What Can We Learn from Women of Color in the Academy
Posted: Friday, June 19, 2020
By: Karen Powell Sears, Ph.D. – Denison University
Fareeda Griffith, Ph.D. – Denison University
Liberal arts colleges offer the promise that their campus is a place where students feel supported and have a sense of belonging away from home. Although in general WOC undergraduate students have relatively strong academic performance and graduation rates, concerns about their wellbeing persist. 1 Wellbeing reflects the varied dimensions of one’s physical and non physical health and is a foundational element of the student experience. 23 The data suggests that WOC undergraduate students at PWIs experience lower rates of academic persistence, poorer emotional health, lower satisfaction with campus life, and less of a sense of institutional belonging relative to their counterparts. 4 A mixture of personal and institutional factors may contribute to these troubling patterns, as some WOC may not share these negative experiences. However, many WOC report encountering devaluing experiences on campus that over time may pose threats to various aspects of their wellbeing.
In an effort to better serve the needs of WOC students on our campus, we developed the Sisters in Dialogue mentoring program at Denison University. The program invites women from indigineous, African, Asian, and Latina backgrounds to participate in a mentoring program designed to specifically resonate with their particular needs as WOC students within the setting of the liberal arts PWI. Women from all backgrounds who are in need of tailored support are also welcomed into the program. Research supports the utility of mentorship for increasing well being as well as a sense of belonging. Our mentoring program employs a strengths based approach which leverages the strength and resilience that students have developed during the course of their lives. 5 This strengths based approach then helps the WOC students repurpose those competencies to thrive in the campus environment as well as in their post graduate experiences. There are only a small number of colleges which have chosen to apply strengths based mentoring principles for WOC and therefore examples of best-practices models are scarce.
Most mentoring programs focus on addressing perceived student deficits that pose barriers to academic success as a means of development targets. A deficit-based mentoring model makes the assumption that the problem is located within the student and implies that they are in need of fixing. It further implies that it is the student who has failed to adapt, adjust or otherwise course correct. Such models are unsuitable for supporting diverse WOC students; many of whom are academically high achieving, yet struggling for belonging and wellbeing on campus. Rather than employ the existing deficit models, we desired to create a strengths-based mentoring model that would resonate with the multiplicities of cultures and gender identities of our student WOC population, promote student resilience, and benefit student wellbeing and belonging. We recognized that WOC on our campus holds diverse identities, backgrounds and cultures and thus bring diverse strengths. We wanted to create an approach that built on these strengths and allowed students to work with us to construct sites of belonging and wellbeing.
Recognizing the limitations of existing mentoring models for WOC undergraduates, we desired to offer mentoring that is:
1) Holistic and addresses multiple areas relevant to WOC student wellbeing
2) Identifies and validates student strengths in each of these areas
3) Assesses opportunities for each student’s self advocacy in each of the need areas
4) Engages mentors as facilitators and advocates in each of the need areas.
5) Cultivates an authentic and meaningful community of caring
6) Provides holistic support by leveraging the breadth of resources from the university as well as the local community, while recognizing the student as an active agent in constructing their wellbeing with guidance from and in collaboration with mentors.
After we completed the definition of our governing framework we sought support from the university leadership. Once the support of leadership was secured, we developed the Holistic and Intersectional Ecology (HIE) model for mentoring guided by Black feminist models and ecological theories in psychology. 6 7 HIE recognizes that students’ needs and strengths are a function of their experiences in the multiple contexts of their lives, both on campus and at home. The model focuses on promoting WOC students’ wellbeing in five central need areas: 1) emotional, 2) psychosocial, 3) academic, 4) relational 5) professional. Student need areas are considered to be interdependent, as progress and challenges in certain areas have the potential to both erode and support success in others.
