Understanding the mentoring needs of African-American female engineering students: A phenomenographic preliminary analysis

Abstract

Seeking to improve retention of underrepresented minorities within the STEM fields, we often discuss why these students leave, but spend less time on the measures that support persistence. Research has shown that mentoring is one essential source of such support for students of color. But our current understanding of the role of mentoring or its critical components is incomplete, both in a general sense and for specific populations. For example, the mentoring experiences of undergraduate African American women, especially in the field of engineering, is particularly understudied. To address this gap, the aim of this study is to gain an understanding of how undergraduate African American women in engineering experience effective faculty mentoring. As a group that lives at the intersection of both African American and female identities experienced simultaneously, African American women's socially defined categorizations provides a unique perspective that can distinctively impact their experiences, including their mentoring relationships. To understand their experiences, we apply phenomenography because of its capability to minimize essentialization and highlight variations within a phenomenon of interest or experience. Fundamentally, this method does not aim to generalize the experiences of all African American women in engineering, but rather to explore the different ways participants in this group experience mentoring relationships. We used student interviews to gather explicit examples of participants' experiences. Here we present a preliminary analysis of the data. The results yielded preliminary groupings based on variations in context, formation, and tone. These findings suggest that mentors can serve a variety of roles and engage with students in multiple ways. Perhaps more importantly, these roles and engagement patterns can occur across race and sex boundaries.