Effective mentoring programs are an important part of the academic and professional development of emerging scholars, a group that includes early career scholars, doctoral students, and postdoctoral researchers. These programs are particularly important for scholars who come from historically marginalized communities.
While informal mentoring can be effective, the COVID-19 pandemic has left emerging scholars with fewer opportunities for informal networking and professional development. For over 160 emerging scholars across the international research community, the Center for Integrative Research in Learning and Computing Sciences (CIRCLS) is working to fill that gap. Through the Emerging Scholars CIRCLS Mentoring Series, we create a space and support system that address the unique professional needs of diverse, interdisciplinary emerging scholars throughout their pursuit of a future in the education research community.
When we launched the Emerging Scholar CIRCLS program in January 2021, we aimed to attract a broad range of scholars with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We sent calls for participation, asked NSF principal investigators (PIs) to encourage their doctoral students and postdoctoral students to join the community, reached out to colleagues at institutions serving historically and systematically excluded communities, and invited scholars with disabilities to participate.
The goal, in line with fulfilling our mission of being a hub for NSF-funded research, was to create a community centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion that would primarily support researchers in the United States. But we quickly found that our community was fulfilling the needs of international emerging scholars as well. Two and a half years later, the initiative has grown to accommodate over 160 members from four continents and 10 countries.
During the early stages of the initiative, we focused on learning about our participants’ needs. Through discussions in our meetings, informal conversations, and a survey, we found that the emerging scholars needed more opportunities for networking and mentoring with established scholars. In response to this feedback, we launched the mentoring series in April 2021.
Each quarter, we host a series of one-hour small group mentoring sessions to foster informal conversations and build relationships between the emerging scholars and established scholars in the field of computing and learning sciences. The sessions are valuable for the mentors and mentees: they allow emerging scholars to connect with seasoned researchers, and mentors get to contribute to the field’s future and connect with the next generation of researchers.
The group conversations are shaped around both mentor and mentees’ interests. During the sessions, participants discuss a range of topics, including research methodologies, grant proposals, job searching, and how to succeed in interdisciplinary research. We have intentionally kept the mentor to mentee ratio 1:8 to maximize opportunities for a beneficial mentor-mentee relationship, while also building a sense of community among the emerging scholars.
After each session, we ask the participants to give their feedback via survey so we can implement meaningful improvements to the program. For example, after reviewing feedback, we decided it would be helpful to provide participants with a shared document where mentees can share their professional experiences and topics of interest prior to mentoring sessions.
We look forward to building the community as we continue to grow the mentoring program. Below, a few emerging scholars and mentors share what they’ve taken away from the sessions:
| “[I value] the space to share our experiences, the thoughtful advice of the mentor about the current snapshot of the research field, and interaction with other participants about their own past and current experiences.” – Dr. Aditi Mallavarapu, postdoctoral researcher |
| “I think this setup is the best. It’s almost like we get [as much] 1:1 time with each mentor as we would get with our advisor” – Arun Lekshmi Narayanan, graduate student |
| “It is quite informative to hear about the different research areas that each participant is working on, their enthusiasm in their research work, their successes, and the roadblocks they are facing in advancing their careers…It also makes me think about how I can be a better mentor to my own students.” – Dr. Gautam Biswas, professor |
| “[The best part of this experience has been] meeting a diverse set of young scholars and learning about how they see the current challenges and opportunities in edtech.” – Dr. Chris Dede, professor |
Dr. Dalila Dragnic-Cindric, Research Scientist at Digital Promise