Philosophically, HIE employs the ethic of caring, which is a central concept in Black Feminist scholarship about WOC’s experiences, and provides guidance about the requirements for effective mentoring. Caring refers to the students’ beliefs that the mentor and institution have the student’s best interest at heart. Student perceptions of caring are increased through substantive investment in the mentoring relationship, empathetic connections, and clearly defined moral obligations. 8
Students are recruited through campus advertisements, direct invitation and student referrals. Mentors are selected from interested staff and general community members who represent the students’ varied backgrounds and experiences. Mentors must desire to be in a long term relationship with students and possess lived and/or professional expertise in at least one need area. Informal mentoring relationships are encouraged because formal relationships may be viewed by students as less authentic than relationships in which mentors choose to engage informally with students. 9 This informal mentoring style is guided both by the ethic caring and the Afrocentric tradition of “other mothers” described in Black Feminist scholarship, in which non-familial elders are in close relationships with younger people within a community. 10.
Sisters in Dialogue offers large and small group meetings and individual mentoring activities that focus on each of the wellbeing areas. Meetings are regularly scheduled throughout the academic year.
Sisters in Dialogue program has become a fixture on our campus. Its membership has included women representing more than 30 nationalities. Self-report data indicate that students who have engaged in two or more mentoring meetings throughout the academic year experience more positive wellbeing and a greater sense of belonging. The program has created a unique community of diverse women who would otherwise unlikely be connected. Sisters in Dialogue focuses on the strengths and resilience that WOC bring to our campus from varied walks of life. We ask students to employ the strengths which bolster them in the various contexts of their lives as a means of enhancing their resilience. We are unrelenting that our mentorship program is a constant institutional reminder that they belong.
Mentoring programs like ours can help to increase a sense of inclusion and belonging for WOC students. When students feel as though they are cared for and belong, they are more inclined to participate in co-curricular offerings, such as study abroad programs. Recent data from the Institute of International Education suggests that African Americans, who represent 14% of the undergraduate population, make up less than 5% of students studying abroad. Mentoring programs can help institutions create more inclusive study abroad experiences. A recent study revealed that WOC who were paired with a similar mentor during their study abroad program, were more satisfied with their experience than those who were not. 11.
In the five years since we founded and facilitated Sisters in Dialogue, we have learned that an ethic of caring that prioritizes belonging is essential to mentorship. We have recognized that there are multiple contexts which are relevant to the development of the whole student, and that must be addressed in a holistic manner. There is no doubt that strengths based mentoring fortifies students and enables them to repurpose their competencies for positive development.”
1 de Brey, C., Musu, L., McFarland, J., Wilkinson-Flicker, S., Diliberti, M., Zhang, A., … &; Wang, X. (2019). Status and Trends in the Education of Racial and Ethnic Groups 2018. NCES 2019-038. National Center for Education Statistics.
2 Ryff, CD. (1989) Happiness is everything or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57:1069-1081.
3 Baldwin, DR, Towler K, Oliver, MD &; Datta, S. (2017). An examination of college student wellness: A research and liberal arts perspective. Health Psychology Open
4 Cole, D., Newman, CB & Hypolite, LI. (2020). Sense of belonging and mattering among two cohorts of first-year students participating in a comprehensive college transition program. American Behavioral Science, 64:276-297
5 McCashen, W. (2005). The Strengths Approach. Bendigo: St. Lukes Innovative Resources.
6 Collins, P. H. (1990). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
7 Brofenbrenner, U. (1986). Ecology of the family as a context for human development. Developmental Psychology, 22:723-742.
8 Teven, J., &; McCroskey, J. (1997). The relationship of perceived teacher caring with student learning and teacher evaluation. Communication Education, 46(1):1-9.
9 McKimm, J., &; Hatter, M. (2007). Mentoring: Theory and practice. Preparedness to Practice Project, Mentoring Scheme. Retrieved from http://www.faculty.londondeanery.ac.uk/elearning/feedback/files/Mentoring_Theory_and_Practice.pdf [Accessed 11 Jan. 2020].
10 Collins, P. H. (2005). The meaning of motherhood in Black culture and Black mother–daughter relationships. Gender through the prism of difference, 285-295.
11 Willis, T. Y. (2015). ” And Still We Rise…”: Microaggressions and Intersectionality in the Study Abroad Experiences of Black Women. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, 26, 209-230.