structures, undergraduate research experiences in STEM, and several theoretical frameworks that are useful for understanding mentoring programs at MSIs.

There are several calls to action throughout the volume. One, in particular, calls STEM stakeholders to engage in specific activities to positively influence the trajectories of STEM students. The authors resolve,

“A necessity in enhancing student academic success is a commitment among faculty to engage in relevant teaching practices, remain active in research activities, and to gain new skill sets for student mentoring” (pp. 181).

Some of the book's chapters quantitatively pinpoint the activities and practices that are known to improve academic and professional experiences. Other chapters offer qualitative investigations that highlight mentor-mentee reflections on the mentoring experience. These methodological approaches to examining minority-serving institutions emerge at a very appropriate time. The volume sheds light on what mentoring looks like at MSIs and alludes to the possibility of social change. These, like many of the book's findings, are testaments to the benefits of mentorship at MSIs, and lessons we could all learn from.

Amy O. Salter, Ph.D., is an educational psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at Morehouse College. She is the speaker behind the TEDx talk, “Mentorship in STEM for Social Change.” Follow Dr. Amy O. Salter on Twitter @SalterScience and Research Gate.