Black youth face systemic educational and social barriers that impede their development and achievement. Research shows that mentoring equips youth to tackle these barriers and use their racial background as an asset. Additionally, college students have limited opportunities to engage in long-term service to local communities. The Heads Up Teen Mentoring Program was begun in September 2019 to provide local Black teens access to Black role models committed to helping them achieve their goals. We currently serve five local Black teens and pair them with five Black graduate student mentors. We engage in monthly group and one-on-one sessions with our teens to provide safe spaces for teens to build life skills and decompress. In this essay, we reflect on how our service as mentors has impacted both our teens and ourselves. We focus our reflection on how we are addressing challenges brought on by the COVID-19 and longstanding police brutality pandemics. Specifically, we have found virtual ways to continue group engagement such as virtual game nights, virtual escape rooms, and weekly challenges using group messaging. We also hosted a virtual healing session for our teens addressing systemic racism with a licensed psychologist and added monthly check-in sessions where teens can unload their stresses. We have learned that our teens struggle through these pandemics in ways similar to us, except they lack safe spaces to unpack these challenges. Teens value having a mentor to talk with who is genuinely interested in their growth. We, as mentors, value the opportunity to invest in Black youth and appreciate this service-based opportunity to develop leadership and mentoring skills. Offering virtual programming to address teens' concerns has been a mutually beneficial form of service by creating a safe space for both teens’ and mentors’ development and well-being.
This research is aimed at developing novel theory to advance innovative methods for examining how collaborative groups progress toward productively engaging during classroom activity that integrates disciplinary practices. This work draws on a situative perspective, along with prior framings of individual engagement, to conceptualize engagement as a shared and multidimensional phenomenon. A multidimensional conceptualization affords the study of distinct engagement dimensions, as well as the interrelationships of engagement dimensions that together are productive. Development and exploration of an observational rubric evaluating collaborative group disciplinary engagement (GDE) is presented, leveraging the benefits of observational methods with a rubric specifying quality ratings, enabling the potential for analyses of larger samples more efficiently than prior approaches, but with similar ability to richly characterize the shared and multidimensional nature of group engagement. Mixed-methods analyses, including case illustrations and profile analysis, showcase the synergistic interrelations among engagement dimensions constituting GDE. The rubric effectively captured engagement features that could be identified via intensive video analysis, while affording the evaluation of broader claims about group engagement patterns. Application of the rubric across curricular contexts, and within and between lessons across a curricular unit, will enable comparative studies that can inform theory about collaborative engagement, as well as instructional design and practice.
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