“Help Being Passed From One Person to the Next”: Factors Defining the Development, Challenges, and Successes of Faculty Peer Mentoring Relationships During Mentee Transitions to Engineering Education Research

Background: Formal and informal faculty peer mentoring relationships are important components of the development, growth, and trajectory of faculty. Yet this nuanced process of faculty peer mentorship remains an underexplored social phenomenon, especially regarding faculty transitions into engineering education research (EER) fields. Awards from the National Science Foundation like the NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formations scaffold this process by providing an opportunity for engineering faculty to conduct funded EER projects with the guidance of an experienced mentor.

Purpose/Hypothesis: Dynamics in faculty peer mentoring relationships influence their development. Here, we explore faculty peer mentorship in EER and define factors impacting the mentoring experience of faculty transitioning to conduct EER. We answer: How are engineering faculty participating in a specific NSF program trained and integrated into the EER community?

Design/Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 grantees, including ten mentors and eight mentees. Data analysis followed an iterative thematic coding procedure to identify concepts that helped explain the mentorship experience of mentors and mentees.

Results: We define aspects of faculty peer mentoring relationships: power dynamics, mentorship location, and team composition. These three elements of grantee teams emerged as themes which influenced, both positively and negatively, the experiences of grantees.

Conclusions: By considering these factors when entering a formal peer mentoring relationship, prospective mentors and mentees preparing for small grant opportunities supporting the development of new faculty conducting EER can better anticipate challenges or needs in their mentoring relationships. These results can be extended to similarly structured mentoring contexts and inform research on other peer mentoring relationships in academic contexts.