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Although institutions of higher education have placed a large emphasis on increasing the number of underrepresented minority (URM) students matriculating in higher education, the disparities in STEM retention and graduation rates between URM and non-URM students emphasize the dire need for increased support to help URM students navigate challenges including stereotype threat, impostor phenomenon, and lack of social connectedness that disproportionately affect URM students in majority-dominated fields. Prior research has demonstrated that structured mentoring has the potential to generate substantial improvements in academic, social, and career outcomes for URM STEM students. In particular, network-based mentoring approaches that allow for students to receive both professional and peer mentoring, as well as the opportunity to mentor other students, have demonstrated success in this realm. In this article, we discuss how the current state of academia often fails URM STEM students and faculty, review literature regarding the ways in which structured mentoring approaches can alleviate barriers to success among URM groups in STEM fields, and offer recommendations regarding how academic institutions can successfully implement holistic student and faculty mentoring programs.

Adopting a critical approach to identification in literature pedagogy, this article examines the dynamics of identification in the text, critical history, performance history, and teaching of Othello. The author theorizes a pedagogical approach that interrogates the play's systems of identification while foregrounding ethical responsibility.

In his 2005 postmodern novel “Specimen Days,” Michael Cunningham reads and re‐envisions Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” through three different stories in different genres, time periods, and landscapes. Each story, however, involves a set of repeating details, including character names and attributes, locations, a curriculum (of one kind or another) of “Leaves of Grass,” and the pedagogical figure of Walt Whitman. This article focuses on the process of reading and interpretation at work in Cunningham’s novel, modeled after Whitman’s own recursive processes in writing and editing “Leaves of Grass.”Poems, Whitman writes, “grow of circumstances, and are evolutionary” (1889/1973, p. 565). Whitman’s poems resist linearity and closure, employing contradiction as well as repetition: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes)” (1891/1973, lines 1324‐1326). In “Specimen Days,” Cunningham also presents three visions of a non‐linear Whitman curriculum, often yielding strange and unpredictable results because of the poems’ resistance to fixed meanings. Cunningham’s recursive readings of Whitman through “Specimen Days” suggest possibilities for nonlinear interpretive practices and for viewing reading as a recursive process, a repeated search for meaning that in fact generates meaning in its iterations rather than finding it.

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